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>Facebook is sitting on the largest audience of real-world identities and hasn't entered the market of microtransactions in exchange for content (like news) yet [1], even though they could single-handedly wipe out the half a dozen or so other firms -- the likes of Flattr, Brave, Webpass, the rebooted Medium, the half-thought-out never-advertised-then-mysteriously-vanished Google Contributor -- the ones who had to build their audience while trying to make this model work for years. This is just bizarre.

That's because there is no FB-level money to be made in "microtransactions in exchange for content", especially news content, and nobody cares for those firms, including Medium which has posted its second "We've failed to make any revenue, but pivoting to some vague BS" post by now.

Of course these firms are struggling -- (did I word this confusingly?) The point is, it's a market that never took off, and Facebook could change that very quickly, due to their sheer scale, their market penetration, their homescreen presence on millions of devices, and the value of the audience they already command.

They don't even need it to be a significant amount of their income. But they could show that some people are in fact willing to pay, which may be enough to entice big publishers to supply content to Facebook again, closing the loop on the original idea of "outsourcing [news] distribution".

>the point is, it's a market that never took off, and Facebook could change that very quickly, due to their sheer scale

But maybe, I say, it never took off for a reason? Some things are just not what people want.

(Though of course all the content providers crave them like crazy)

I think niftich's reasoning was chicken and egg.

No one (practically speaking) accepts micropayments because there's no unified system with good UX, and no one can build a unified system with a good UX because no one is accepting micropayments. Facebook could change all that in the same way that MS can push a feature to Windows and instantly make a new market. Barrier to entry looks different when you're a de facto monopoly.

The problem with micro transactions is that you're paying "real money" for information.

With so much "free stuff" on the internet, it's almost impossible to convince that your content is worth more than an infinite increase in value (1¢/free =infinite ). The "big guys" like the WSJ or IEEE can, simply by being close to canonical.

It does not have to be "real money", could be crypto currency generated by the very community, have a look at steem and steemit.

> Instead they let themselves caught up in the 'fake news' fiasco (a factor absent from the article),

I don't think it is as simple as that. It is a fiasco at face value. Only if we think those smart people running Facebook and Google really thought Lizard People and Chemtrails believers have turned around the election and now they are on a noble mission to rescue us from such horrors, because you know, they are pure and noble, and not evil. At least that is how they framed it.

But I think it was a about something else. It was a signal to powerful advertisement buyers that traditional media (TV news channels, newspapers etc) have failed at manufacturing consent, and they shouldn't waste their money on them anymore. That market vacuum can now be filled Google and Facebook - "Don't let fake news ruin your next campaign. Come to us. We'll make sure only true news gets out".

It's amazing how obvious it seems in hindsight, but it's a signal that if you change the underlying network architecture of how people consume content then the characteristics of popular content change.

Newspapers -> broadcast TV -> site based web -> network based web

I'd argue that network based web looks a lot more like the wild west days of hyper newspaper competition than broadcast TV. Fake news is essentially peer sourced yellow journalism. And I'm amazed publishers didn't see that coming -- there's historical precedent!

> their previous actually-kinda-nice attempts to give a proper home to professionally-written journalistic content, such that it's not jarringly intermingled with memes, baby photos, and humblebrags.

This was nice while it lasted, but it was facing a lot of flak for it. Several news outlets were talking about how facebook was censoring news and only allowing 'democrat/liberal' news and blocking news from more conservative news outlets (which tend to be terrible, but oh well)

So they had to shut it down, and set up algorithmic news aggregator, which lead to the fake news problem.

This micro transaction model is the one chosen by steemit, using blockchain and cryptocurrency. It use its own cryptocurrency steem and reward curator and creator and others who in turn can use it to interact with the website.

It's too early to know if this particular website will be successful but this is the idea of how to get curated quality content with self sustained micro transactions. This might be a better incentive than fake internet points.

What would the microtransaction flow look like within the limited mobile screen real estate? Read the headline and the teaser paragraph, decide on whether to part with hard-earned 2c next?

This will resurface the sensationalist headline-grabbing click-optimized shenanigans of ViralNova and UpWorthy of the past, and you won't believe what happened next.

> Flattr, Brave, Webpass, the rebooted Medium

I can't imagine Facebook going up against those household names.

This is the funniest thing I've read all day.

Some of the people at Flattr probably live in houses.

Savage.

Holy shit