This can be a drawback that comes up yearly or two, however nobody has carried out a helpful answer but.
Promoting is a surprisingly unhealthy approach for a tradition to pay for content material, as a result of the type of content material that will get rewarded is commonly dumbed down for a big viewers or is optimized for a small viewers of individuals keen to purchase one thing that makes a revenue.
It’s additionally inefficient, as advertisers can’t know upfront what’s going to work, and creators get a really small share of the advert spend.
An alternate is to pay for what you get, the way in which we deal with carrots, baseballs and clarinets. As an alternative of shopping for a baseball, although, you’re shopping for an opportunity to look at a video.
Micropayments are a system the place you pay a penny or a nickel or a greenback for a bit of content material.
It introduces two sorts of friction, although:
- There must be a tech system that may successfully transfer tiny quantities of cash round.
- As a reader/client of content material, you should continuously make choices about what’s “price it.”
About thirty years in the past, I described a easy answer to each issues:
For $25 you should purchase a content material passport. It’s out there for buy on any web site that’s a part of the content material community, and also you want one to learn the content material on their website. The positioning that sells it to you will get $10 in fee for promoting it to you.
It retains observe of each member website you go to (that’s very easy now, with a cookie). After which the coordinator of the system allocates, on a proportion foundation, $10 to the websites you go to. It’s all gonna go someplace, whether or not you go to one website or a thousand. There’s no friction, as a result of it’s a buffet, identical to it’s now. Learn all you need, no advertisements, no hassles.
The websites that get visited probably the most get probably the most combination cash from the month-to-month distributions of royalties.
Every website has an incentive to promote numerous passports (the fee is important) and the coordinator of the community is making 25% as nicely.
It’s actually clear who the client is (the reader) and it’s straightforward for any website to affix the community. Aligned incentives, a easy and resilient answer.
Have enjoyable. (PS that is unrelated to yesterday’s publish about federations, only a coincidence.)
