I’m going to break character and talk about my work - I’m at a company, Scroll.com , that sorta does micropayments - but instead of having an account that you drain as you browse, we have a flat monthly subscription that we divide up among the sites in our network. Payout is based on the ratios of how much time you spent on each site. So if you read a lot or a little it’s the same, from your point of view. And generally it still delivers more $ per impression than advertising would.
Also, we hope that it will incentivize better content than impression-based payments does
Isn't that what flattr did?
there are a few competitors in this space, yes. We also get compared to Brave’s attention coin system. We’re differentiated in that we parter with major news-media sites - newspapers and magazines, mostly, so far.
I recall having a similar idea a few years back. How do you signup clients who insist on a larger payout? Do you have any policies in place to dissuade content producers from displaying ads to your users?
We _require_ that ads and other trackers are removed for our customers (basically, when we have a certain cookie set). And our users know that if they see our logobar on a site that they shouldn’t see ads- so they report if something goes wrong.
But cash-wise - the pitch is only that our users will bring in more money than ads - if you want to, for example, put premium content behind a paywall, that’s fine, we don’t get involved with that. But, like with advertising, the only real way to increase your payout is to get more unique users.
I have had this idea also in my head for quite a while. Did not bother to search if it was already done. I am do tired of paywalled things/ads. I do not lind paying, but I don't want to subscribe everytime someone sends me a paywalled link on another website. How many websites and customers do you have?
here’s the official list of sites: https://scroll.com/sites and we’ll be adding more soon
I’m not sure that our user count is public information right now - but we just came out of private beta last week and it’s growing fast!
The problem with micropayments is that people get sticker shock. You put $10 in your micropayment account, browse around, and that money is gone whereas your friends that just look at ads and ignore them still have $10. (This was my impression, anyway, from when Google was testing that "pay to disable ads" service.) This means that publishers are forced to lower the price of an impression, and of course then advertisers ask to pay less. Guess who loses out? Publishers and the ad networks. Guess who would be well-placed to encourage the adoption of micropayments? Publishers and the ad networks. That's why we don't have micropayments. Getting money from consumers is an exercise in frustration and a race to the bottom. Getting money from businesses is an exercise in "add an extra 0 to the price and see if they still buy".
Having said that, micropayments seem to be working fine on platforms like Twitch.