I'm hoping it would be something based on micropayments, maybe through a service like flattr. That would keep content accessible (for a small, affordable fee) and completely block out the bad actors (i.e. advertisers).
I think ideal for me would be some sort of hassle free micro-payment if some form of it ever really caught on. With all the paywalls going up I really wouldn't mind paying a small bit for some of the quality content out there, but I'm not gonna sign up for a subscription to every site on the internet nor give them my info.
I'm still hoping that something like Flattr can work. It should be possible to have a middle ground between "everything is ad supported" and "everything requires subscriptions or credit cards", especially for niche "small" content (that don't take months or years to produce) where the audience can appreciate the work done and its value.
Web3 with working micropayments would do it. But that's very speculative, in that we are very far from having anything like that. Crowdfunding could make ad-free platforms work for types of content that can be served cheaply, so video would mostly be out.
This solution is what the content creators want too: the problem is how to pay for it. Micropayments are the obvious choice, but they're currently impractical for a number of reasons (Bitcoin is promising but has yet to clear adoption hurdles necessary to hit the mainstream). I don't know that this will ever come to pass though. Micropayment tech is just too far off, and workable online distribution models are already in development.
Obviously, the cable/satellite/telco video companies of the world don't want to get disintermediated here; so most of them have been building IP video platforms for the last few years. It will still likely require a cable video subscription (though maybe with a slight discount as you won't need to rent a cable box.)
I do like the idea of micropayments for content. But doing so under the auspices of an ad-blocking tool or any client-side tool smells too much like a protection/extortion racket. This should be handled by the publishers themselves.
I think technology will eventually solve this problem through P2P sites that no one owns. Ads will still exist but they'll be mostly as endorsements, official sponsorships, and infomercials (e.g., any corporate blog). People who can't be easily paid this way (e.g., researchers, investigative journalists, writers, artists, open source programmers, forum admins) will eventually collaborate to create a fair system of distributed payments for projects/content. That system will be funded both from the grass-roots and top-down by governments and large corporations.
I suspect that for free content, we can look forward to ever more product placement and sponsored material, i.e., ads you can’t conveniently skip/ignore instead of standalone ads that are more easily blocked. It's been working (for sufficiently generous values of “working”) that way with TV and films for a while.
Personally, I’d rather see more effective forms of paying directly and not compromise the integrity of the content, but then I’m the guy who still buys box sets of spinning discs to enjoy my favourite shows uninterrupted and legally instead of either watching the ad-ridden ones on TV or pirating them on-line, so I guess I’m probably in a minority these days.
Given that we’ve yet to solve the micropayments problem, and even if we did it’s not entirely clear how well it would work, I wonder whether the most promising avenue might be some sort of collective subscription scheme. Smaller (or not) sites could join a collective programme that includes a lot of different sites aimed at similar audiences, there would effectively be a paywall but paid through a single centralised subscription rather than every individual site so much of the time users wouldn’t actually see it, and then some sort of simple marker that indicates you’re a subscriber and gets you in would also let the scheme track which sites were getting the most views and adjust payments in some reasonable way proportionate to value.
Some of the most successful on-line business models of recent times, other than ad-based and direct payment, seem to have been the library-style services like Netflix and Spotify, so I could believe this sort of collective subscription scheme could work if anyone had enough resources to get it up to a useful number of publishers and subscribers to be credible quickly enough. It feels like a balance of convenience and commercial viability that might actually work to me.
A significant problem might be that the umbrella schemes wind up taking a huge chunk of the revenue for themselves instead of passing it on to the real content providers, since the whole model depends on having a small enough number of schemes to be manageable for customers and that implies a degree of consolidation. Then again, we have a similar problem with big ad networks and with other types of middleman site today, so I’m not sure it would necessarily be any worse and at least very successful sites could still go their own way if they were valuable enough to their users so there would always be some inherent competition for any umbrella scheme.
What about something like Patreon? There probably needs to be a social and cultural shift (i.e. not just technology) to make micropayment "marketplaces" for creators and content actually viable, but I would actually reasonably bet that this is one probable way forward.
I like what your concept is a lot. I do not think a huge number of payments are going to be made using it, HOWEVER, I think this is just the beginning of a much larger movement behind micropayments for ad-free content. I've been wanting this for a very long time to read good quality articles online that are behind paywalls. I would totally pay with bitcoin, but refuse to sign up using any form of credit card.
I would pay for something that I could load a budget onto to just pay everyone for the ads they would have shown me so I can browse in peace. I like supporting content creators directly, but I don't want to be hassled making accounts and filling in my credit card info every time.
I think if we had a competitive, cheap and secure-enough micropayments system we could do away with advertisement-based monetization altogether. Creators could host their own videos, blogs, etc. on their own website and just charge a fraction of a cent per pageview or download.
I honestly believe that technologies like Flatr will make this possible.
You have to lower the barriers to having people purchase content. There's a mental barrier which stops you from spending $1 to watch another episode of House. Even though you like House, and you'd like to watch another episode.
And for "free content," well, ads suck. Nobody likes ads. We don't like being forces to watch ads, before we watch content. People who buy ad space don't like you to be able to skip their ads. YouTube is trying to pitch "skippable ads". Still not close enough, I think.
If I watch Sherlock from the BBC and like it, I Flatr it. I think that model works. I'm not sure - but that's my hunch.
Humble Indie Bundle is another great example - but I don't think it works for broadcast video.
You know, amidst the ad-block debate today, I actually see an opportunity ripe for a start-up.
A system that lets willing participants opt out of ad-viewship for direct micropayments. Wait a second, I think what I'm describing is close to the new 'Flattr' -- but still not quite it. Let the users choose between micropayments or ad-viewership.
Oh, right, another radical thought of mine - something that users would pay for. Even if it were just $1/month, one account per credit card only, it would serve as another little barrier to all the right people, and prevent throwaways and constant account deletion.
Obviously for a commercial, advertiser-funded operation, it is all about more and more users and traffic and the quality of the content isn't a priority, but this eventually destroys everything. I'm imagining something much smaller, but potentially higher quality and self-sustaining. I guess I'm pretty much describing The Well, but hopefully cheaper and with more users, but not free and as many users as possible.
Hopefully it will reach a critical mass sufficient to allow sites to REQUIRE a flattr account to see their content. Note that this is different from requiring a subscription, since you aren't forced into donating to them. But you are forced into jumping into the 'donation scheme' so if they produce content you like, why not click it?
I'm not sure what kind of critical mass that would require though. I think in some niche areas it would be possible without much effort if there was some sort of banding together among the major content producers for that niche.
Interesting concept: a centralized content micropayment service. You pay in ten bucks a month, a little gets taken out every time you visit various sites.
I like it. Not sure how to get enough vendor participation, though. I imagine the way to go would be to pair up with one of the large ad networks -- you could even work it where if you pay, the ads don't come. If you're not in the system, you get ad-ed like everybody else.
What would be interesting is a sort of all-content-subscription - you pay X per month, and it's divvied up between the providers/owners of whatever you use. Kind of like a tax, but actually related to usage.
Would be very difficult to have the trust and integration required for it to work though.
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