About two decades ago, whilst I was just about learning how to walk, the internet was facing a existential dilemma—monetisation. In the early days of the web, when the demographic was largely composed of computer geeks and academics, the thought of paying for access to online content wasn’t even a consideration; the original ethos of the internet was that information should be free and accessible to all.
This, however, was not a sustainable strategy. As the internet grew in popularity and the number of users increased, the cost of hosting and serving content also increased. Additionally, as the demographic of internet users shifted from the tech-literate to the general public, more developer time was needed to create user-friendly interfaces and experiences, further increasing costs. This left the important question of how would all this be paid for?
There were two paths that we could have taken to solve this problem. The first, was to charge users for access to content either through subscription fees or one-off payments. Although this would have been the most direct and transparent way to monetise content, it was largely rejected by the internet community, feeling that it would be a betrayal of the open and free ethos of the web. Instead, we ended up taking the second path, monetising content through the use of advertising.
I can imagine, that at the time, this seemed like a good idea. With the introduction of a few, unintrusive advertisements, websites could continue to provide their content for free, and users could continue to access it without having to pay. The optimality of this solution, however, was based on the somewhat naive assumption that ad-tech would remain relatively benign and unobtrusive. This, as we now know, was not the case.
Instead, the last twenty years have seen a thorough enshittification of the internet. From pervasive tracking, to intrusive pop-up ads, or endless clickbait and algorithmic manipulation, the internet has become a cesspool of attention-grabbing, time-wasting, and privacy-invading garbage.
This is not the way it had to be though. As an example, imagine a world in which Facebook was treated more as a public utility, a town square, rather than an engine of extracting advertising revenue and personal data. This may seem far-fetched, but is far from the realm of impossibility. Rough estimates suggest that per European user, Facebook makes around £40 per year in revenue. Although this is not an insignificant amount, it is worth considering whether the benifits from completely removing all advertising, tracking, and manipulation from the platform would outweigh this cost—a world with significantly less polarisation, misinformation, and mental health issues. Even forgetting the larger social benefits of such a change, the personal benefits of being free from advertisements and seeing the content you actually want to see would be substantial.
This £40 per year fee is also a conservative estimate. Given the benefits to social stability and wellbeing that a “de-shittification” of Facebook would entail, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a government to subsidise such a service through taxation. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be too harmful for Facebook to maintain some level of (heavily-regulated) advertising, so long as it was unintrusive and not based on tracking or manipulation, to further offset the cost to the user.
This is the path we could have, but did not take. I hope that we can course correct. In fact, we may be at the beginning of such a transition based on new EU regulations that are beginning to take shape. This proposal has a long way to go—specifically, the fee Facebook are charging for this service is delibrately high to discourage users from signing up, and the payment only removes explicit advertisements, not suggested content—but it is a step in the right direction.
This approach gives me hope that one day we may be able to access large platforms such as Facebook without the constant bombardment of advertisements and tracking that we currently face. My concern, however, is that the implementation of similar approaches for smaller platforms or even individual creators is being hindered by a simple fact—they are charging to much.
This trend is best illustrated with an example. Let’s consider one of my favourite tech podcasts “Late Night Linux”. The podcast is released weekly and typically features two 30-second advertisements per episode. Exact figures for podcast advertisement rates are hard to come by, but the upper end of the estimated range sits at $40 per advert, per 1000 listens. Note this figure comes from a podcast publishing platform, with a vested interest in inflating this figure, so the true value is likely lower. Multiplying this figure by the 52 episodes per year and two advertisements per episode, we come to a total value of $4.16 per year for a listener who listens to every episode.
Remember, this is an optimistic figure, and yet if we compare it to the $60 per year for the podcast’s ad-free (and no other benefits) Patreon tier, it is still completely dwarfed. The creators of the podcast rightly point out that they do not enjoy depending on advertisers for their revenue, with fears that they may be forced to compromise their content to keep advertisers happy or that sponsor ad-spending may dry up at any moment. For this reason, the creators encourage their listeners to move to the Patreon tier; I completely sympathise with their position and want to support them in this change (and equally improve my own listening experience), but at a 1400% markup, it’s hard to justify. In fact, given that I listen to roughly 30 different podcasts, the cost of supporting all of them at this rate would be completely unfeasible.
This problem is not unique to the Late Night Linux podcast or even the podcasting industry at large. For example the same pattern is seen in the world of online journalism—I’m not going to subscribe to the Financial Times for the 2–3 articles I read per year!
I dream of a world in which I can support all of the creators I enjoy, without having to pay a fortune. This would be in the form of small micropayments for individually and directly for the content I consume at a fair price.
Coming up to a decade ago, in the early of the cryptocurrency boom, there was a lot of talk about the potential for micropayments to solve this problem. This had me truly excited that in a few years we would be living in a techno-utopia with no advertising, manipulation or tracking, and where creators could be directly supported by their fans. As it became progressively evident of how much of the cryptocurrency space was little more than scamming and speculation, I lost hope in this particular path to salvation. That said, there was and is interesting work in integrating crypto-powered micropayments into Brave and Chromium, respectively.
Even if cryptocurrencies don’t appear to be the solution, I still believe that micropayments are the way forward. Given the clear benefits of a payment-based internet economy both at a personal and societal level, I hope that once a solid foundation is laid for the technology, sufficient momentum will be generated for the change to drive itself. I am hopeful that this change will come soon, and in the meantime, will be taking any opportunity to support creators directly through payment/subscriptions, when the price is reasonable.