[bambax]

> 99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name

So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer.

> it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content

Not sure about that.

Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content:

- by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.)

- by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such)

- by paying for it via taxes (your proposal)

- because it's free.

The best content is undeniably that which people will specifically, directly buy with their own money[1].

And the second best is free.

All the other content distribution schemes produce bad content, either hollow or click-baity or just plain dumb.

My point is that AdBlock is saving the world.

1: For the purpose of this discussion, pirated is in the same category as paid-for.

[jerf]

Patreon is saving the world, not AdBlock. It's still early but I expect in 10 years that "trying to make money via ads" is going to see "very 2010s", due to the lack of words for "something done from the late 1990s to the late 2010s".

It just doesn't work. It almost works. It is so painfully close to working that we can taste it, which is why it has hung around so long. But eventually, advertising corrupts all souls. People respond to incentives, no matter how hard they try not to, and nobody sane should really try to build a quality content-production regime on people trying really hard to act as if the incentives they are operating under aren't the incentives they're operating under. Even when it "works" for some period of time I question the effects of such long-term self-deception.

[Fuxy]

Patrion is a good idea however a better one would be if you could pay £0.01 - £0.05 (pick your currency) per you-tube video watched and not have any ads shown.

Right now everybody in analitics is thinking in the millions of impressions but imagine if you could make £0.05 per impression.

That would be £50,000 per million views.

I wouldn't mind just having a few pounds on my youtube account and using that to avoid seeing ads.

[jerf]

Microtransactions have had implementations of various sorts for about two decades now. Patronage has had implementations for about two years now. Patronage is probably already ten times the size of microtransactions, and I suspect I'm being an order of magnitude or two generous on the side of microtransactions there. My conclusion: Patronage may work, microtransactions do not.

One possibly reason is that advertising crowds out microtransactions in any practical implementation; you can either hope that your viewer has installed a microtransaction plugin and is visiting enough sites to make it worthwhile and not let the installation decay, or you can simply install ads and get 100th the price of a single transaction but get it from everybody. Microtransactions have faced a serious boil-the-ocean problem. On the other hand, under the patronage model, you get about 500-1000 people to support you with 4-5 bucks a month and now you're living a middle class lifestyle. That's not trivial, but it's not boil the ocean. (And if you can't get that, well... sorry, perhaps you're not cut out to be an internet "content creator" and live on that. I know I personally am not.)

I got that 4-5 bucks a month by running the numbers on the four campaigns I'm involved in. The averages I obtained were $7.80, $3.50, $4.50, and $3.90 per patron. 2 of those are big enough that the creators can live comfortably middle-class lifestyles on the patronage alone. One is augmenting contract cartooning work and I would imagine between the two of those things is comfortably-middle class. One of them can not on just the patronage income, but has expressed thanks on his blog for it being enough money to find a better place to live for him and his family, and the other is a now embarrassingly-oversupplied-with-money Let's Play series that's a spare time thing that certainly is worth the time the owner invests in it now. So this is not a rehash of the "microtransactions will be awesome someday in the future" argument that I've been reading; this is happening now, it's the present.

(And in all cases, when I say "comfortably middle-class", I am including both fees taken out before they get their money, taxes, and self-insuring; $60-70K a year in income is more than many people see! If they're merely making the "median US income" in cash before fees and taxes I would be less glib, though even that is impressive compared to what could be done three years ago.)

(Also, by no means am I claiming this is a random sample. You may go do your own to whatever criteria you like. But I would also reiterate that this isn't going to work for everyone, and a failed Patreon campaign isn't really the fault of either Patreon or the idea of patronage as a viable solution.)

[dredmorbius]

"Patronage is probably already ten times the size of microtransactions"

Any data / sources to back that assertion?

[Touche]

Isn't Patreon just charity? I don't think that's a sustainable way to pay for content.

[JoshTriplett]

No, it isn't charity; it's payment for content. Calling it "charity" implies that the content being provided has no value to the person paying for it.

[gergles]

No, it's patronage, and it appeared to work for a few hundred years.

[normloman]

Not sustainable? Tell that to PBS!

[Touche]

Sustainable is the wrong word. Is it scalable? Meaning can a large number of creators live off of this model?

[normloman]

Time will tell, but I can't see any reason to doubt whether this could scale. As long as an artist can inspire intense loyalty from a small group of fans, they could forseeably supplement their income with donations. This won't work for all artists, and won't replace existing funding models. But there are a lot of creators who fit this bill.

I, for one, and excited to see crowd-patronage grow. It's a model that rewards artists with cult appeal (versus the consumer model, which values mass appeal). The arts will be a little less bland.

[jerf]

See my other reply that's like a great-great-uncle-once-removed of this comment or something, and I'd highlight I'm using real numbers from my real patronage, not theoretical things that could happen someday.

[bambax]

Agree with all of the above!

Thanks for mentioning Patreon: first time I hear about it. Sounds like a brilliant idea!

[antihero]

What would be interesting is a sort of all-content-subscription - you pay X per month, and it's divvied up between the providers/owners of whatever you use. Kind of like a tax, but actually related to usage.

Would be very difficult to have the trust and integration required for it to work though.

[dredmorbius]

That's pretty much my proposal, though with a few caveats.

It's a flat fee. That is, you're paying the same whether you fetch a single work or 10,000. Aaron Swartz's mass document mining would be supported. If you're interested in large-scale literature analysis, it's possible.

It's scaled to income / wealth. Information is part of what makes the system in which you're living possible. If the system's rewarded you, you reward the system back. Hence the tax element. Possibly scaling to some sort of connectivity plan might accomplish a similar aspect via price discrimination (of the old-school multi-tier service offering model, not the new-school hit-them-with-hidden-fees approach).

There are tiers of compensation. Pumping out white noise / easy-to-generate content doesn't necessarily buy you high compensation. Detailed scientific / journalistic work does. Penalties for inaccuracy in genres where accuracy matters, especially against deliberate distortion.

Implementation is the tricky bit.

[forgotpasswd3x]

I had thought that would be an interesting way to set up a streaming music service.

Ex: I'll agree to pay $X/month, and then at the end of the month, that money gets paid out to the artists I listened to based on how often I listened to them.

It probably wouldn't work, but I don't really feel any current method of music sales is really working for most artists.

[kuschku]

Soooo, like Flattr?