Absolutely. Positively. This was one of the driving arguments behind Gilder's Life After Google: "a ridiculous number of subscriptions" is an excellent blockchain application. Let's say I'm browsing with Mist and I've got it loaded up with 1 ETH. In order to browse pages I need to pay fees - positive or negative. eBay might find it effective to pay me a tenth of a cent for every page I click on - they might not. The New York Times might find it effective to hit me for 25 cents a day every time I land on one of their pages and then maybe a tenth of a cent for every article beyond that. Obviously my prices are actually in szabos or gwei or brindlestiffs or whatever we measure fractional cryptocurrency in but a conversion factor to realpeoplemoney is only a couple more lines of code and for now realpeoplemoney is how we operate. I could set my browser to: - automatically pay any site fee of .01 penny or less - require approval for any site fee of 1 penny or more - warn me if I try to browse to any site on a blacklist I subscribe to (for 5 cents a month) - automatically allow me on any site that is a member of EthicsNet, the certification platform that controls for malware and clickbait ...and so long as all my browsing is connected to that wallet all the rules apply. At that point blockchain basically becomes "cookies" except since I'm the direct investor rather than the target of investment, the content becomes arrayed to suit my wants and needs rather than that of the people paying for my eyeballs. For that matter I could pay Mother Jones 50 cents a month to let me onto their content network and let them curate for me. They could try out new sources of content and allow them onto their network for negotiated prices and then I could maybe score a discount for allowing these un-vetted sources access to my eyeballs. Robert Mercer could give out 50 cents to anybody who spends ten minutes on InfoWars. Bias doesn't go away but the perversion of incentives does. If I'm willing to spend $15 a month on journalism I'm going to get better journalism. Maybe George Soros gives out journalism grants to spend on anything you want while Sheldon Adelson gives out journalism grants to certain websites. Will the public start to smell a rat? Pay for the CPB with a subsidy. Pay for The National Enquirer with NRA money. Pay a penny a month for a funding tracer so you know who's behind your journalism. Everybody gets paid, everybody can throw money in the pool and it becomes direct rather than tangential.
... and then I find out what Chrome and Safari's default "automatically pay" amount is and request an empty file that costs that much every random() seconds on my clickbait site, which exists under many identities that I retire when they start getting added to blacklists. And the arms race continues, only instead of picking advertisers' pockets we're picking everyone's.
Absolutely. The difference is, if I'm an advertiser and I'm paying in CPM, I'm not paying attention to individual users. If someone is scamming me for .01% of my content I call that "breakage" and move on. But if I'm getting scammed I'm getting scammed and I care a lot more. It's the difference between being shoplifted and being pickpocketed. Shoplifters target your business. Pickpockets target you. It's the degree of remove that allows most of this to go on and getting rid of that degree simplifies things. The other thing to keep in mind is that if I'm the New York Times, I probably have no interest or reason to allow you on my site. You can't inject code. And if I've given money to a site that has allowed you to inject code in the past, I'm that much less likely to give money to that site in the future. What kind of nightclub are you running? The kind where you can get a drink and call a cab and be fine or the kind where you have to keep your hand over your drink because the GHB flows freely? There are probably reasons for both clubs to exist but if you try to be one while actually being the other you'll lose your clientele quickly. Right now it's all free and it's all supported by ads; as soon as users become the market instead of the marketplace users end up voting more.