The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base
The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.
I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are.
When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much.
Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware.
Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content.
That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume.
All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman.
Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected.
It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance.
I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
• Advertisers want subscribers because that's a proxy for wealth and often, locality.
• Only quite rich people are willing to pay for an ad-free newspaper. The Spectator is one example of such a thing in the UK (subscription only, no ads).
• A lot of subscriptions are driven by a desire for opinion and opinionated takes, often by a single star writer, not news and certainly not neutrally written news.
Extremely slanted opinion sells like hotcakes and subsidizes all the rest, but the market for drive-by micropayments for opinion is very small. This opinion-subscription-bias amongst readers is why Substack works and also the Guardian (the Guardian is 90% just opinion pretending to be unbiased news).
We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet?
And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird!
Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.