If your phrasing were where this is going I'd have no issues with it, but I think (if this is successful) it's going to be much worse:
"The idea is to create experiences that ... are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether."
The most likely use case is to make pop-over ads 100x more annoying, not to complement a paywall. I would hope user revolts would kill this, but I'm not optimistic...
Not everything is a conspiracy theory. As a start-up we wanted to solve only one problem: giving users alternative for paying for the quality content. Where this leads us we'll see. As a species we already made a mistake thousand years ago when starting to mass produce the food. But today we're here and it's not that bad.
Correction: behavior design matters and is a great challenge for our established banking system, which only wants to deal in Big Money (much like how many start-ups now only want to deal in Big Data).
"The idea is to create experiences that ... are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether."
The most likely use case is to make pop-over ads 100x more annoying, not to complement a paywall. I would hope user revolts would kill this, but I'm not optimistic...