Eric Meyer: Hello and welcome to another episode of Igalia Chats. I'm Eric Meyer. I am a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: And I'm Brian Kardell, also a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And recently, Brian wrote a web post, one in a series really, maybe not a formal series, but still one in a series as many of our blog posts are about web monetization. And when I say web monetization in this case, I mean the overall idea of monetizing the web in a way that isn't ads. So this has gone by a lot of names over the years, like micropayments and et cetera, so on and so forth. And part of this post was a reaction to a recent thing from Google, and the first I heard about it was reading Brian's post. So Brian, why don't you introduce what's happening to our audience as you did to me? What is Offerwall?
Brian Kardell: Sure, sure. The interesting thing that caught my eye about Offerwall is that there's this chicken and egg problem with all these solutions is that you have to get them into publishers hands and you have to, publishers need a way to enforce the payment and enable the payment. And Offerwall is brought to you by Google Ad Manager. So it's just integrated with the system that 95% of publishers already use and it offers users a choice. Well, it offers publishers a way to select multiple possible options for payment.
Eric Meyer: So wait, I take it by multiple options for payment. You don't mean credit card versus Apple Pay versus whatever? I think, isn't it more we can serve banner ads or we can play a video ad, or you could buy access with no ads, is that kind of thing?
Brian Kardell: Sort of. So the innovation here, I guess, is that it does give users the choice which thing to do, and they demonstrate three different choices. One being you can watch a video ad, another being you can tell us, you can offer us your personal information so that we can profile you. And the third being this thing that really is the thing that catches my eye a lot is this Supertab, which is a way to say I'll pay this later, but with micropayments, so you won't be billed at the time of use, but we'll batch payments together. And this is an interesting thing that has been done a few different ways and a few different times before. We can talk about some of those I guess. But here is the latest, and I would say largest because again, it's available to 95% of the world's publishers.
Eric Meyer: Through Google Ad Manager.
Brian Kardell: And it's not even necessarily just a binary thing where you can say, 'You can pay for my website,' it will let you configure, you can pay for this article, maybe you want to charge for this article 10 cents. Or maybe you say, 'Nobody wants to deal with paying 10 cents, 10 cents, 10 cents, so you get access to this news website for 24 hours for $2 or for $1 or something.' Or you can manage your monthly subscriptions that way. And also, I said they give you three choices that they demonstrate, but there's also possible integration. So the possible integrations is also very interesting because it could integrate with, I imagine, Visa or MasterCard or Discover or whatever, your card of choice, American Express, if there were an efficient way to do that, that made sense.
Eric Meyer: Right, okay. So Supertab is not a Google Service, it's a third-party service.
Brian Kardell: Third party, yeah.
Eric Meyer: But the point of Supertab is to run up a tab like you run up a tab at a bar essentially, except in this case it's for websites rather than drinks.
Brian Kardell: Just a mental model, yeah.
Eric Meyer: Or for those who are old enough to remember such things, you used to be able to run tabs at the grocery store or the gas station, but we don't do that anymore.
Brian Kardell: Basically you live in a small enough town, you still can do it today.
Eric Meyer: Okay, there you go. It's just the idea of put it on my tab and then at the end of some time period, charge me for the total on my tab. So when you go to the bar, put this drink on my tab, put this drink on my tab, put this drink on my tab, and then when you leave, you got to pay for all three drinks or whatever-
Brian Kardell: And I've said it's very similar to a lot of other systems. I mean, when you use a shopping cart, in fact, the patent uses the metaphor of a shopping cart. So it's like imagine you could just have a shopping cart for the whole web so you can put a bunch of things in your shopping cart and then pay for them, or before it's time to pay for them, decide like, no, I don't want that after all.
Eric Meyer: And take it out of your-
Brian Kardell: Which is an interesting thing to balance is especially if these become very low value things, do you need to enforce payment on them or do you just need it to be payment by default? This is actually an interesting, we can maybe segue into a little bit some other answers to the same problem that have come before that are also adjacent and interesting. And one of the things that excites me about this is-
Eric Meyer: Wait. Which this, Offerwall?
Brian Kardell: About Offerwall and Supertab is that I do think it will help rejuvenate a lot of discussions. So there's been this stuff about micropayments since-
Eric Meyer: Since web.
Brian Kardell: Since even before the web actually. I mean-
Eric Meyer: Yeah, true.
Brian Kardell: Ted Nelson coined the term micropayments and actually began pulling on a thread that led him to say that we need to replace the whole copyright system and all kinds of stuff that actually is happening now with AI for similar reasons to what he said. But it's interesting. The core question here becomes a little bit like what is a micropayment? One definition could be something that's less than a cent, but why? It's a completely arbitrary concept in a way. And then, you have all these different monetary systems. So if I say a dollar is worth, in a rational number of euros, which one is the minimum? Which one is the minimum that you can transfer? So it gets really complicated, but really another answer to that is just even if you limit yourself to just money systems, can you transfer literally any amount efficiently? So if I wanted to transfer you a penny, a single penny, and I was like, anytime I visit your website, I give you a penny. In the US, the banking systems are not friendly to that.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, no. If you wanted to give me a penny and I set on my website to take credit card payments, I don't think even most credit card companies will even take a penny transaction, but even if they do, they're going to charge 25 cents on top of that as a transfer fee. So I'll actually get minus 24 cents or whatever. I don't know what the exact amount is, but it's something like that, which is why in the US at least sometimes you'll go to shops and they'll say, 'We don't accept credit cards for any transaction under $10,' because below $10, they feel it's not worth their time to pay the credit card fees and the transaction fees that go along with that. And so, this has always been regarded as a barrier on the web and we see it even with the novel currency systems, there are transaction fees, whatever. Let's not go into a cryptocurrency here. Just the general idea being that it's not frictionless. But what's interesting to me about Bitcoin is that I think it's made a lot of people, at least in our space, become much more familiar with the idea of fractional amounts because people talk about, well, that $10 is 0.0001 Bitcoin or whatever the current conversion is. So we hear about these fractional coins with Bitcoin. But does it make sense to send fractions of a penny? Generally, no. It doesn't make sense to pay half a penny to access a web article. But if you have something like Supertab where you do that 100 times in a month, then you've totaled up to 50 cents. And then, if you do that over a number of months and you get more familiar with it, you get more comfortable with it and you're like, 'Half penny, whatever,' then you start to add up to an amount where you've run your tab up to let's say $5 and Supertab then says, 'Hey, it's time to charge your credit card or transfer from your bank account or PayPal or whatever it is that you've set up to pay them, hey, 5 bucks or 10 bucks,' or whatever that low threshold is.
Brian Kardell: And so, it makes use of this batching idea. You said a number of interesting things there, but I want to make sure we get this in because if this is not universal, in several countries like the UK, I think Germany, France, like Singapore, I think, anybody feel free to fact check me on these, but I think all these use new payment systems where they do the thing that's intuitive, which is if there's a concept of a penny and you want to send a penny, okay, bits are cheap, we can do it, no big deal, just moving bits around. So you can do it fast, free, and you can do it, I believe because everybody in Europe shares euros, you can pretty much move money around for free in Europe, for example. But then, there's countries that have these legacy systems, let's call them, and those are the United States, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, South Africa.
Eric Meyer: Although it's interesting you bring up Africa because I know in a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, there's a lot of using mobile numbers to transfer money around fairly frictionlessly. I don't know if it's completely free to move money around, but there's a lot of that because like I say in sub-Saharan Africa, but maybe not South Africa, there are legacy systems, but they never built out a landline network. Everyone went straight to cell phones because that makes a lot more sense when you have widely distributed populations. And so, there is a lot of, I'll just text you a buck or whatever. Anyway.
Brian Kardell: So I mean there's inertia and laws and things that are built on these legacy systems. And if you noticed when I said that is a lot of the world's biggest economies have older systems and then have businesses built around that. We mentioned Visa and MasterCard and things like that.
Eric Meyer: We built up middlemen and they make a lot of money being middlemen pretty much in the, rather than you and me meeting halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh for me to hand you 50 bucks, I send you 50 bucks electronically, but some payment processor gets a couple bucks off of that and you actually get $48, but it's way more convenient than you and me driving an hour or so each to meet halfway between so we accept it.
Brian Kardell: And there's all these weird things where, I don't know, you transfer money using Zelle or you transfer money using Venmo or something and you're like, 'Are there fees?' I don't even know how a lot of that stuff works to be totally honest with you, but it feels like how do they work? The fact that it's mostly transparent to me means that for the most part, I don't care. Where I do care though a little bit is when I donate to a project, you can read about this on the Servo page for example. If you donate a very little bit of money, a lot of the money goes in fees. So if you donate, it would be great if everybody could donate $1 and we just get a million people to donate $1 every year and that would be $1 million. And it's like, well, no, not really, because basically if you donate in $1, it's not worth donating $1 because, and astute person might say, but what if all the people who paid in $1 didn't pay into those payment systems but rather somehow paid in like, well, I'm going to give a total of $20 a month and I just want you to allocate it this way at the end of the month, and those companies pay out one check, then the transaction fees become way smaller. And that's the way that all of these things work. And it also leads into this other thing that you were talking about crypto. My thing on crypto is not that I'm fundamentally against... These are all bits moving around in a system. Money is a useful fiction. That's all it is.
Eric Meyer: A consensual hallucination as Jeremy Keith and or William Gibson would say.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, and I fully can see that, and I don't care. I mean, I think it's honestly not the world I want to live in or the world I want to help build to have mean coins that are just some bits somewhere that anybody can create and then just play roulette and see if they hit big. Or we can make celebrities even richer by giving them memecoins or something. But also like baseball cards, Beanie Babies, they're all, who knows why they're worth whatever they're worth. The general philosophy behind it, I am totally willing to concede the general idea that it's all just fictional, but-
Eric Meyer: Things are worth what people will pay for them even if you and I don't understand why they're paying for them.
Brian Kardell: And if we're just moving around bits in the system, what I care about is that that system isn't burning down the planet, that it isn't just very obviously a way to do bad things.
Eric Meyer: And that it's not rigged.
Brian Kardell: That it's not rigged. Yeah, exactly.
Eric Meyer: Things like that.
Brian Kardell: I do care that we have the ability to have some laws around them and things like that. Maybe I think every society has healthy debates on what those laws should be, and we're constantly tweaking them. That's fine. You could argue that we have too many regulations on some things. But anyway, that's a whole different show, I guess. The reason I get into this is because I want to say Brave who they have this idea that you can pay money into a wallet or you can earn money for watching ads that they sell, and then you can spend that money. And the way that they do it is they have something that's internally keeping track of your history, cryptographically on your own computer keeping track of your history, and at the end of the month there's like a bill. But it's not a bill like you owe this money. It's like you put $5 in and here's where your time went. And so, here's how we're going to redistribute the numbers in our database into other accounts. And so, the idea is if 10,000 people went to meyerweb.com, then all of the database numbers just go in there and then whenever Eric says, 'I would like to cash that check, please.' Then we write Eric one check and we have one traditional bank transfer fee, and it's like, yeah, like or hate Brave, I think that that works pretty well. And the nice thing about it is that because they do that batching up and this fictional money, which they call bat, which is I guess like an Ethereum based cryptocurrency.
Eric Meyer: But didn't have to be, it could be whatever.
Brian Kardell: It doesn't have to be. The concept seems pretty solid. It could be a sequel database or whatever works, I don't care. You can, if you choose to, choose to view the bill and say, 'Yeah, I don't want to pay that one.' Yeah, I mean I think it's really interesting. It's an interesting balance of do you have to pay, but it's very much a chicken and egg problem, because you can't rely on it, first of all, as your exclusive source of income because it's only Brave, which is getting bigger, it's 85 million users, which isn't nothing.
Eric Meyer: Right. So like you said, whatever you think of Brave or the people who are behind it, it is an interesting experiment.
Brian Kardell: Absolutely.
Eric Meyer: I shouldn't say was because it's still going on. It is an interesting experiment because like you say, one of the problems with the idea of micropayments in general, web monetization in general, is that it's really inefficient to have lots of little microtransactions, but it's really difficult to get anyone to pay transactions that are an amount that are worth it. If I wanted to charge access to meyerweb, for some reason it doesn't make sense to do it for below $10 and who's going to pay $10 to view my website? But what Brave did is said, 'Okay, we're going to have all these users, however many users it's going to be, and if we create this pool that they can all pay into and we make it easy for them to do that, then we can pay out of that pool to these various creators.' That is a really interesting experiment. And Supertab is trying to do that same thing, I guess for anybody. It reminds me a lot of Patreon actually. So Patreon, as I understand it, anyway, the way it works is you pledge to a bunch, well, however many, you can pledge to five projects or five creators, excuse me. I was mixing it up for a minute there with Kickstarter, but you can pledge to 5 creators or 10 creators or however many creators, but let's say it's actually, let's say it's 10 creators at 5 bucks a month. So my understanding of Patreon is that Patreon then charges me 50 bucks a month because I have 10 creators. I'm paying 5 bucks a month or 5 creators, I'm paying 10 bucks a month or whatever. And then, that's one transaction. And then, for a given creator, they take everyone who has pledged however much, put it all together and send them one transaction rather than having to do a mesh. And of course, Patreon is a middleman, and so takes cuts, but is not, at least, I'm not sure if this is still the case, but wasn't taking a cut on every single transaction for me to a creator. It was one transaction or one cut of the total of whatever I've been pledging per month. And then, hopefully not be able to then send to each creator, 'Hey, here's your $500 that all of your supporters have pledged to you pooled together.' So being that pool and just like Brave with this attention token, crypto, whatever it is, creating a pool that people can pay into and then they can pay out of. And Supertab is trying to do the same thing except I guess for the whole web so that you can no matter, well, I guess anywhere that supports Supertab, you can do that. And that was, that was the other barrier. There were two barriers which made this whole problem really difficult is how do you get people to pick a place to pool their money, and then how do you get all the people who want to be paid to use that pool?
Brian Kardell: This is where I was saying is the chicken and egg problem, but there's a third part of that, which is the regulations and how you define money and all that kind of stuff. So there's all this weird, we talk about fraction of money and things like that. If you look at a coupon, most coupons say the value of this coupon, the cash value is 1/100th of a cent or 1/1,000th of a cent or something like that. And so, in theory, you could take them to the store that issued them, and if you had enough of them, then you could get one penny. I don't know why they do that. I don't know why they do that, but I'm sure it's some work around for some similar thing because-
Eric Meyer: Some kind of law that says there has to be a cash value. And so, they're like, 'All right, that's how much money this is.'
Brian Kardell: So one of the things that gets tricky about this is what are they giving you? Is it money or is it like money or is it a discount or is that a... And so, another thing I pointed out in my blog post is Bing, the search engine Bing pays you to use the search engine. I don't know if you know this, but if you do searches on Bing, you get points. I call them Bing bucks because I am a fan of alliteration. I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity to not call them Bing bucks, but then you can sign them on.
Eric Meyer: Somebody would've called them Bing coin to make it sound like-
Brian Kardell: Bitcoin.
Eric Meyer: Bitcoin.
Brian Kardell: Sure.
Eric Meyer: But anyway, yeah, I'm with you. Bing bucks.
Brian Kardell: Actually, you hit on the point that I was trying to make because those are loyalty points, which is what most microtransactions people make a comparison between loyalty points. You can get airline miles and they're not money, but they're as good as money within that company. You can't take them out of that company, or maybe they have to give you some cash equivalent if you chose to cash it in, but it's worth almost nothing by comparison.
Eric Meyer: I'm wondering if somewhere buried in the fine print of airline miles is that they have a cash value of-
Brian Kardell: I'm sure.
Eric Meyer: ... say 1,000,000th of a cent per mile or whatever, well, point.
Brian Kardell: Right. And so, Bing bucks are not money, but they're usable as money within the point system, the loyalty program that Bing offers. And you could try to make the case with different things that that's what's happening here. I think that is a little bit, the thing that happens with cryptocurrencies is people are like, well, it's not money. And then they're like, but it kind of is money. And so, that gets really tricky because the laws, if you're holding onto money, if you are transferring money, are different. They're different than they are if you're not doing that. And so, that's a gray area right now in a lot of countries, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out. But it brings me to the one that a lot of people ask about, and it seems to come up a lot, which is web monetization.
Eric Meyer: Specifically the web monetization proposal.
Brian Kardell: I mean, this is part of why we said we should do this podcast is this is so confusing because there is a proposal, W3C community group proposal, so it's not really a working group thing yet called web monetization, and it is very specific about what it is. And none of these things would currently fit web monetization, the Capital W Capital M, let's call it, proposal. But a full disclosure, Igalia is doing some prototyping work in Chromium for the Interledger Foundation, that's who's paying us to do it.
Eric Meyer: And also the people who created the web monetization community group.
Brian Kardell: Yes. Well, okay, so that's a good thing to talk about, I guess. So what does it take to create a community group? The answer is not much. You need five people with W3C accounts to back you up and say, 'This is worth creating.' So they got that, and honestly, they got a lot more than that. They got 400 members. It was like a lot of people were really interested in this as a conceptual problem and for the reasons that we're talking about here. It is a really interesting problem that needs solving and we've known that it needs solving since before there even was a web.
Eric Meyer: Right. This general idea of how can we pay for things without having everything depend on an ad ecosystem.
Brian Kardell: Everybody is interested in that problem.
Eric Meyer: Pretty much.
Brian Kardell: Everybody.
Eric Meyer: So including Google given Offerwall.
Brian Kardell: Part of the reason I wanted to bring that up though is because this was worked on, it is a very specific proposal that is there, and it uses this thing that was called a payment pointer, I believe it's now called a wallet address. It's evolved a number of times, but the whole thing centers really on Interledger, hence the Interledger Foundation supporting it. It could be subject to change. I mean, who knows where it goes because we have to really get it into a working group and prove that anybody in the implementation space is interested. And there's a lot of hurdles to get through. And so, the reason that Igalia is working on it is because it's difficult to force the conversation without some prototyping. It's difficult to only do things in extensions and things like that, especially with the extensions models changing. And so, there's value in doing a prototype that doesn't have to be like, 'we're going to ship it.' So don't read too much into it. It's not endorsement or criticism or anything like that, but it allows us to talk about this thing, which is how does it work, what is it about? And it's a novel approach that attempts to do something like TCPIP to imagine money as just streams of data. And so, it's a protocol for money really, which is a big change.
Eric Meyer: A protocol for money or for money transfers or both?
Brian Kardell: Well, I guess it's money transfers. It's really based a lot on network protocols, and it is tempting to be a protocol. Anyway, I don't want to misrepresent it. I don't know that much about it. My understanding of it's actually very limited, but it's novel. It's novel, it's a big ask. And it was popularized by Coil. Do you remember Coil?
Eric Meyer: I do remember Coil.
Brian Kardell: So Coil got around some problems by Coil itself being a subscription service.
Eric Meyer: So it was another attempt to create a pool of money.
Brian Kardell: Exactly. But you would create a pool of money as part of the subscription service, and then Coil would take a cut for-
Eric Meyer: Whatever.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, whatever. But then, they would distribute this money as you're going. You know what I mean? But when you say distribute this money, it was really distribute this in a crypto wallet, so you then would have to cash it for regular money. But it got around this by being a subscription service and things like that. And anyway, these are all really, really interesting. There was a long time ago, a few things that did get pretty famous. I wrote this history piece. I think it's fun to go back and look at things that seemed like they might almost make it or they might make it. There was one called Beanz, B-E-A-N-Z. Do you remember them?
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I do.
Brian Kardell: There's a link on my website to a 20-minute video somebody did on it. It earned multiple rounds of tens of millions of dollars of funding, even 5 million just from Larry Ellison, who was the Oracle guy and had posh offices all around the world.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean, Larry Ellison literally owns an entire Hawaiian island so he could probably afford it.
Brian Kardell: But there was another one that got pretty big that was a Flooz around 2000, and it had a Whoopi Goldberg behind it. And there's lots of these things. And in fact, actually Elon Musk even was behind some of these. There was one called Confinity and then x.com, which is why he owned the domain. And then, that became PayPal, which is where he made a lot of his money. And they were all trying to figure that stuff out. And I don't know, I think it's a thing that happens in tech a lot where very smart people who do technology see a problem and go, 'I could do that more efficiently.' And then as we get into it, we realize that, oh, that's actually really complicated.
Eric Meyer: And I think what a lot of people, very smart people in tech, or even maybe not so very smart people, but still in tech who see a problem and think, I could do that way more efficiently than especially in this area, in this realm when it comes to money, run into regulations, and they get really frustrated and upset. It's like, 'Oh, all these regulations are in my way.' And they rarely ever stop to think that maybe those regulations exist for a reason. It's like the line about every line in the safety manual is written in blood. Everything in the safety manual is because, yeah, somebody did that and it didn't go well. So now we have a rule for how you do that. And we see the same thing in the financial sector. After the Great Depression, there was a whole lot of banking and other financial regulation that happened and persisted for a really long time. Some of it's been undone, some of it still exists. And so, we're, I think cryptocurrencies, but also micropayments have run headlong into there are all these barriers, these regulatory barriers to moving money around, and it's just bits. It's like, yeah, the problem is when you make it real easy to move money around, you make it really easy for people to get defrauded or you run scams or whatever, and regulations exist because of things that happened, and they may not be the perfect way to address the problem. And even if they were the perfect way to address the problem in a 1930s economy with 1930s currency in 1930s speed of information, it might not apply as well in the 2030s. But that's what we keep running into is I think particularly, I mean like you say in general, tech people have this tendency to look at problems and go, 'We could disrupt that efficiently.'
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I mean, sometimes-
Eric Meyer: You sure that works?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, sometimes I will say that, like I said earlier in the chat that we had, people will continue to debate and refine, and that's a good healthy thing. And sometimes the outcomes of these things that are disrupting, they blow up but there are some good realizations that still wind up coming out of them, and I don't know, it's tricky. It's tricky, and I don't want that to sound the wrong way, but it's always worth us keeping our minds open and reviewing why do these rules exist or why don't rules exist? What's that Alice Boxhall, our colleague is Chesterton's fence, right?
Eric Meyer: Yep. Chesterton's fence.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. Can you tell us what that is?
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I'm probably not going to quote it exactly correctly, but GK Chesterton posited essentially before you should be allowed to tear down a fence, you have to explain why the fence is there, because sometime some fences are just in the way and some fences are keeping the really mad bull in a place where it doesn't gore people, as an example. There are many other reasons why fences might or might not exist. So yeah.
Brian Kardell: I do think it's always worth, you have to understand why the thing exists or doesn't exist before you try to solve the actual problem. Understanding what is the actual problem that you're trying to solve is a good thing.
Eric Meyer: And so, I mean, we have all these problems and Coil tried to create a pool and Brave is creating a pool, and Supertab is talking about creating a pool. But now you have Google coming in and saying, for 95% of the publishers on the web, basically anyone who uses Google Ad Manager, which is a lot of people, in addition to ads, they can now also make people offers like the Washington Post through Offerwall might be able to say, and I'm just picking that off the top of my head because they've been in the news recently, but New York Times or The Guardian or whoever, anyone who's using Google Ad Manager can also put up a, as part of Google Ad Manager, the whole 595 a month gets you access to all of our stuff, or for $1, you can have access to this article for 30 days.
Brian Kardell: Or to our website for-
Eric Meyer: Yeah, whatever.
Brian Kardell: A week.
Eric Meyer: Sure.
Brian Kardell: What I like about that is that it allows experimentation because what if you could just give me 10 cents when you view my article. For some people, that would work just fine. If you have maybe like CSS-Tricks back in the day and it's driving really a lot of traffic, maybe that's fine, but it's actually a lot easier if they're like, we have 500 subscribers that pay this much because we know next month we're going to have 500 subscribers. It's harder to cancel a subscription, but at least currently there aren't any models. So we'll see what works. It might sound really interesting, it might sound really good. And then in practice, for whatever reason, it can't work. But the ability to experiment with a lot of models is, I'm really keen on that.
Eric Meyer: And I mean, Google doing it through Google Ad Manager, Google offering Offerwall essentially solves one of those hurdles. Rather than, okay, everyone's on Google Ad Manager, and then someone else comes up, let's say offerwall.com and some parallel universe had been a third party thing and tried to get everyone who's on Google Ad Manager to sign up with their service. That would be really hard. But Google offering it as part of the service that everyone's using, the whole rolling it out to publishers, getting publishers to use it, the technical part of that is already solved essentially. It's just a question of does a publisher want to use these other ways?
Brian Kardell: Exactly.
Eric Meyer: Rather than showing video ads or banner ads or whatever. And so, then I guess the challenge is how do you then get the money from readers, from users? And if Google is offering to also establish a pool in addition to Supertab users, if Google is also going to manage a pool, which they already do, they take in money from a bunch of people who are placing ads.
Brian Kardell: A little bit.
Eric Meyer: Well, yeah. And then they pay it out.
Brian Kardell: Few trillion.
Eric Meyer: Who show the ads. So to get me, for example, to sign up because The Economist, let's say uses this, and I think to myself, you know what? I would take The Economist's offer of $1 per article that I read, and every time I get one of those, every time I pay for one of those, I have access to it for a month, let's say. I would do that because I don't want to read everything that The Economist, I actually used to have a print subscription to The Economist, and I eventually dropped it because I realized I can't read everything in The Economist. I can't finish it. But to be able to, or The Financial Times or whatever, but I'm just going to use The Economist. Sometimes they have really interesting perspectives on things like American politics or they can tell me things about what's going on in the Chinese economy that I'm not going to probably learn other places. So I might say through whatever, the Offerwall or Supertab or however it works, if The Economist just says, hey, I land on an article and says, 'Hi, Eric, this article is $1 for a month's access.' I would probably click that if I'm already signed up.
Brian Kardell: So it sounds really plain and it has sounded really plain for since Ted Nelson came up with it in the '60s. So why hasn't it worked? Why doesn't it work? Why might it still not work?
Eric Meyer: My take is that the network effects haven't been there and that micro transactions are hard to do given transfer fees. But if I am paying into a pool like they do with Patreon, then those barriers are much lower. I'm not going to say they're zero, because sometimes I'm going to hit an article and be like, 'Hey, you know what? I don't want to pay $1 just to read this. I'm not that into it, or 50 cents or whatever it is.' Or I might say, 'I keep paying $1 for this site, articles on this site. Why am I just not paying five bucks a month to get unlimited access to everything?' I could see the people doing that with 404 Media, for example, which does fantastic work. And at the moment, all you need at 404 Media to get access to all their articles is to become a subscriber. And all it takes to be a subscriber actually is to just give them an email address. But I would, of course, I could probably pay for them now, but I feel like it's easier to get people to decide, you know what? I'm going to pay these people 5 bucks, 10 bucks a month, whatever. After they've already paid for a few micro things, they realize, wait, this is really good. I should just be supporting it for something that will cost me less than I'm already paying them to see what they're doing.
Brian Kardell: Right. So back in 2000, there was some criticism. Clay Shirky wrote a seminal take-down of micropayments. That was one of the things that I would say ended a lot of this stuff. And one of the things that came out, I'm not sure, it's not part of that article, but I connect them in my mind, so I'm pretty sure that he said it, or it was part of the same time that somebody first made this observation, which is one of the real problems with micropayments is that there is friction and micropayments are so low value that they're not worth the friction. So users get annoyed and they just leave, which is true. I mean, if you take me to a site and I read two sentences and then a banner comes up and it's like, you're going to hide this and not let me read, I just leave. If it's a site that I don't subscribe to that I know I'm not going to subscribe to, I just leave. Maybe the question then is, how low can you make the friction where it's worth it for me? And most people want to make it. The values are so low, you don't need any friction, and the observation was, taking your money with zero friction is theft. It's just theft. So there has to be some friction. How do you balance these things? So it's interesting what is the appropriate amount of friction? How do you make sure that you're not paying people you don't want to be paying? Should you have the right to not pay people that you don't want to be paying? And if you can pay for only the things that you're viewing, it does exacerbate some of the attention economy thing that we have right now, which is very divisive politics, extreme views, silly me-me stuff. Whatever is shareable, whatever is going to drive your attention, is going to make just a ton of money and a lot of really important stuff. A lot of really good stuff that needs to be written, that deserves to be written won't be supported or won't be supported enough.And so, you'll have these amazing journalists who can't make a living. So anyway, it's full of interesting challenges and questions to see how it'll play out. I'm excited that it's starting this way, but one thing we didn't talk about is that the web monetization, one of the challenges here is joining the payment, like you said to the person, so you can use, as a publisher, you can use this tab, put it on my tab thing, Supertab, but a user still has to-
Eric Meyer: Sign up for it.
Brian Kardell: ... sign up for an account. The nice thing about that, oh, another thing that can blow this up is you might notice that we've said the really huge thing here that's never happened before maybe is Google Ad Manager, which 95% of publishers use. We've said that a really lot of times you might say that sounds like Monopoly.
Eric Meyer: The Department of Justice did.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. And lots of cases around the world looking to break that up. So that's a boost now for it. But who knows how long that will last or whatever.
Eric Meyer: That's true, but I do feel like that if this concept can take hold through Google Ad Manager through Offerwall basically, that might be enough for it to become more seriously worked on beyond just prototype implementations, which are important, but eventually you need more, but it could be enough to push past the launch part of things and just get the concept going such that maybe then it becomes more of an open protocol where Offerwall is one pool in a network of pools and they can talk to each other in web monetization community group, maybe ideas that come out of there and things that they're proposing eventually become, whether in their current form or in some modified form, the way that those bits can move around without a lot of that, without more than the necessary amount of friction.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I'm just hoping that this news from Google and pushing something new and a bunch of us talking about it, part of the reason that we were talking about it on this show is because after I wrote my piece, they talked about it on Shoptalk show. I thought it was really good episode. But one of the things that got very confusing was web monetization. What does it mean? Because there's capital, there's the proposal. That is something, it does mean something very, very specific currently, and it's not what some of these other things are, which are about web monetization. I think way more people are excited about the concept than any really specific proposal. So I would love it if this gave energy to that as a thing and just drove us to more attempts to answer this question. Anyway, anything else that you want to talk about?
Eric Meyer: No, not really. Just stay tuned for more because this does seem like there's new energy in the space, and so it'd be interesting to see where it goes.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. Okay. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell