Comment by satotious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by satotious | Hacker News Reader

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Hi HN, long time lurker, first time poster. We've been working on a new funding model for the web as we believe content creators should be paid for their hard work. satotious.com is a unique twist on paywall, users can access content by viewing ads or with micropayments(on the Bitcoin Lightning Network).

We think the time is right to try micropayments again as an increasing amount of content is going behind subscriptions and ad revenue is declining. Reasons we are different: 1. We have a free option with ad views. 2. We run on the Bitcoin Lightning Network as it makes micropayments feasible without the need to track users. 3. We tackle cognitive cost associated with micropayments with our browser extension/app which can auto-pay the paywalls.

For more details of our vision have a look at our site and blog posts, satotious.com. Right now we're in beta and are looking for content creators, no matter how big or small, please get in touch: ruby@satotious.com

You can test out the paywall on our site, all feedback welcome :)

Hi! Super cool extension for readers, seems easy for publishers too. I like that it isn't baked into the browser like the Brave BAT.

Just curious - what split have you seen so far between readers picking ads v micropayments?

Question before I try it out -How do you serve up ads? Are you a part of a network? I noticed you collect all data from sites with the extension, curious to know if the ad alternative is collecting my data and targeting me with personalized ads.

Thank you so much! If you email us(ruby at satotious.com) your userID, we will credit it with a small amount of btc so you can test the extension auto-pay feature for free.

So far we are getting 95% picking ads vs micropayments, I guess thats to be expected as most people dont have bitcoin lightning wallets yet.

Right now we have demo ads which we create. Our ads are slightly different as they incorporate a captcha.

The permissive permission on the extension is so we can inject the auto-pay functionality. We dont collect your browsing data. Open sourcing the browser extension and paywall is on the road map. The future plan is that users connect their own lightning wallet to the browser extension and publishers do the same for the paywall, therefore we wont see any of those interactions and keep everything private

How does the paywall know to let someone through?

Disclosure: I am, in theory, a potential competitor through work I've done off and on over the past decade.

The content is encrypted, users get the key when pay or view an ad. We dont host anything

Hey! Really love this concept, especially because a lot of smaller creators/bloggers/etc are getting pulled between hosting and owning their own content on their own platform (but getting very little in ads) vs. hosting on someone else platform where they may get more in ads but don't own their content.

Can't wait to see where this goes!

Hi :D, thank you for the positive feedback. Hopefully this will incentivize people to host their own content and not rely on centralized platforms.

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