Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
You know the moment I’m talking about. The one where you read that irresistibly juicy headline and have no choice but to click. But when you do, you get the message.
You have no free articles left this month.
Great. Well, I guess my world will have to stay right-side-up for now.
I get it, though. News providers like the New York Times and Washington Post deserve to get paid for their product, and the paywall solves that. To what end, though?
Some people will avoid those sources. I’m one of them. I’m very choosy about which headlines I click because I know I’ve only got so many clicks. I ask myself, Do I really want to spend a free article on this topic?
And yea, I could subscribe. It’s just a couple of bucks, right? I don’t want all those subscriptions, though. I only care about a few articles from each of these sites per month, and other outlets cover the stories themselves.
The relationship between news providers and readers is symbiotic. These sites cannot exist without revenue, and readers are revenue, whether directly through subscription fees or indirectly through advertising. Given the interdependency, why can’t we find an honest, mutually-beneficial solution?
I believe one already exists in the form of a cryptocurrency: the Basic Attention Token (BAT).
Meet Brave
Brave is a browser that focuses on privacy. It has nice features like built-in ad blockers and protection against tracking and data collection. Given that ad prevention is one of its key selling points, it feels somewhat ironic that another feature it offers is Brave Rewards, which lets you opt to receive more ads.
Two things are really cool about BRAVE Rewards. First, it’s entirely optional. If you don’t want extra ads, no problem?—?don’t enable ’em. But, if you do turn them on, you get a cut of the ad revenue.
This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Companies buy ads so consumers will see them. Consumers don’t really have an incentive to view ads, though, and will do their best to ignore, block, or avoid them.
Ads that people pay attention to are more valuable?—?look at the Super Bowl. So, why not take a small percentage of that ad revenue and pay it to people who are eager and willing to participate?
That’s Brave Rewards in a nutshell. You earn BAT by viewing ads. The ads are pretty subtle, too. Just a small OS notification that you can dismiss if not interested. You can make several tokens a month using the browser, and the tokens are currently worth about $0.50 each. So, a couple of bucks.
It’s a win-win-win
So, here’s a novel idea: apply the same opt-in, profit-sharing strategy to news providers.
Think about it. A large provider could give its users two account types. There could be a free plan where readers earn BAT by reading articles that contain paid advertisements. The reader has an incentive to view the ads because it makes them money. The amount earned would be proportional to the amount paid by advertisers, and advertisers would be willing to spend a lot because of the huge audience exposure.
Not everybody likes ads, though, so there could also continue to be a paid plan that removes them. And what if this could be delivered in BAT?—?the same BAT earned using the Brave Browser?
It feels like the perfect win-win for these media giants. If I could earn BAT by reading articles at the NY Times or Washington Post, they’d quickly become my most-visited go-to sources instead of the paywall landmines that I try to avoid today.
Traffic would be way up. Ad revenue would be way up. Subscriptions would be way up. It could catapult them to the forefront of relevancy and influence.
And it all starts with the simple idea of paying people for their attention instead of treating them as a revenue stream.
This article was originally published on ILLUMINATION on February 17, 2021.
