Micropayments for content material | Seth’s Weblog

This can be a drawback that comes up yearly or two, however nobody has carried out a helpful resolution but.

Promoting is a surprisingly unhealthy approach for a tradition to pay for content material, as a result of the type of content material that will get rewarded is usually dumbed down for a big viewers or is optimized for a small viewers of individuals keen to purchase one thing that makes a revenue.

It’s additionally inefficient, as advertisers can’t know prematurely what’s going to work, and creators get a really small share of the advert spend.

Another is to pay for what you get, the way in which we deal with carrots, baseballs and clarinets. As a substitute of shopping for a baseball, although, you’re shopping for an opportunity to observe a video.

Micropayments are a system the place you pay a penny or a nickel or a greenback for a bit of content material.

It introduces two sorts of friction, although:

1. There must be a tech system that may successfully transfer tiny quantities of cash round.
2. As a reader/client of content material, it is advisable to consistently make choices about what’s “value it.”

About thirty years in the past, I described a easy resolution to each issues:

For $25 you should purchase a content material passport. It’s out there for buy on any web site that’s a part of the content material community, and also you want one to learn the content material on their web site. The positioning that sells it to you will get $10 in fee for promoting it to you.

It retains observe of each member web site you go to (that’s very easy now, with a cookie). After which the coordinator of the system allocates, on a proportion foundation, $10 to the websites you go to. It’s all gonna go someplace, whether or not you go to one web site or a thousand. There’s no friction, as a result of it’s a buffet, similar to it’s now. Learn all you need, no adverts, no hassles.

The websites that get visited essentially the most get essentially the most combination cash from the month-to-month distributions of royalties.

Every web site has an incentive to promote quite a lot of passports (the fee is critical) and the coordinator of the community is making 25% as nicely.

It’s actually clear who the client is (the reader) and it’s straightforward for any web site to hitch the community. Aligned incentives, a easy and resilient resolution.

Have enjoyable. (PS that is unrelated to yesterday’s publish about federations, only a coincidence.)