- From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2021 21:24:07 +1100
- To: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Cc: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Public TAG List <www-tag@w3.org>, Wendy Seltzer <wseltzer@w3.org>, Jonathan Zittrain <zittrain@law.harvard.edu>, Daniel Weitzner <weitzner@mit.edu>, Davi Ottenheimer <davi@inrupt.com>, schneier Bruce <schneier@inrupt.com>
Hey Henry, > On 17 Jan 2021, at 6:52 am, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote: > > Another response is to make it easy for them to deploy micropayments, so that > users coming from search engines can easily pay per article read, and then > subscribe if they find themselves reading articles from that paper very often. > > I regularly land on newspapers via search engines, twitter, blogs, … and these ask me for > a monthly or yearly subscription which I don’t really want. I can’t possibly subscribe to > all newspapers I come across, for lack of time. But I would be happy to pay a > small amount per article read if it were a one click affair and secure. That reminds me; a few years back I was in a meeting with some executives from a Very Large Publishing Company (one who everyone would instantly recognise). After the meeting, two of the execs took me aside and started asking some very detailed questions about micropayments and whether a standardisation effort could be started for them. It turns out that they were convinced that advertising-funded sites were a medium-term dead end, and they were looking for other options. I wonder if they feel the same way today; besides the pending legislation, the "cookiepocalyse" is causing a lot of navel gazing in the adtech industry, and publishers are waking up to the notion that they're getting ripped off, and might be able to do it better on their own, or at least based upon their own knowledge of users, rather than an ecosystem where there are hundreds of middlemen. Personally, I'm very interested in a privacy-preserving micropayments/microsubscriptions system -- not only for HTML content, but also RSS/Atom... Cheers, -- Mark Nottingham https://www.mnot.net/
Received on Sunday, 17 January 2021 10:24:24 UTC