Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension.

The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.

View on HN

Yeah, lots of other groups have developed micropayment systems, but it looks like Brave might have finally figured out how to make it work on a large enough scale that it might improve the web.

I think that is partly because Brave has tied micropayments to something else people care about by putting their system in a privacy-oriented browser.

i think it's because (as TBL had foreseen) , payments should be a browser feature

> it's paying the users first

I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road.

What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often".

This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.

I believe the plan is to use BAT to pay for paywalled content and other premium features a site may have.

> I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited.

Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away. Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.

Disagree. Subscription models are outdated. Also, what mechanism does coil have to prevent a “content creator” from bombarding the end user with ads?

The problem with subscription models are that they are walled-gardens. You can only flattr to people who use flattr. That can not scale. An it would be terrible if it does. The web monetization can not be in the hand of a single company like flatter. Coil however is just one payment provider that use the interledger protocol. If the content creator uses another payment provider who also uses the open interledger protocol donation form someone using coil still would be delivered. Coil doesn't care what provider the other party uses. It just reads the Web Monetization Meta Tag and sends the donation to the given address. Anyone on the web who has a banking relationship with user could potentially be a web monetization payment provider. For example Netflix. As a content creator this changes nothing. You still have one Web Monetization Meta Tag in your page with the address where to send the donations you don't have to care if some donation come from Coil user and some from Netflix users.

>Also, what mechanism does coil have to prevent a “content creator” from bombarding the end user with ads?

Nothing. Coil is a payment provider for web monetization. It's up to the content creator to provide content in way people want to consume it. A content creator can of course still show ads to user who donate and piss off the user. And the user can of course still block ads or turn off donation for that site (or both). Donation hardly depend on the time you spend on a site. So if you go to a site and its overloaded with ads you simply leave. (The fact that people know that sites get donations if they stay on the site probably has a very positive effect on people behavior)

We did that monthly subscription model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820

It had too few conversions and many of those were too small (< $5) to make it viable.

Ads are already effortless and fair, they generate cash from your attention in real-time and on-demand. The problem is the overall experience (interruptive formats, high frequency, tracking, etc) which is what Brave is really improving on. Good luck to them.

>it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop

I’m not sure what you mean… advertisers buy BAT to pay for ads and users get paid a percentage of the ad spend to view the ads if they wish.

Also, when Brave did the ICO for BAT, they raised $35 million in 30 seconds[1]. BAT's current market cap is over $265 million USD.[2]

[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/35-million-30-seconds-token-sale-in...

[2]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/

3 models:

- Earn cash from work, pay cash to site as user.

- View ads on site and generate cash for site via attention in real-time.

- View ads from Brave and earn BAT, pay BAT to site as user.

It's a mix between the two models. You're still working via your attention to generate value and trade it for content from the site, it's just inserting 1 more step from the usual ads but with more control over the experience since it's handled by Brave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com