but look at the internet now. maybe they had a point.
Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?
It was a distributed way to fund media instead of banner ads. I think it would have been a tough sell, but imagine if all the 30% stakes that PayPal, Apple, Patreon, take were direct to creators?
This of course would all depend on a reliable search engine that could actually find things worth supporting.
Instead we had Geocities and Live Journal jamming ads all over to make it a “free” service, until it wasn’t. Now we have Google, TikTok and Facebook to replace them but that could turn it all off whenever they want.
maybe? it’s impossible to predict what effects that would have resulted in but what we ended up with now isn’t exactly great.
your options now are either full subscription only, with little audience and a huge barrier to get users as you have tonconvince them it’s worth a full size payment.
or convince someone else to pay you, e.g referral links and sponsored posts. this leads to low quality ‘reviews’ where the best affiliate program wins.
or put advertisers content in your site…and deal with people blocking it, and all the seo spam to get viewers onto those ads…
or…monetize your service by harvesting data on your users to then sell to whoever is willing to pay you for that data…also not good.
maybe if we figured out micropayments early we could have avoided some of that. or maybe we’d just have all of that on top of micropayments. or something even worse to maximize micropayments.