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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although, I am not convinced micropayments would save the Internet from this ad-winter: It is hard to beat free at scale.
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.
Beside, Orchid.com whitepaper talks about doing nanopayments on-chain, which is quite a radical approach.
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.
[0] https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati...
Because the history of other platforms which have done this, shows that ads didn't go away.
Cable TV, full of ads.
Satellite Radio, not too bad but still has ads.
Spotify premium, zero ads
I think it's just a question of coming up with the right model. Assuming that failed examples are the rule isn't all that useful
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?
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.
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.
Both of those are replacement products for models of consumption that were previously pretty much entirely ad based.
This is classic negativity bias, I can think of plenty of platforms that transitioned to paid models without ads
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.
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.