Blocks, streams and paying for content online

There are only 3 ways to pay for content online, with

- money (subs mostly)

- attention (ads primarily)

- identity (personal info, to be sold to marketers eventually).

Until 2015 or so, harvesting reader attention via ads was the dominant way to pay. In the last few years, that is now quickly changing to getting readers / viewers to pay via subscriptions / fees. This of course works well for streams (Netflix, Spotify etc.) but not so well for blocks (unless they are high brand blocks such as NYT).

Hence the push to figure out payments for blocks. 

One option was micropayments but this hasnt worked. Blendle is the latest casualty.

Many reasons for this; the best explanation is likely the one by by Nick Szabo, of Bitcoin fame, which says there is a lot of cognitive burden attached to micropayments.

Hence I feel that over the next couple of years, we will see new interesting ways to harvest attention and identity.

Surveys is one obvious way to harvest attention. Google Surveys for instance. This has been on since '12 and hasn't taken off yet (not sure why yet).

The other way to harvest attention could be tasks - say classify images for training data sets for Machine Learning projects. Captcha but for images etc. Or even transcribing. Imagine Playment but sliced and diced like a captcha. There is an interesting startup called Turkbox is trying to solve this problem via this approach.

Early days though for them, especially given challenges of verification of data filled in. Still this is an entirely new form of attention harvesting, and it is worth watching how this gets played out.

Which then brings us to identity. Other than sharing personal data, what are other ideas here? That is, what are the new ways of leveraging identity to pay for content?

Could Amazon introduce a 'Read with Amazon' button, where they intermediate the cost of reading, and then harvest your articles to deduce what you wish to buy? Hmmm....

So, to summarize we have moved away from attention-harvesting via ads as the dominant media model. Streams and mega brands have customers willing to pay money for subs / memberships. But what abt blocks? What new models will emerge to address their challenges?

Interesting times ahead!