Why is it that so much content on the internet is clickbait, false, or hateful? Furthermore, if users are creating all the content, why are Facebook and other social media companies earning all the money instead of the users? We believe the ad-funded business model so common on the internet today is fundamentally responsible for these problems, and thoughtful incentives based on micropayments are the solution.
Most content on the internet today is funded by advertisements, which have peculiar incentives encouraging low quality content. Instead of incentivizing truth or thoroughness, ads encourage people to click on links and look at things briefly. With ad-funded content, the substance and quality of content suffers. All that matters is page views.
We believe thoughtful peer-to-peer micropayments embedded into a social platform can simultaneously improve the quality of content significantly as well as get creators paid for their content. There are really two problems here: 1) Designing the right incentives that encourage high quality content, 2) Making micropayments technically possible. We have solved both of these problems.
Designing the right incentives is what we call the “product problem”. We have spent the past year and a half designing 10 different payment models that encourage substance, truth and quality to be surfaced over shallow, false and hateful content. Our central payment model, the “purchase model”, is deceptively simple: Authors can place an optional pay wall somewhere in their content, with a location and price they determine. Authors earn money if people actually pay for their content. Therefore they are incentivized to create content that is actually worth paying for, which is significantly higher quality than the average content on the internet. Text, video, audio and images are all supported.
Besides purchasing, we have many other complementary models to encourage good curation, moderation, and sharing. Our intent is always and everywhere to get the right people paid for doing work that improves content quality.
The second problem we have solved is what we call the “technology problem”, which means making micropayments technically possible. Although the term “micropayment” has been around since the 1990s, they weren’t technically possible until the right smart contracts were available on the blockchain, which occurred in 2016. We have spent the past year developing a smart contract network on the blockchain for making transactions with zero marginal cost. Our technology works in a web browser with no install, enabling every device in the world to easily access micropayments for the first time in history.
