Decrypt has a new strategy to create a unifying ecosystem that both incentivizes readers, but also connect advertisers to the audience. Distributed tokens can be exchanged for gift cards on sites such as Amazon, AirBnB and several other online stores.
The Challenge
There are a number of niche media in blockchain and cryptocurrency, and Decrypt is a significant player in this sector. According to Decrypt, the news service wants to simplify complicated issues so that everyone can understand the content. They aim for a mass market and strike for the widest possible reader base.
The media industry has been under great deal of pressure, now that consumer habits have become digital. It cost a lot to stop printing papers, where they got direct revenue, and rather to make money from digital ads on readers online. The latest innovation is digital subscriptions. Read as much as you want, for a couple dollars a month. The problem is that almost everyone has a limit on how many subscriptions they want to have running. This prevents new players from turning up and creates a narrower market for the established players.
The Solution
Experts have pointed to micro-payments of individual items, but here the media has held back. The reason is that they do not want to compete on individual articles, but rather lock readers into their universe. In addition, the infrastructure with today’s payment services has been too expensive to charge, for example 10 cents for an article. This is about to change.
The Basic Attention Token is a project, where advertisers’ reward publishers and readers. The BAT token can be traded on many of the major crypto exchanges, and was launched to support the BAT platform closely linked to the Brave browser. If you surf the web through Brave, you automatically get paid for attention and dedication, as do the websites that manage to engage you. Advertisers pay with BAT tokens to promote their message.
Conclusion
The consequences of moving towards open earnings models, where micro-payments and reward tokens are the mainstays, will be that the old media houses are going to continue to suffer further. They will pay for celebrity journalists who sell articles, and take less risk with unfamiliar topics and staff. Suddenly, influencers from the blog world are getting a new arena.
The media industry has been ever-changing since computers and smartphones became public domain. Many media companies have cut down the workforce and adapted to a digital everyday life, but the attempts so far have largely been to preserve something within new frameworks rather than cutting-edge innovation.
Decrypt and other blockchain projects take one step further than the traditional media industry as they now connect advertisers closer to the reader by introducing direct payments and various ‘reward tokens’.