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Comment by yuvalkarmi | Hacker News Reader

Didn’t Tim Berners-Lee originally envision a way to pay for individual World Wide Web content via micro-payments? This would have been perfect for that. While most content today is monetized via advertisements (which ultimately directs which content gets published to maximize views), I’m guessing this was originally meant to enable the sort of transactional content delivery originally envisioned at the onset the web.

I know there have been multiple experiments with content micropayments (I remember google had a product that was meant to allow you to charge up a wallet and use it to avoid displaying ads on participating news publications), and I vaguely remember reading something about Brave doing something similar. Really curious if this would go anywhere in this context.

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I think this idea is really only viable now that we have cryptocurrencies--just to keep your payment information out of the wrong hands. That said, the popularity of adblockers has forced website owners to rely more on affiliate links and sponsorships instead of ads in the traditional sense.

I think websites are still using ads.

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.

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

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!

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.

Sigh. Crypto"currencies" are a scam. Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21145147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21077708

Edit: downvotes are funny when I link a 70 upvoted post...

I downvoted you because neither of your links clarified why cryptocurrencies wouldn't satisfy a micropayment niche for 402 negotiation, other than "they're a Ponzi scheme." If you'd discussed Brave BAT, or the latency issues involved with posting a transaction or the dust issues with small payments, it would have been on-topic.

They are specifically NOT a Ponzi scheme, they are a new kind of scam.

And isn't it obvious it can't satisfy a micropayment niche because ... it's a scam? Any moment the value of it can drop to zero, someone might walk away with the contents of your wallet -- and that someone might be your exchange. All of these had examples.

> Any moment the value of it can drop to zero

As opposed to... what?

> someone might walk away with the contents of your wallet

Completely depends on how much you care about securing your wallet. I wouldn't say this is a common occurrence at all.

> and that someone might be your exchange.

An exchange is where you go to trade currencies, why are you keeping your money there? And how is that a problem of the currency?

New ultra-low-cost transfer networks like Bitcoin’s lightning seem necessary and sufficient to enable something like this. I would be happy to set a budget of e.g. a few cents a YouTube-minute that got paid out automatically by my browser.

The problem isn't the tech; one could build a centralized micropayment system long before lightning was viable.

The issue is that receiving and sending bitcoin payments makes you regulated like a wire transfer service, and the resulting license costs to operate such a business are approximately 1MM USD per US state in which you wish to operate (before you can send a single payment).

It's madness. All of the cool micropayment businesses I want to start are illegal now.

I don't understand. If I accept bitcoin payments, does this make me a wire transfer service?

If it makes the payment service provider a wire transfer service then Bitcoin and BTCPayServer already solves this.

I think it’s accepting bitcoins on behalf of another party that makes you a wire transfer service.

But do you need to receive and send them at all? Couldn't you just act as a coordinator, sending the site's BTC address to the client so that they can pay them directly?

Yes, although there exist no libraries which let one easily implement such services. Simple on-chain transactions also require a transaction fee every time a micropayment is made, and due to this and the fact that blockchains still not scale to more than a few tx/s, the usage of payment channels is required.

Here's a project of mine from a while ago: https://github.com/void4/paymentchannel

You don't need crypto-currencies for something like this - just a payment broker, like PayPal.

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