A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.
Turning everything into a microtransaction / subscription is destroying what was good about the internet.
More options are great.
The current political situation we find ourselves in is partly due to the destruction of real journalism caused because people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. Advertising perverts incentives; I need you entertained - not informed - to make money…
There is no Spotify for press so the only other good solution is having microtransactions - paying only for articles you want to see, from any provider you want. Currently you must subscribe even if you want to read single article so the very few that buy the press are usually limited to single news source.
>people won’t pay for timely and accurate news.
This won't be changed by forcing payments through API contracts or other microtransactions.
I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.
So you're going to be the problem no matter what happens.
I block a lot of ads but I also pay monthly to a lot of creators through Patreon so I don't feel guilty about blocking ads on youtube. I also pay monthly for a few news sites but not most because I read an article or two at most there per year (lots of random links from friends ... etc, almost always to local / regional news).
Microtransactions are _exactly_ what those guys need. The "please give us $10/month!" banner on the regional news site is not worth it for me, they're loosing out because i'm not going to fiddle with adblocker for just this one visit. I'd pay $0.30 to support them and not be guilty about it.
I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscriptions for websites that I might only visit twice a year.
Seems more likely that subscriptions, advertising, and microtransactions will coexist.
Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail to find take up because the mental load in deciding to pay or not is higher than the value receive.
Maybe ideal for agents but how many people are going to trust their agents with enough of a balance.
Which isn't private. Wallet ID 123 buys a 10c article from Leftist Newspaper A and one from Leftist Newspaper B. Leftist Newspaper A and B, being businesses, sell the information that Wallet ID 123 purchased an article to Data Broker A. Data Broker A correlates all purchases Wallet ID 123 has ever made and with a high degree of accuracy identifies who they are and their political affliation. Data Broker A sells this profile to anyone who asks for it, including far right governments who might be interested in throwing people out of helicopters based on their political affiliation. Unless you use Monero, this will happen, and Monero will obviously not be used.
Yes, 90% of people are careless and already give away this information right now. But you're suggesting closing the door on the rest who care to be able to protect themselves while still being able to use the internet, and cementing that nobody will ever have privacy for the rest of their lives, when we should be making an effort to make it harder to identify people, not easier.
Microtransactional web is only a risk in an alternative universe which doesn't have spying/tracking/profiling funded by enormous ad industry.
In our world it is a big improvement.
AI can easily strip any ads for fractions of a cent. AI bots can be tracked - Open Router (or equivalent) will probably don't mind. That is the point of the article - ad and tracker infested webpages will soon be struggling, and some other forms of monetization needs to come.
Also if they are handling payments at some point you're going to be forming that relationship or they are going to get shut down for money laundering very quickly.
With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my coffee spend). That's money that was previously unlocked. Also, being able to pay some random writer/journalist outside the mega-news-corps, has a special feel to it and this gives me the option to do that.
Also 20$ monthly from 10 users for the whole site might be worse than 0.1$ from 100 users for a single article.
Users pay for it with their privacy/data. Intrusive ads. Dark patterns.
The increasing eyeballs on screen time is a net negative for society. I would say consuming content should come with some friction.
My screentime would drastically decrease if even it was partial cents per video.
Remember: from a business's perspective, advertising has positive ROI. Which means you as the consumer pay for it anyway. No ad supported service is free.