[nucleative]

This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.

I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.

[junto]

Back in the late 90’s we were at a tipping point of how to monetize the world wide web. It turned out that selling advertising was way easier than figuring out micropayments. Advertising turned into a billions of dollar business. Facebook then turned the World Wide Web into a snooping platform. We then moved into a global propaganda engine on a mass scale.

I wonder if micropayments had been solved before taking the easy route, we would have been in a much more healthy global scenario today.

[Razengan]

What if people could choose to donate their devices' computing power in return for some Netcoin or whatever?

[immibis]

You can do this. Several services pay you real money (not much) in exchange for letting AI scrapers use you as a proxy. It's completely legal (AFAIK).