This post will explain briefly how cryptocurrencies can save content creators from people that use ad blockers.
Content creators are having a lot of problems nowadays because they mostly get reveneue through advertisement but more and more people are starting to use ad blockers. Currently more than 600 million people use ad blockers.
To make matters worse, there are a lot of 3rd parties in the advertisement industry that suck money from publishers and advertisers.
There are currently two solutions that I know of and another one coming up that is supposed to be used in the porn industry.
I read a post on a Facebook group that I'm in regarding how can Vice make money if they actually pay users to watch porn?
The answer to that question is the attention economy and blockchain based digital advertisement.
How can I actually be paid for using websites? Or using specific apps on my phone or even watching porn? How can publishers make money if they're paying me?
One solution for the web is the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The solution for Android is AppCoins (APPC) and for the porn industry is Vice Industry Token (VIT). I assume Vice could also use BAT but lets not worry about that now.
Right now I'm using the Brave browser. This browser has ad blocking features integrated so I never see ads anywhere. I was previously using Chrome and lately the new super fast version of Firefox, both with ad blockers for the past five years. I am conscious that using ad blockers hurts the publishers but YouTube in Germany has so many ads that it's "unusable." You almost want to throw your laptop out of the window. Actually, only after moving to Germany five years ago is when I installed an ad blocker for the first time because I was getting twenty to thirty second ads without skip all the time! It was so annoying that I simply couldn't use YouTube after one week.
So how does Brave solve this problem?
Brave has the attention economy built in and it tracks the attention that you give to websites. It also has BAT integrated and a dedicated tab to the Payments where you can decide to which websites to contribute the BAT tokens.
This assumes that you're willing to pay to not have ads. Which I am. So I bought some BATs, which I actually had bought before using Brave and I transferred some from Bittrex to my BAT wallet on my browser. That way, every month, all my BATs are distributed among the websites I use and the share of tokens each publisher gets depends on the attention I've given to each website. All of this is done automatically by the Brave browser.
But how can I get paid?
If you don't mind ads, you can see them and you'll get BAT tokens from the advertisers. In turn, these tokens that you get can be used to reward publishers or to buy premium content from them.
How about getting paid to watch porn?
Even without having read the Vice whitepaper I assume they follow the same attention economy concept.
I will read it and probably write another post about it but here is how it probably works if they follow the same concept.
You get paid in VIT if you agree to pay attention to ads (probably you would have to click them since most online advertisement nowadays is Pay-per-click (PPC). Publishers are also paid in VIT tokens which they can pay users for giving attention to the content on the website. So us, end-users would get paid by both the publishers and the advertisers. These tokens would also be used to purchase premium porn content from those publishers.
I hope this post helped you to understand a bit of how the attention economy works.