If you’ve only just joined us, let me bring you up to speed on my vision of the “Content Economy.”
The Content Economy will be a system of monetary exchange made through micro-payments. But not that micro. A penny or pence or whatever 1/100th of a euro or yuan is.
You will have your content account which you can top-off with $ or, if you’re good at creating content, said account will be your repository for the oodles of AddCents clicks that you will receive.
AddCents is the concept I came up with years ago that I wanted Google to build. Imagine seeing a little G$ next to an article or youtube video. You read or watch — enjoy the content SO MUCH that you want to pay the creator directly — so you click the AddCents button. Ding! A transfer from your account to the creator’s account. (Kind of the opposite of Google’s current adsense.)
Anyway, the idea seems sound. But, Google refused it. And, recently, so did Medium (instead they implemented that silly clap meme). So, what about other, hint hint, content platforms?
If you had a WordPress account that you deposited, oh, $25 into and then instead of clicking that contentious “Like” button you clicked these instead:
And you PAY the author of the content, whatever you think it is worth.
You can AddCents to articles, to posts, to comments!!!, to anything attached to a piece of content. But think of this. An author could offer their larger works, self-published novels vimeo or youtube videos, and build a page that hosted them. And then let content consumers pay them DIRECTLY!
Additionally, if you give a great review of a novel — why shouldn’t you be able to earn money for that too?
Effectively, this paradigm becomes a self serving, self propagating economy where everyone can pay for content or earn money for content. Everyone can participate in the Content Economy.
If you like this — send me a penny. (I wish!) Or petition WordPress to implement this concept.
Cite:
https://goo.gl/PaEPKg
https://anonymole.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/google-addcents/
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Quote: Free2z, it’s based on zCash, a Crypto asset. But if you don’t mind trying. You can post your content and receive donations via P2P straight to your wallet.
https://free2z.cash/docs/
https://z.cash/
This /kind of/ the way to go, using blockchain. But, the reality is that there must be a central clearing house to manage the accounts concept. Paying into and deducting out of a single WeeFee account must be possible. If there’s a way to do so, providing the link-software for presenting payment interfaces — then sure, distributed would work and perhaps be preferred.
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My Inner Picard says, “Make it so”.
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Hi AMole,
Your idea reminds me of the bank accountant who siphons off the half cent from all the interest bearing accounts and ends up rich at the end of the year. In order for that to happen with a content economy you might consider a holding account where members of the content economy could pool there pennies or dollars into a collective fund that would then be purposed toward some end like a long shot Vegas bet. That would be fun. Gambling would add a boost to the enterprise. I predict this would attract many social media types. Of course, you would have to manage the fund and if it hit you would be faced with the prospect of suddenly sitting on a bunch of money. Perhaps I’m running away with this very good idea, but game theory (not zero sum) might have some application. Thanks. Duke
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Hi Duke,
Gaming is a complex subject in the US. Heavy regulations box in much of what one would think might fly. “Games of skill” are often how the platforms get around that. If you’re competing then it’s not gambling (in theory).
But charity, or “good cause” is a great addition to the topic.
I suspect that the reasons for separating buyers vs sellers accounts is due to money laundering issues. We’ll see if that’s true or not. I’ve got inquires into two of the major players in this space.
I did want to post this here as if one wanted to, one could implement either Jamatto or Laterpay, on their wordpress accounts — right now.
The problem, as I pointed out in the update, is that payees/contributors would have to have separate accounts one to spend and one to earn.
Something is going to give in this space — soon. Subscription models suck. And vertical solutions lack coverage.
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Thanks for the comments.
15 years a go, or even just ten, I would have tried to build this myself. And in fact I worked with a bunch of people with whom we could have done this. But today? The social space is impossible to break into (tried that — maybe I’ll share that experience here soon).
Oddly, back around 2000, the concept of micropayments was huge. But there was no platform upon which one could build a community. Netscape was dead and Microsoft was taking over the web. Msn, Aol, Yahoo, CNet were the big “social” sites. Aol, I suppose, could have done this, and they may indeed have tried. I don’t recall.
Not really an option now for an independent to do this. Although, what’s great today is that social sites provide public APIs like OAuth which anyone can use to authenticate people. An AddCents API “could” allow platforms to exchange payment/compensation across multiple venues. I may have to think on this.
At this point, it would be vastly easier to plug in an exchange system to an existing social site.
[desertcurmudgeon: Mozilla offers a read only mode which strips out all non text content…]
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Here’s why I really like your idea: fairly recently, I’ve noticed that a few of the blogs I’ve been following for a while have become ad-hosting, money-making ventures. I’m cool with that. However, what happens now is that when I start reading a new post from one of these bloggers, a loud video commercial begins to play loudly and I am automatically thrust to the bottom of the page where the video is when I was right in the middle of reading a sentence. Then, it really doesn’t want you to go back to where you left off — it keeps shoving you back down to the advertisement. Is this a savvy way to earn cash or a way to lose readers?
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I find that mildly annoying as well.
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Can you not develop the concept yourself? Then offer it to different sites?
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Great idea! But I’d “ADCENTS” so fast and often I have to keep putting in huge sums! (Or maybe I’d be a lot more choosy before clicking that “like” button…) I’ll support you!
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