The cognitive dissonance at the center of the internet is the disconnect between "information wants to be free" and "workers want to be paid". The model adopted early and often was "run ads" because "run ads" was the American model of first radio and then television. Radio and television, however, are synchronous and linear. The internet is asynchronous and non-linear. What became relatively easy to measure and monetize - "pay $500,000 and your thirty-second commercial will play for 6 million people five times a day for a week" - became code injected into open markup that could be bypassed by anyone reasonably savvy. the monetization schedule became precipitously complex and easy to game in uncountable ways. There is no Nielsen Ratings for online advertising. There are various traffic rankers that use various methodologies but it all comes down to fishing with algorithms. Algorithmic warfare is the end result. Thus, clickfarms use bootleg code to trick ratings algorithms into inflating view numbers so that the "information wants to be free" crowd can gouge the advertisers they'd rather avoid entirely. The arms race spirals out of control, absent all humans. This happened to "yellow journalism" where the sensationalist broadsheets of Hearst and Pulitzer were eventually bypassed entirely by the subscription-model New York Times. Within ten years there were no direct sale newspapers left; a subscription model became the fundamental basis of journalism. Civil libertarians decried Apple's move to the "walled garden" of its app store but if nothing else, Apple has an easier time of curation than Google. Meanwhile all the internet giants are moving their traffic into apps - Facebook has an app. Netflix has an app. Pinterest has an app. Snapchat has an app. Google is embeddable anywhere and it is an algorithmic hellhole of bizarre clickbait. It's probably about time for some genius to loft the idea of micropayments as if he's the first one to think of them (again). And then eight companies will try it, they'll all go under and we'll get right back to bots yelling at each other for clicks.
Ok, I'll bite. The subscription model doesn't make sense for the web because most of us don't read the New York Times, we read an article in the New York Times because we got linked to it from somewhere else. If every site used subscriptions you'd need a ridiculous number of subscriptions to use the web like the web.
Absolutely. Positively. This was one of the driving arguments behind Gilder's Life After Google: "a ridiculous number of subscriptions" is an excellent blockchain application. Let's say I'm browsing with Mist and I've got it loaded up with 1 ETH. In order to browse pages I need to pay fees - positive or negative. eBay might find it effective to pay me a tenth of a cent for every page I click on - they might not. The New York Times might find it effective to hit me for 25 cents a day every time I land on one of their pages and then maybe a tenth of a cent for every article beyond that. Obviously my prices are actually in szabos or gwei or brindlestiffs or whatever we measure fractional cryptocurrency in but a conversion factor to realpeoplemoney is only a couple more lines of code and for now realpeoplemoney is how we operate. I could set my browser to: - automatically pay any site fee of .01 penny or less - require approval for any site fee of 1 penny or more - warn me if I try to browse to any site on a blacklist I subscribe to (for 5 cents a month) - automatically allow me on any site that is a member of EthicsNet, the certification platform that controls for malware and clickbait ...and so long as all my browsing is connected to that wallet all the rules apply. At that point blockchain basically becomes "cookies" except since I'm the direct investor rather than the target of investment, the content becomes arrayed to suit my wants and needs rather than that of the people paying for my eyeballs. For that matter I could pay Mother Jones 50 cents a month to let me onto their content network and let them curate for me. They could try out new sources of content and allow them onto their network for negotiated prices and then I could maybe score a discount for allowing these un-vetted sources access to my eyeballs. Robert Mercer could give out 50 cents to anybody who spends ten minutes on InfoWars. Bias doesn't go away but the perversion of incentives does. If I'm willing to spend $15 a month on journalism I'm going to get better journalism. Maybe George Soros gives out journalism grants to spend on anything you want while Sheldon Adelson gives out journalism grants to certain websites. Will the public start to smell a rat? Pay for the CPB with a subsidy. Pay for The National Enquirer with NRA money. Pay a penny a month for a funding tracer so you know who's behind your journalism. Everybody gets paid, everybody can throw money in the pool and it becomes direct rather than tangential.
... and then I find out what Chrome and Safari's default "automatically pay" amount is and request an empty file that costs that much every random() seconds on my clickbait site, which exists under many identities that I retire when they start getting added to blacklists. And the arms race continues, only instead of picking advertisers' pockets we're picking everyone's.
Absolutely. The difference is, if I'm an advertiser and I'm paying in CPM, I'm not paying attention to individual users. If someone is scamming me for .01% of my content I call that "breakage" and move on. But if I'm getting scammed I'm getting scammed and I care a lot more. It's the difference between being shoplifted and being pickpocketed. Shoplifters target your business. Pickpockets target you. It's the degree of remove that allows most of this to go on and getting rid of that degree simplifies things. The other thing to keep in mind is that if I'm the New York Times, I probably have no interest or reason to allow you on my site. You can't inject code. And if I've given money to a site that has allowed you to inject code in the past, I'm that much less likely to give money to that site in the future. What kind of nightclub are you running? The kind where you can get a drink and call a cab and be fine or the kind where you have to keep your hand over your drink because the GHB flows freely? There are probably reasons for both clubs to exist but if you try to be one while actually being the other you'll lose your clientele quickly. Right now it's all free and it's all supported by ads; as soon as users become the market instead of the marketplace users end up voting more.