<story><title>The Buzzfeed Lesson</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/the-buzzfeed-lesson/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhauer</author><text>I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments to consume their content.  I would happily pay $0.25 or thereabouts to read articles on some of the sites I consider to be good content creators.&lt;p&gt;That said, I have somewhat high expectations.  E.g., I would hope that such a platform doesn&amp;#x27;t take too large a cut (e.g., Apple app-store sized cut) because that&amp;#x27;s offensive to both readers and creators.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemothekid</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not optimistic that this platform will ever exist in the West. Micropayments is effectively blocked by the credit card industry with their high fees and a widely used micropayments platform would essentially disrupt the credit card industry - why would anyone pay Visa 1.9% if the new platform was sending payments for a fraction of a cent? And any player large enough (e.g. Apple) to deploy such a platform would rather not piss off Visa.&lt;p&gt;In China, where credit cards never existed, they already have a micropayments infrastructure. Sending payments is massively cheaper there and some businesses there, such as Podcasts are way more successful due to this model. Some podcasting subscriptions are sold for 1 yuan (15 cents)[1].&lt;p&gt;As long as Visa&amp;#x2F;Mastercard exists, I don&amp;#x27;t think we will see this come to the US. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t hold out for crypto either - it&amp;#x27;s not a technical problem. The technology has existed to make this reality for years.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;chinese-show-willingness-to-pay-for-clicks-1483555104&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wsj.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;chinese-show-willingness-to-pay...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Buzzfeed Lesson</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2019/the-buzzfeed-lesson/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhauer</author><text>I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments to consume their content.  I would happily pay $0.25 or thereabouts to read articles on some of the sites I consider to be good content creators.&lt;p&gt;That said, I have somewhat high expectations.  E.g., I would hope that such a platform doesn&amp;#x27;t take too large a cut (e.g., Apple app-store sized cut) because that&amp;#x27;s offensive to both readers and creators.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crowbahr</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a great use-case for Cryptocurrencies: low transaction fees to send micro-amounts of goods across the network.&lt;p&gt;That seems like part of what Brave is trying to do with the BAT: Use BAT split among websites based on the amount of time you spend on each site.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d rather see a self contained library that allows websites to easily insert a button which lets you tip 0.02c or whatever to them with a single click. No idea what you&amp;#x27;d need to do to create something like that, but it seems like a really compelling way to get people to spend on sites they like. A tiny amount of pennies sent via crypto with the press of a single button could be a sizable stream when you&amp;#x27;ve got scale to it.</text></comment>