[mukuz]

Why does no one talk about brave’s approach to micro payments. It makes micro payments effortless. One doesn’t even need to use their ad based model. Instead, just buy some of the BAT tokens and use them.

Is there some inherent flaw in there approach that it’s not more widely discussed.

[hakfoo]

I think the goal needs to be to remove the "micro" from micropayment schemes.

At some point, the overhead of managing and tracking payments takes up a major part of its value.

Federation is the potential counter-argument. Let me buy one USD20 per month subscription that covers a huge swath of media. Divide the revenue among publishers based on aggregate metrics.

Then you're dealing with only relatively large and infrequent transactions-- consumers paying $20 per month, the aggregator paying each publisher a monthly cut of $100 or $100,000-- something that doesn't require a completely new financial ecosystem to make viable.

Making it a fixed-dollar subscription helps with risk-aversion. If you're buying 200 other media products in the same subscription, you can avoid second-guessing "will I use this?" It avoids any client-side "I have to consciously specify what I want to back" friction like Patreon.

[ryandvm]

I think a Brave-style approach is better than an advertising-supported model just because Internet advertising is a scam for everyone involved. Unfortunately Brave doesn't solve the underlying problem of "views = $$$", which means journalism would have to continue to rely on being clickbait to survive.

[mukuz]

It does make an effort to solve the problem. It currently uses a time based approach in which tokens are credited to a publisher based on time spent by the user reading the article.

Also there is a threshold of some seconds before any tokens are accounted for an article. So basically click baits won’t account for any tokens because the user might quickly close the article.