> is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue
The root problem there is it's not practical in today's world to pay the small sums individual bits of content are actually worth. The smallest practical transact-able value is about a dollar. With service fees you can't go much below that value before you make no money or lose money. Even then it's really only practical for large scale players.
A single news article is not worth a dollar. A tweet or HN comment is worth nowhere near a dollar. Even if I found some HN comment worth money...how is my payment going to get to you and not eaten by HN?
Crypto bullshit is not the answer at all. It's worse for transactions in every way than regular money. It pretends to be a solution to micropayments by ignoring the very real and very onerous transaction fees and deflationary nature of the currency. There's been efforts to deal with micropayments but it's a hard problem. Paying individuals is difficult and transacting in practical (sub-cent values) is extremely difficult to do.
Ads are an imperfect but working-ish solution to micropayments. They allow the customer to "pay" with attention (though now with intrusive tracking) rather than currency. AdTech has gone bonkers with tracking and targeting and has gleefully participated in facilitating the Dead Internet.
The root problem there is it's not practical in today's world to pay the small sums individual bits of content are actually worth. The smallest practical transact-able value is about a dollar. With service fees you can't go much below that value before you make no money or lose money. Even then it's really only practical for large scale players.
A single news article is not worth a dollar. A tweet or HN comment is worth nowhere near a dollar. Even if I found some HN comment worth money...how is my payment going to get to you and not eaten by HN?
Crypto bullshit is not the answer at all. It's worse for transactions in every way than regular money. It pretends to be a solution to micropayments by ignoring the very real and very onerous transaction fees and deflationary nature of the currency. There's been efforts to deal with micropayments but it's a hard problem. Paying individuals is difficult and transacting in practical (sub-cent values) is extremely difficult to do.
Ads are an imperfect but working-ish solution to micropayments. They allow the customer to "pay" with attention (though now with intrusive tracking) rather than currency. AdTech has gone bonkers with tracking and targeting and has gleefully participated in facilitating the Dead Internet.