I've been thinking about an idea that would solve this: Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. After they read an article, they can click either a "worth it", "meh" or "garbage" button. At the end of the month, all subscription fees are distributed to each publisher proportional to their "worth it" votes. This will drive up quality. If "garbage" votes are penalized, it will discourage bad content as well as link-baiting, dishonest titles or any other gaming of traffic.
The primary impetus is to get the internet off of advertising. It's an absolute fallacy that ads give us content and services for free. It actually makes the web much more expensive:
1. The advertisers who pay google get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.
4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising as predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of services that rely on advertising revenue.
Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web searches and email than if we could just straight up pay Google for straight-up ad-free versions.
I like this idea. I'm sure there are flaws that need to be tackled (Should we discount the votes of the leechers who vote "meh" on everything to avoid paying? Would this encourage publishers to post lots of short articles instead of long thoughtful ones to raise revenues?). Look at flattr for an implementation similar to this in some ways. But in general, I think this is an excellent idea and should be tried.
Certainly there are details that need to be thought through, but I believe I've covered the important questions you raise:
>Should we discount the votes of the leechers who vote "meh" on everything to avoid paying?
Unlike flatter, subscribers pay monthly, up front. Voting does not affect how much you pay, only how your flat payment is distributed across the publishers in the collective. It is thus impossible to leach. If a subscriber honestly votes "meh" on everything because all the content is (to her) truly meh, then she should probably discontinue her subscription. That is as it should be. The free market mechanism applies not just to comparative success of publishers within this collective, but the collective as a whole. If the collective cannot retain a sufficient number of subscribers, it should fail.
>Would this encourage publishers to post lots of short articles instead of long thoughtful ones to raise revenues?
Good point. Clearly we should remove the "if" from my statement about "garbage" votes, which are explicitly designed to penalize any and all gaming, as determined by the subscribers. If subscribers detect such behavior (We would encourage such a critical attitude among the subscriber community culture) they should vote "meh" or "garbage" depending on the degree of offense.
But what if those many short articles were actually good? Should five short articles get the same share of subscription fees as one long thoughtful one? I'd like to leave this in the hands of the subscribers, but also keep the system simple. Maybe we allow greater than +1 for "worth it" votes, which would increase that article's share of revenue, and may or may not increase it's ranking in any recommendation system that we include in this system.
I've had this idea for over a year (along with many others intended to get us off this advertising addiction). Maybe I (or we!) should get this moving! If you or anyone else is interested, whether to flesh out the idea, evangelize it, or build it, shoot me an email.
This solution comes with its own problem: after reading, there is absolutely no incentive to pay other than good will. And most won't pay.
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