I had high hopes for Brave Browser and BAT as a way to be able to easily fund content, but it hasn't really panned out. The idea is browser integration of micropayments, with a button in the browser enabling you to pay for content via tips or recurring payments.
It's a catch-22 for a lot of content, if they ask for a subscription it needs to be enough to be worth their while (payment processing costs, overhead), but also needs to cover typical use. There are so many sites that have ones-and-twos of content I'd use, but want a $10/mo subscription or $30-50/year. It's hard as a casual consumer to justify that. But they also have to cover the serious consumer who finds value in all their content.
Want to play? Insert coin. We need payments-hardware integrated to our computers
Today that is not possible. Visa and Mastercard want to play world police so they set rules and regulations about what is allowed to be paid. Even if BAT tries to solve this, people still have to onboard their money somewhere , again via visa+MC
Arcades had transaction costs too. They sold quarters in blocks. You couldn't just buy 1 at a time. Which is precisely how MC/Visa operate. Big players like Apple can sell songs for $1 because they pay for a minimum level of payment processing so their unit cost is less than the 2.9% + 30c or whatever the standard charge is.
Because nobody actually wants to 'solve' it. They just want to topple Visa and Mastercard and take their margins, preferably without following any of the numerous consumer regulations those companies abide by.
Cash is perfect because there is no profit motive behind it. It doesn't cost you any more to take a $1 transaction than it does a $100 one. And that is something tech companies won't have any interest in.
Flattr 2.0 has introduced an alternative that starts with a set monthly payment and splits it to all the (sub)websites you wish to fund.
And compatible with all browsers taking extensions, and 2 years before Brave, but it still requires client-side tracking and monthly upload of aggregated data :
The 402 response needs to be properly implemented. But, to do this expeditiously, we need people wanting to move away from advertising revenue for their content.
I've consistently posted here about Aperture, Lightning Network's reverse proxy service that implements 402s via Lightning. With support from major browsers, this would provide a means for all different types of services and content providers to easily monetize their sites.
Because most people that seem to try are trying to crack the relatively easy part, which is the actual payment. If all that you needed to do was have a small amount of money go from a site visitor to a site operator with nothing else affected or involved or triggered it would not be hard.
The hard part is running an international business, and that is what a web site that accepts micro payments (or macro payments) is the moment someone from another country pays for its content.
When a site visitor pays a site operator, regardless of whether it is a micro payment or a macro payment, and regardless of the mechanism used, that transaction might:
1. be subject to sales tax or VAT by the visitor's government, the operator's government, or both,
2. be subject to tariffs or duties if the operator and visitor are in different countries,
3. be subject to reporting requirements or other paperwork due to sanctions if it is between countries,
and probably many more I'm forgetting.
Even if you just sell in one country it can get annoying. In the US sales tax when you sell to someone in a different state is due in the buyer's state, but the seller has to collect it. There are thresholds below which there is no tax, but unfortunately many of them are of the form N transactions or X dollars, with N around 100. If 100 people in such a state do a $0.01 micro-payment on your site that's $1 of revenue but you have to collect and report sales tax and it is probably going to cost you more than $1 to deal with.
To avoid all this what you can do is to have an intermediary between the site and the visitor with that intermediary being the seller that they buyer deals with. In other words, a store that carries the content from many sites.
The site is then just selling to one entity, the store, so at most had to deal with keeping two governments happy (its own and the one of the country the store is in). The store deals with all those issues of selling to people in hundreds of different jurisdictions.
Notice with the store model you don't actually need micro payments for the visitors. I think most people would be OK with a model where they could buy credits in multiples of some small but not micro amount, say $1 or $5, and then use this credits to buy content from site for micro amounts. And the store doesn't really need micro payments for the sites, because the store is aggregating all of the payments to the site. It can wait until the site accumulates enough for a macro payment.
But there would still be a role for micro payments in this model. With the macro payment for credits approach the visitor has to have an account at the store. If there were too many stores you might need accounts at dozens of stores to cover all the sites you are interested in. Ugh.
With micro payments to the stores you could probably get rid of the account requirement.
Brave is failing at enabling Micro-payments because they are blocking ads and serving their own. Why would any serious publication use them as a paywall?
It's a catch-22 for a lot of content, if they ask for a subscription it needs to be enough to be worth their while (payment processing costs, overhead), but also needs to cover typical use. There are so many sites that have ones-and-twos of content I'd use, but want a $10/mo subscription or $30-50/year. It's hard as a casual consumer to justify that. But they also have to cover the serious consumer who finds value in all their content.
Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?