Medium

Medium has managed to get rid of ads completely while still allowing ideas shared on its platform to be freely accessible. The Medium model enables all content on the platform to be viewed by anyone but limits the number of premium articles for non-paying registered customers to 3 a month. For users who pay the $5 monthly subscription, they will have unlimited access to all premium articles plus a few extra perks such as audio-narration and offline reading.

One vital thing Medium has done in empowering the content creators is giving them the ability to decide which of their content is considered premium with creators only getting paid for premium content. In terms of how the creators get paid, the $5 subscription fee is distributed proportionally at the end of the month based upon the reading time and number of applause (Medium’s own voting mechanism) a user gives to all premium articles they have interacted with for that month.

The Medium model manages to balance the need for content to be freely accessible while also enabling creators to get paid. This being said, there are also a few issues with this model. Key amongst this is that a paywall still exists with articles on the platform being split between premium and public articles. Given that the only revenue stream which Medium has is through its subscribers, it is understandable why this needs to be done but it comes at the cost of ideas being siloed. As such, there is a fine balance to be had for displaying premium and public content to non-paying members. For those that don’t want to pay or who struggle to pay, they must consciously choose the premium articles they want to see.

Related to the monetisation of premium content, another challenge is that creators only get paid for content which they deem as premium. Putting aside the fact that it is very difficult to determine which of the articles will go viral, this model requires the the creator to decide on the tradeoffs between monetising their content or gaining more exposure by releasing it for free. Ideally, monetisation and exposure should go hand-in-hand as creators should be rewarded if the knowledge shared for them is of value to readers.

One major challenge for Medium as an idea sharing platform is that anonymous participation is not possible given that the payment channels powering it are only credit cards or PayPal, both of which will effectively link the account with a user’s identity. It is still possible to participate with an anonymous e-mail account but such users will not be able to give or receive any monetary payments. Given that Medium is a single platform, this also means that the platform is susceptible to censorship as seen in Medium being banned in China and previously also in countries such as Malaysia. Censorship resistance will be key to the future of the internet if ideas and discourse is to be encouraged.

Brave

Brave takes a rather innovative step towards providing users with more control over their data and how they choose to fund their favorite creators. Brave aims to monetize publisher content while protecting user privacy. To do this, they have rolled out the Brave browser and the accompanying Basic Attention Token (BAT).

The Brave browser acts as a gateway to the internet for users, much like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge (Internet Explorer). For a user on the Brave browser, the experience of navigating the internet will still be largely the same albeit much faster, secure and private as the browser automatically blocks third-party ads and trackers.

The biggest innovation that Brave brings to the table is that users will not have to change their web-browsing behavior and are even incentivised to switch to the Brave browser, all of this while protecting user data and driving efficiencies in the ad marketplace. This is achieved via the Brave browser which privately monitors user intent at the browser level and encrypts this data to be stored on the device only. The browser tracks engagement via various algorithms which calculates the amount of time an ad on an active tab is in view. In-device machine learning will match relevant ads while companies will be able to buy ad space via a decentralized ad marketplace.

Additionally, these micro-transactions are made more efficient via the Basic Attention Token (BAT), an ERC-20 token. By buying an ad-space, advertisers deposit BAT into a locked state which only opens when a user views the ad thereby allowing money from that account to be distributed to Brave, the publisher and also the users’ wallets. As such, BAT is effectively a monetary valuation of a user’s attention.

Key to Brave’s success is that their revenue streams are not just limited to ads as BAT empowers creative content by enabling users to indirectly contribute towards their favorite creators. User’s of the platform have the option of setting aside a monthly contribution amount which is divided proportionally among the registered Brave publisher sites they engage with the most for that month. This evens out the playing field as content creators do not have to be locked into the pay-per-impression cycle.

A possible pain point in this design is that for content creators, they will have to register with Brave as a publisher hence Brave still has the power of verification and censorship. Moreover, as it stands now, the in-browser Brave wallet is currently only unidirectional with future updates for multi-directional transfers requiring know-your-customers procedures. This being said, the Brave infrastructure is open-sourced and Brave as a whole have been very transparent with their team and direction. Brave is planning to move towards a fully distributed micro-payment system in the future and this is exciting as creators will have access to more revenue streams.

Steemit

Steemit is a social media platform where everyone gets paid for creating and curating content. Steemit flips the conventional value exchange system on its head by getting the community to pay creators for content which the community as a whole deems valuable. This is made possible through a relatively complex platform architecture which is powered at its core by STEEM tokens.

Without getting too much into the technical details, users are able to upvote or downvote content on the platform and the distribution of these votes will determine how the rewards pool is distributed to the creators and the promoters of content. The users influence on the distribution is directly proportional to the amount of STEEM tokens they have vested in the network. The rewards pool is not created out of thin air but rather is the result of users vesting their STEEM tokens in the network. At a simplified level, this rewards pool can thought of as a portion of the interest generated by the network once all interest payments have been paid to individual users who vested their tokens (for those familiar with blockchain, this is basically the block reward). As such, when a user upvotes a post, it is the community that pays the bill.

As groundbreaking as this innovation is, it also comes with some drawbacks. Chief among them is centralization risks as a users’ voting power is directly proportional to the mount of STEEM they have vested in the network. As such, larger holders of STEEM are able to disproportionately influence the public discourse as their votes will have a significant effect on what content is promoted or hidden from sight. There is a lot of discussion around this but it is a problem which is solvable through limits or power delegation. Steem themselves are trying to make distribution fairer via delegation of votes.

Additionally, Steemit faces the problem that this ecosystem is only accessible through a single platform. As such, it requires users to buy into the network although there is an option of signing up anonymously. Nonetheless, this will be a significant barrier to adoption for many users as not only is there resistance to change but the content itself is limited to the Steemit platform.

Lessons from Medium, Brave and Steemit

Key to all of the companies explored above (save for non-paying users in Medium) is that the users do not have to make a payment decision on a per-interaction basis. As such, the user is able to freely navigate the platform/web without having to worry about incurring additional costs. This is vital to the future of the internet as it is not necessarily the monetary costs which users will worry about but rather the uncertainty that accompanies deciding whether a site is worth paying for.

Moreover, through distributing resources via the various voting mechanisms, the incentive is for the community to continue creating engaging content which is valued by the community as a whole. This subjectivity in what constitutes value in the network will enable the ecosystem to continue growing.