Clearly use case for Lightning. Did anyone try to do implement this and convince some of the bigger publishers to enable it?
Getmash currently is working on this.
Way back in 2020 we attempted this with Satotious(now defunct). It was a paywall which would let the users choose between viewing an ad or paying with lightning. The issues we hit were:
  1. Lightning was super new back then, no easy on/off ramps. -- better now with big exchanges doing lightning (kraken, binance)
  2. My assumption was that users may not want to pay for things, actually they were cool with paying and it was the publishers who didn't want Bitcoin.
  3. Big publishers who use paywalls( like wsj, New York times etc) are really conservative. Adding a pay per article might reduce their membership numbers.
  4. Big publishers who relied on ads were scared of losing users if they added a paywall.
  5. Small/new publishers(think hobbyist blog) were trying to grow into big publishers, adding a paywall was too much user friction for too little benefit (they might earn a small amount but would not get many users and grow)
I still think micro payments is way better than ads(in a way ads are micropayments). Hopefully with more lightning adoption, we will have a web with less ads and tracking!
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Very insightful response. Thank for sharing your learnings!
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I don’t think any big publishers have tried it yet because it’s too hard to get normies on board without better in-built Lightning support on browsers or mobile OSes. Plugins just won’t cut it when it comes to user uptake.
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Bitcoin magazine does this already
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He's had a bunch of bitcoiners on his podcast. I guess he still hasn't looked into bitcoin
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It's more complicated. He wants to access the articles on NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc -- looking into Bitcoin won't solve it for him.
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