It amazes me that over the last 10-20 years an astonishing amount of money and intellectual capital have been invested in adtech and crypto but nothing in micropayments. Ads are evil, but it will remain a moot point until we have working micropayments. We have (and will have) ads with all their downsides exactly because we don't have micropayments, because ads basically work as a substitute to micropayments.
I feel like most on the producer side are coming at this from a totally wrong angle. A better web isn't a web in which content is monetized in a different way. Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web is not worth paying for. Not with ads, not with micropayments, not with anything. There's the saying about five web sites consisting of screenshots of the other four, but even with news, the vast bulk of it that isn't legitimately old media like Al Jazeera or Reuters is 22 year-olds being paid with exposure to summarize Reddit threads. Much of it isn't even that at this point and is probably just programmatically generated with no writer at all. When all you have to go on is a link, you can't possibly know whether something is worth paying for until after clicking, reading it, and finding out. But if the first thing you see is some pop up begging you to subscribe to content you've not even read yet, turn off an ad blocker to a server you don't trust, or even some gate requiring a micropayment, a whole lot of people are just going to go elsewhere for what is likely to be identical information content at a less annoying source.
If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of developing a reputation for quality output slowly, disseminated through trusted sources, surely augmented by some form of paid marketing but not by just spamming the web with links in the hopes that they can get clicks and then use dark patterns to keep people on the site long enough to monetize 20 seconds of their eyeball time, then maybe they can get people to willingly pay them. This is sort of what Substack is proving. The tiny number of writers worth reading are actually being paid by willing readers. But it's a tiny number. Micropayments can never solve that most web content is worth 0 dollars and 0 cents.
> If content producers are willing to put in the hard work of developing a reputation for quality output slowly, disseminated through trusted sources, surely augmented by some form of paid marketing but not by just spamming the web with links in the hopes that they can get clicks and then use dark patterns to keep people on the site long enough to monetize 20 seconds of their eyeball time, then maybe they can get people to willingly pay them.
What do you think traditional print media organizations were trying to do for decades before they gave up and embraced the new normal with layoffs and consolidation? Substack is an extremely, small, extremely premium part of what used to be the whole.
> Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web is not worth paying for.
Maybe much content on the web is not worth paying for, but the vast majority consumers don't want to pay regardless of the quality, not because of it. It has literally been impossible for most news organizations to survive because people would rather read the advertising-funded "22 year-old" than a quality outlet where they have to pay any amount of money.
This is a complicated phenomenon and I can't possibly do justice to the complexity in the space of a link aggregation comment. Arguably, the truth of that very statement is part of the problem here. Our attention spans have shortened. When I was 8 and wanted to learn about something, I'd gladly dive into the library and read thousands of pages uninterrupted for hours a day. Now I'm here, skimming thousands of comments to try and figure out which seem interesting enough to make the link itself worth visiting, then possibly actually visiting it or possibly just putting in a tab I later close when I realize I'll never get to it.
Without any sort of gate to publishing, we're all inundated with information overload. So yeah, print media got their lunch eaten for many reasons, including being too slow to pivot to digital delivery at all, but also with the payment model. Outsourcing content curation to Hacker News or the people you follow on Facebook is free. I used to read the LA Times for two hours every single morning when I was in middle school and high school. Do I trust Hacker News more than I trust the LA Times editorial board today? Do I trust the LA Times more but not $6 a month more or whatever they're charging now? I have no idea, but I've changed my information consumption habits anyway.
At least part of the issue is the nature of news itself. Events happen in the world. Someone out there finds out and reports it to others. Eventually, it reaches me. It used to be that people being paid by the LA Times had a level of unique access both to the sources of information and to dissemination channels I could readily access, and that was worth paying for. Today, that no longer seems to be the case. A thousand different people are going to post the same information to a thousand different sources at exactly the same time. Which of those thousands of people deserves to be compensated? If you just split whatever the salary of an LA Times reporter used to be a thousand different ways, that isn't enough to make it into a viable profession.
Maybe information about important events in the world has become a public good in a world with such a low bar to publishing. We can try to invent technical means of preventing access and then charging for it, but it can never possibly be enough to actually cover the costs of all of the different people out there trying to publish, not with micropayments, not with subscriptions, not with anything. Maybe we need to just publicly fund some small number of professionals doing this for a living and anyone else that wants to try can do it without the expectation they'll ever be compensated for it. Expecting high-quality fact-based reporting paid for by consumers may just not be possible any more.
> Consumers don't want to pay because most content on the web is not worth paying for.
This can be true at the same as another truth: consumers would pay for some content on the web if it was convenient to pay small amounts for it on an ad-hoc basis. Nobody is suggesting that most of the web is worth paying for, but that doesn't mean that none of it is, and it also doesn't mean that subscription models (which mostly avoid the micropayment "problem") should be the only way to address this.
>Micropayments can never solve that most web content is worth 0 dollars and 0 cents.
The irony is that most of the actually valuable content is user generated. A site like Reddit could be actively curating all of the great content that people give away for free and people would pay for it. Then Reddit could actually pay their content creators. And -poof- we have high quality content that is worth paying for and people getting paid to generate it - all without the scourge of ads.
Cryptocurrencies, ironically, enable micropayments. Orchid.com did an extensive write-up on how they achieve this (https://www.orchid.com/assets/whitepaper/whitepaper.pdf Chapter 5, Nanopayments) The Brave Attention Token is another example.
Although, I am not convinced micropayments would save the Internet from this ad-winter: It is hard to beat free at scale.
There's a little bit of a fundamental problem here.
We're talking about paying a cent to avoid an ad. On a blockchain, work needs to be done to register that transaction. If the fee is a fraction of a penny, who is going to want to do the work? I get that you'll make it up at scale, but each transaction must be cryptographically secure (and therefore take up some type of resource), so there's a problem.
For "crypto" transactions, on-chain is no longer seen as a stringent requirement. In fact, the entire DeFi ecosystem wouldn't exist if there wasn't a cryptographically-secure way of doing transactions off-chain on second-level chains (0x, Polygon, Compound etc) or on chain of chains (Polkadot, Cosmos, Kava etc), or on chains built for payments (Celo, Diem, Stellar etc).
Beside, Orchid.com whitepaper talks about doing nanopayments on-chain, which is quite a radical approach.
Sure, if you put a layer on top, you can do whatever you want! It just adds more centralization, which isn't better than something like a Venmo that would be based on fiat.
"Enable micropayments". Where are they disabled? And in what world is it easier to do a micro payment with cryptocurrency instead of one of your cards?
I’m still surprised more apps don’t have inbuilt marketplaces and then take a cut of payments.
Reddit could do this. Users sell to each other through an Etsy like interface. Reddit takes 5% of each transaction.
This solves Reddits existing inability to monetize through ads as successfully as their major competitors.
On /r/fishing you obviously sell fishing supplies.
On /r/$political_faction you sell bumper stickers with slogans.
/r/nonbinary you sell pronoun pins.
It would be like an etsy or a shopify store for each subreddit with a UI that reflects that.
It could also be a big Amazon style UI for a sitewide shop.
That's not true. Web Monetization is built on top of the Interledger and does precisely that - micropayments for web content. When i wrote about it[0] and posted on HN[1] the overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed and lack of privacy of everyone ( as in the website would still track and run ads to earn more money, etc.). The solutions exist, people just don't want them, even supposedly privacy-focused people.
Netflix doesn't have ads, yet. Spotify Premium doesn't have ads, yet.
Hulu didn't use to have ads on its most premium tier, and from what I know, you now get ads on that too. Corporations generally don't like leaving money on the table. If you can pay, you are even better target for ads.
For now, Netflix and Spotify have no ads. I have a feeling that if these companies feel the pinch during a bad quarter or two, they will 100% start introducing ads. That's how business works, they want to maximize revenue. TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top of the ads. That demonstrates that audiences are fine with it. 100% Netflix and Spotify will eventually have ads.
> TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top of the ads.
While not wanting to get into a debate about what is and isn't an ad in the context of US public broadcasting, this claim is not true of public broadcasting worldwide.
> TV publishers have traditionally charged a fee on top of the ads. That demonstrates that audiences are fine with it. 100% Netflix and Spotify will eventually have ads.
Or maybe the huge success of Netflix and to a lesser extent Spotify is in no small part because they don't have ads and they know it?
Micropayment are a non-starter, and even if they weren't, you'd still have ads. There are companies lined up willing to pay money to show you something they want to sell you, and even if your favorite news site was micropayment enabled, even the most righteous media companies would be fools not to keep taking that money to expand their ability to give you more and better news, as an example.
But to my first point, they are a non-starter because too much of the world has trouble managing their money, and mentally don't want to pay for something until they've seen it. Why should I pay a dollar to read an article that might be poorly written, full of inaccuracies, etc.?
The closest model I've seen to working is twitch. You have a central content platform, with silly cosmetic awards for subscription, and a sense of "credibility" among others there in interactions because you've been subscribing for x amount of time. This would require a more interactive news service, and hell, that I would pay for. If I read an article by an expert who answered (reasonable) follow up questions and owned their journalism, that would be incredible.
I'd be interested in working on stuff like this; I used to work in a PCI-DSS Tier 1 company storing cardholder data on-premises so if someone wants to work on this and would like my help with this please reach out; my contact information is in my bio.
More directly to your point, I think lots of people have made attempts at micropayment protocols. The difficulty is psychological rather than technical - the cumulative mental burden of repeatedly deciding whether to part with a tenth of a cent "costs" much more than value being exchanged.
You live with the assumption that everyone would just accept micropayments, and that's far from the truth.
The result would be content for a small portion of those with available income, and content for those without it (with parallel markets for content distribution under paywalls - like piracy).
That's even more messed up than the current advertising model.
Don't get me wrong, some brands would love that, to pile up those with available income and serve them marketing communication through press releases, reviews and stuff like that. I can see Apple applauding this.
