Maybe we could start with a scheduled community call on the topic? Who would be interested in participating? @JollyOrc and @erik_lonroth, could that work for you as a first / second step? @inge would you be up for joining as well?
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I’m up for that!
Great! Which times usually work for you?
I work in a home office and am europe-based, so anything that isn’t in the night can probably be accommodated, given enough heads-up.
Thursday and Friday this week are booked though.
love to take part! I’m Tbilisi-based, so that’s two hours ahead of Brussels. Flexible time and day wise, except for Monday afternoons and Thursday mornings.
Mornings for me are afternoons for you. Right now when it is 4 PM in Brussels it is 7 Am in California. That is pretty much the earliest realistic time for me on a given day. We tend to have other calls on Mondays and Tuesday so other days would be best.
So lets start planning:
- What should be the specific topic of the call? My proposal: *What could be done about the Ad-based internet economy with emphasis on the news" or “Any news @ ad-based economy?” feel free to specify and propose your own spin on it.
- Who is free when? Fill out the doodle doc here: https://doodle.com/poll/6q3zg9c34hstu6cu
- Who would be up to/who would you like to take the topical lead during the call?
Also, see this post for general planning for community calls:
looking forward to talking to you 
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@inge thank you so much for filling out the google form already, but when I checked it out I recognized that I set it up wrong. The time slots were supposed to be 1 hour slots between 16:00 and 19:00. Here is the updated link: Expired Group Poll - Create a New Poll or Contact the Owner I will also change it in the original post. If you could input your times again, that would be amazing!
Done 
Guys dont forget to put up an event invitation that we can then share with broader community…
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tho there isn’t a date and time set, isn’t it better to push this when we have a concrete plan? Or should we have an event invitation already up earlier so other community members can give their input in doodle as well?
Do you guys think we should push it back two weeks or such to invite more people or go ahead to get things going?
I think we should go ahead if we can get good people. If it’s too far ahead people also may forget about it. what do you think?
things move fast around here
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Hello, dear community members,
we are planning the next coming up community call.
What could be done about the Ad-based internet economy with emphasis on the news? An (almost) face to face discussion extending this discussion.
It will take place on Tuesday the 18th of June from 18:00 to 19:00 Brussels time on zoom
If you are interested:
- Feel free to specify and propose your own spin on it before and during the call.
- Invite whoever you think might be interested from within and outside the platform.
- Tell us if you would you like to take some of the topical lead during the call? Who would maybe prepare some questions or a case study/project to present to others?
Please comment here if you are interested and @ the people you think might be interested
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I should be able to be there. Will you post the zoom link here?
Yes
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Edgeryders Team is inviting you to a community call:
Topic: Any news @ ad-based economy
Time: Jun 18, 2019 6:00 PM Brussels
Join Zoom Meeting
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Hey folks
New here and just stumbled over this very interesting thread.
I have been thinking for a couple of year about a way that the ad business, and revenue models for content production and curation needs to change. (And actively working in a direction that it will change)
IMO all existing approaches don’t work for their own reasons. What they share is that they are coming from an old thinking where we translate how print worked into the digital age.
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Ads.
Obvious why they don’t work. They put an incentive on quantity of content and shallow clicks, they drive the spread of emotional (mis)information instead of wisdom and useful information.
However we need to be aware that ads will always be around as they are a tool for the market to optimise distribution by making consumers aware of products and services. The question is if that stays the main income source of online outlets.
The good thing is that ads bring in money that neither the publisher, nor the consumer has to pay for. -
Subscription models
They are a good start and it helped to validate that people are willing to pay for quality content. What makes the subscription model good is that it frees content providers from the necessity of optimising for clicks, but may be able to focus on producing quality content again.
However they effectively create a 2 tier consumer society where some people just won’t have access to this information. In my view it working somewhat against the purpose of journalism: to inform people.
From a user perspective they are also horrible. Most readers are not reading content from just one provider, so buying a subscription from every of their sources is a decision making overkill and frankly too time consuming. Paid news aggregators only ease that problem, they don’t solve it. What about all those little websites that are not big household names like the nytimes? How are they going to be funded if they are not included in something like Apple News or Blendl? -
Micropayment Services
The really good thing was that a user can determine for themselves how much worth their media consumption overall is and distribute the funds to any provider, big and small. This make an approach inclusive to many different types of contributions and potential income to smaller bloggers too. A student might just be able to pay 5 bucks, a CEO 200 and so forth.
However approaches like Flattr didn’t work because the service required to find an audience that values journalism enough to sign up for such a new service. From a UX perspective practically unusable as it required users to manually press a button for each article they want to pay. Big decision paralysis and frankly too much effort.
So how could a new approach look like?
I think the inclusivity and user-centric flexibility of something like Flattr is the biggest step in the right direction I have seen so far. We’ve seen people like to pay, but we need to solve the UX issues that users have to decide who to give the money to.
This needs to happen automatically.
The question is how?
For doing so it would require having extensive data that can help to determine the usefulness/quality of content people see, and such a solution needs to be baked into another value proposition. It can’t be a standalone service like Flattr.
One of the outputs of the project we run is to provide that data and that service to build on.
At worldbrain we develop Memex, an open source tool to search your web history, annotate and collaborate with peers when doing web research. So you can search for websites, papers and social posts you’ve seen with the vague memories you have. Like “that article I visited last January with the words “climate change” in the text, it was on the nytimes.”
To make search possible the tool gathers data about how users interact with content. (e.g. how long did they stay, how far they scrolled, if shared/liked on social media, sent via email/messenger with (positive) sentiment)
All data is stored locally of course and no data will ever be sent anywhere without user consent.
Soon we will provide an API on which developers and entrepreneurs could build new tools with that data.
One of those could be a plugin that detects the the subjectively most useful content based on interaction data and automatically distributes the funds a user has allocated for their media consumption. This would IMO view solve the UX issues associated with current approaches to micropayments.
Brave has also been going into that direction and it seems to work pretty well. They still combine it with ads though, which is an OK step in-between but hopefully ads will not play such a big role anymore or the market has adjusted to only wanting to run ads on useful content.
For more information on Memex, check out this post: Introducing Oliver, WorldBrain.io, Memex and Storex, Democratising Knowledge
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