Micropayments for content material | Seth’s Weblog

This can be a downside that comes up yearly or two, however no person has applied an invaluable resolution but.

Promoting is an incredibly unhealthy means for a tradition to pay for content material, as a result of the type of content material that will get rewarded is incessantly dumbed down for a big target market or is optimized for a small target market of other folks keen to shop for one thing that makes a benefit.

It’s additionally inefficient, as advertisers can’t know prematurely what’s going to paintings, and creators get an overly small percentage of the advert spend.

An alternate is to pay for what you get, the best way we deal with carrots, baseballs and clarinets. As a substitute of shopping for a baseball, although, you’re purchasing a possibility to look at a video.

Micropayments are a machine the place you pay a penny or a nickel or a greenback for a work of content material.

It introduces two forms of friction, although:

1. There must be a tech machine that may successfully transfer tiny quantities of cash round.
2. As a reader/shopper of content material, you wish to have to repeatedly make selections about what’s “price it.”

About thirty years in the past, I described a easy technique to each issues:

For $25 you’ll purchase a content material passport. It’s available to buy on any website online that is a part of the content material community, and you wish to have one to learn the content material on their web site. The web site that sells it to you will get $10 in fee for promoting it to you.

It assists in keeping observe of each member web site you consult with (that’s in point of fact simple now, with a cookie). After which the coordinator of the machine allocates, on a share foundation, $10 to the websites you consult with. It’s all gonna cross someplace, whether or not you consult with one web site or one thousand. There’s no friction, as it’s a buffet, simply love it is now. Learn all you need, no commercials, no hassles.

The websites that get visited essentially the most get essentially the most combination cash from the per thirty days distributions of royalties.

Each and every web site has an incentive to promote a large number of passports (the fee is vital) and the coordinator of the community is making 25% as smartly.

It’s in point of fact transparent who the client is (the reader) and it’s simple for any web site to enroll in the community. Aligned incentives, a easy and resilient resolution.

Have a laugh. (PS that is unrelated to the previous day’s submit about federations, only a accident.)