军情锐评：服役63年仍作战：美B

Don’t worry everyone; your friend Google is here to save the online content industry. After three years testing and tweaking their Google Contributor micropayments mechanism—which allows users to pay a few pennies to view a web page without ads on enabled sites—the platform finally re-launched on a bigger (but still beta) scale at the start of June. Users buy a pass for $X which works across enabled sites, with each page you view spending a fraction of your ‘wallet’. When your balance hits 0 it tops up automatically. Sites are setting their own price-per-page (PPP? P3?), with $0.04 one figure I’ve seen. No more annoying ads for you. A more stable source of income for publishers. Everyone wins!

Actually Google probably wins the most here, taking a percentage of every page view cost and exerting an even more dominant control of the online advertising sphere, hoovering up yet more data about our online behaviour in the process. Under the auspices of a drive to make ads “better” (less annoying, less pop-ups, less obstructive), Google is positioning itself as the noble behemoth (muttering “don’t be evil” ever more quietly under its breath while doing so). I believe they’ve missed an opportunity here, though.

I’ve been passionately extolling the potential virtues of a more widespread micropayments system for creators to anyone who is unfortunate enough to entertain my diatribe recently. Something that reaches beyond the publishing world; somewhere in between Patreon and paywalls. I envisaged a button which could be embedded in the same way that social share / like buttons are, whereby people would only have to login once and could then hit the ‘donate’ button next to any bit of content it appeared by to give 1p / $0.01 or upwards to the creator.

It wouldn’t drive you off-site, unlike Patreon. It would be opt-in, unlike Google Contributor, which subtracts money from your wallet whether you value the page you have loaded or not. Seamless, quick and a way of attributing different value to different content rather than a flat fee. I always believed it would take a major player with the requisite infrastructure, reach, influence and tools to make such a system a success, and I had envisaged someone like PayPal being able to take up the mantle. They actually had a crack at micropayments back in 2010, but it never quite worked out.

Google also previously tried and failed with a similar system called OnePass in 2012. eConsultancy summarised why the landscape and consumer sentiment might not have changed as much as Google would have hoped since then:

“ While Contributor is not a carbon copy of One Pass, the harsh reality is that a large percentage of consumers are opposed to paying for content and don't feel an obligation to view ads. Therefore, convincing them that paying pennies (or fractions of a penny) at a time for viewing content without ads is probably going to remain a tough sell, especially as ad blocking technology becomes harder and harder to detect.”

I believe that an ‘opt-in’ method of allowing consumers to choose which articles, songs, videos and photos they want to contribute to is a superior solution if you’re trying to get people on board with micropayments. At the very least, it could be a smarter way of getting people into the mindset of rewarding content that they value, rather than saying you have to commit to ￡x right now and it’s going to get frittered away whether you enjoy the content or not. It’s still a massive step change in behaviour that Google et al are trying to force here, even if it is a more flexible system than paying for separate paywalls for individual sites.

As it happens, such a system does exist. SatoshiPay promises "login-free, 1-click nanopayments, everywhere on the web, monetising where nobody has monotised before". They allow you "charge users per download, second of video, or for an extra life in your game", and they take a 10% fee for the process. They are developer-forward as you would hope. I don't recall having seen their button / widget in action anywhere yet, but with what seems like a decent amount of funding behind them, I hope they proliferate and make my vision a reality.

An opt-in method where people get sovereignty over what to spend their pennies on not only provides a stepping stone for this, but it could also incentivise better content. Wouldn’t most of us like to see less clickbait? How many people are going to click ‘donate’ / ‘reward’ on a misleading, vapid article if they have the choice? Why should we reward such ‘journalism’? It could be argued that clickbait only exists because publisher ad revenue was falling off a click and sites needed to start ramping up their page views. Provide a revenue stream that rewards quality content and maybe we’d see a virtuous circle here.

Google don’t seem to have much to say on that front. I also can’t find any information on what happens if you click on a page or link by mistake and hit the stop button or back or have a bad connection. Are you still going to get charged? What constitutes a page view? Do you have to scroll through the whole article before you get charged or will it be deducted as soon as the page starts loading?

As a musician who heavily relies on SoundCloud to promote my music, a micropayments system is something that would be most welcome on the platform. Of course there’s a concern about uploading copyrighted content onto the platform and monetising it, but given that their copyright takedown system already works so, erm, enthusiastically, and that YouTube already deals with similar concerns (albeit not very well), there’s surely a way of limiting abuse. Besides, if you want to make money out of music you don’t own, are you going to bother uploading it somewhere where you aren’t guaranteed money anyway? Or are you going to stick to uploading it to YouTube where you are guaranteed to make ad revenue as long as their takedown system doesn’t detect the content?

SoundCloud could have taken their cut in the way Google are doing and provided an additional revenue stream that could have taken them in a more Bandcamp direction rather than the struggling and much maligned subscription and ads system that clearly isn’t working very well for them. The only way you can make money from SoundCloud as a creator right now is by effectively putting your tracks behind their subscription ‘paywall’. Very few people are doing that because doing so completely eradicates the utility of SoundCloud, its open access and its freeness. You can’t suddenly turn off a service that everyone has come to expect for free (where the content owners have long since consented to this freeness). That’s why I believe a gentle guiding hand to say—hey, we’re giving you this for free but how about pressing this button and giving us 1p?—could be a good middle ground for everyone. It’s already working for creators on Patreon, but again that’s effectively a subscription model and not a choose-what-you-reward model.

While we’re talking about SoundCloud, just a footnote to remind you that while Spotify has been the major force in driving people from paying nothing for music to paying something for it, it’s not actually in their interests for you to increase your music consumption on the platform. The more you listen to, the more they have to pay out in royalties, the less profit they make from your subscription. So much so that they are now being accused to being involved in working with or possibly commissioning ‘fake artists’ to create music for them which they can pay a lower royalty rate to, thereby juicing more profit out of your subscription. Small margins which add up. My point being that while some might look at Spotify as a ‘saviour’, a service whose profit diminishes the more people use it doesn’t seem entirely sustainable.

Are free and subscription / wallet / paywall passes really the only options? Isn’t there something else on the spectrum that can work? As the line between ownership of a download and 24/7 connectivity access to streaming a track continue to blur and diminish, the argument that people wouldn’t consider paying a tiny amount for something that you won’t ‘own’ and are offering for free otherwise doesn’t stand with me.

Radiohead and many others already showed that people are willing to pay money for something they can get for free if they like it, and yes that was more in the days when people actually cared about having the tracks on their hard drive. But I truly believe if such a system became as widely integrated as a ‘share’ button and the consumer had the power to reward what they want, it could become a normal part of online behaviour.

Would you click the +1p button after reading this article? Let me know in a comment below yes or no and let’s do a very crude and completely unscientific experiment… and please be honest!