Content based businesses are exploring the possibility of including bitcoin paywall on their website as part of their revenue model in lieu of advertisements. Users will have to pay a small amount in bitcoin to access the content which will be free from advertisements.
Content monetization and advertising is a major revenue source for many content creators. Browsing through the internet one can come across a lot of sites that offer required information for free while sustaining themselves with advertisements and other sponsored stories. Content monetization has been there since the day blogging caught up with the internet generation.
There are few tried and tested revenue generation models available for online content businesses. They include on-site advertising, sponsored contact, emailers etc. Advertising is usually responsible for generating a large portion of revenue. Sometimes few websites and applications tend to go overboard with advertising material which will end up affecting the user’s/reader’s experience on the site. In order to avoid it, users are increasingly using software like ad-blocker on their browsers, which blocks ad-banners and pop-ups from being displayed while the user is navigating on any of the webpages containing ad content.
These ad-blocking software were so far confined only to desktop browsers, but not anymore as nowadays there are applications available for smartphones that allows users to block entire websites itself from being displayed on their phone. Apple’s recent iOS 9 allows developers to build applications that can lock certain content from being displayed on the mobile device either inside an application or on mobile’s browser.
There are such apps already made available on Apple app store. Discontent is one such content blocker application available at a price of $0.99. Apart from blocking advertisements, Discontent also allows users to completely block certain web content or posts from appearing on the browser or inside the application.
Applications like Discontent can be detrimental to many content based businesses as a wide scale adoption of such apps will prevent companies from monetizing their website through advertisements. The alternative for content platforms is to have a separate stream of revenue and bitcoin seems to be a preferred payment option for content monetization as bitcoin supports microtransactions with negligible transaction costs.
Image source: Ethical Hedonist