[array_key_first]

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield.

I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month.

Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.

Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.

[kbelder]

But there's no method or structure in place to pay a website a fraction of a cent. Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention.

I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.

[FloorEgg]

In 2023 I did a deep dive into the crypto community with two main questions:

- do these people understand the principles of making good products?

- is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models?

After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing.

I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc.

Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...

[order-matters]

I have also done similar research because I wanted to build something to handle microtransactions on a personal website that could scale if adopted to be usable by everyone if they wanted.

I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire network to be updating ledgers with ~millions of records per ~$1000 moved. the fundamental tech of crypto leans towards slower, higher value transactions than high volume, small transactions. Lots of efforts have been made with some coins to bring down the bar of "high value, low volume" to meet everyday consumer usage rates and values - but a transaction history at the scale of every ad impression for every person is a tough ask and would perpetually be in an uphill battle against energy costs.

Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is that the service would need to be centralized, and likely treated as cash by not keeping track of history. Centralized company creates "web credits", user spends $5 for 10,000 credits, these credits are consumed when they visit websites. Websites collect a few credits from each user, and cash out with the centralized company. The issue is that since it would cost more to track and store all the transactions than the value of the transactions themselves, you have to fully trust the company to properly manage the balances.

I started building it and since I would be handling, exchanging, and storing real currency - it seemed subject to a lot of regulations. It is like a combination bank and casino.

i've thought about finishing the project and using disclaimers that buying credits legally owes the user nothing, and collecting credits legally owes the websites nothing, and operating on a trust system - but any smart person would see the potential for a rug pull on that and i figured there would not be much interest.

The alternative route of adhering to all the banking regulations to get the proper insurances needed to make the commitments necessary to users and websites to guarantee exchange between credits and $ seemed like too much for 1 person to take on as a side project for free

[Dylan16807]

It would need to be mostly centralized, but keeping track of history would not be hard.

A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for five years? Okay, that's around $100 in cost. If you're taking a 1% fee then the storage cost is 1% of your fee.

If your credits are worth 1/20th of a penny, and you store history for 18 months, then that drops the amount of data 17x.

(And any criticisms of these numbers based on database overhead get countered by the fact that you would not store a 10 credit transaction as 10 separate database entries.)

[order-matters]

fair enough on tracking history in the centralized model. I had suspicions there would be hidden costs that might make it too expensive. i dont think the data storage would be as much of a problem as the cost to write it to storage.

I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.

the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk

[Dylan16807]

Even with user to user credits it would take a lot for the number of transactions to go above 2. That would mean more than half the money is going to viral payouts.

And was this assuming you'd only take a cut on the cash going in and out? Because even a 0.1% cut of the transactions would mean you have $1000 to handle the amount of data I described in the last comment.

[mistrial9]

you are not alone, people seriously proposed one thing after another in the early 2000s.. same time frame as RSS, roughly. Somehow, these proposals were undermined and slow-walked? merger and acquisition in Silicon Valley was aligned with very different things

[vannevar]

>"Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention."

Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.

[zadikian]

Microtransactions have been done in various ways, in fact the word refers to those more than a hypothetical.

[mlinsey]

YouTube had an estimated $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/youtube-surpasses-disney-p...

And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.

[gfody]

I believe this and it makes a web 3.0 solution seem viable if only we could escape the collective action trap

[abustamam]

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks.

There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

[dotancohen]

  > distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking

How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?

[wing-_-nuts]

Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.

[lukechu10]

Well what makes you think the VPN providers are not tracking?

You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.

[wing-_-nuts]

They have been subject to warrant requests, and had nothing to turn over. There are only a few vpn providers that I genuinely trust. (Mullvad, airvpn, etc)

Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.

[abustamam]

Yeah that's the problem (and possibly why such a thing didn't exist).

But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.

[saghm]

> This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks.

The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.

[Terretta]

content creator is new speak

people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to

that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked

at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person

publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well

having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round

[totallymike]

I couldn’t disagree with this more if I tried. The biggest benefit of the internet is to make it easier to talk to each other and share ideas. Putting financial gates in front of that ability is hot garbage.

Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.

[CamperBob2]

The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't.

The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?

[Terretta]

Texture was incredible.

Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.

Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...

[abustamam]

I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!