No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
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Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
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It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
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I was excited to discover today that there's a proposed web standard very much along these lines! webmonetization.org
I don't know if this is the right solution, but *something* like this might help us escape the awful ads model.
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A great point about the trouble here: how can price negotiation happen sensibly? The spec punts to browsers, but it’s quite a hard problem for the long tails.
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Replying to @xeegeex and @andy_matuschak
It's an information theory question: the price signal comes from both positive and negative economic choice. Either negotiation in the bazar for the fringes, or supply demand in the bigger market. The utility model doesn't have that.
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Also, I discovered the Web Monetization API via this wonderful essay on the magic of the web being left behind in the mad rush for newsletters: robinrendle.com/essays/newslet, which in turn I found via 's 💯 relaunched Society of the ‡:
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I do have a solution for it btw, but it's not very elegant yet. I think people can price what their time is worth ahead of time and unlock content in that price point. by the end of the month they can distribute the total cost of time spent at that layer on the content they ...
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consumed, so the better content gets higher share of total bucket the user spends in that tier. that way I think the incentives can be aligned and the bargaining happens, customer gets to 'not spend' after value is assessed, there's competition and payment is made in the end.
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Electricity is easily measured.
For video content, you could just put a fixed price per minute watched, that would be very interesting!
It maybe would lead to me watching fewer low-value videos.
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Every problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection: pay 10€/month for access, get 1000 credit points to give to content you enjoyed. Use them like medium claps.
They come at no extra cost to you, so spending is easy.