Right now, if you do a Google search for a product like an iPhone, above the link to Apple.com you will see ads to purchase a phone. Those ads are how Google makes its money.

Meanwhile, if the search you are doing isn’t a product, but an idea or concept, then those ads aren’t always about selling something, but rather about sharing content… and that content is usually surrounded by advertising. That’s how a website gets you to look at ads on their page, how they get advertisers to pay them for views and clicks on their pages. This race for your attention is not free, and what you see on the internet, at the top of searches, and on websites next to, above and below, the content you want to see is the price we all pay… the price of our attention.

I think that there is going to be a social media platform that will show up in the next few years that is going to figure out micropayments as a means to share ad-free content. Want to see a news article with no ads? Pay 1/10th of a cent. Find a great article you really enjoyed? Give them a hand clap or two (applause of some sort), each worth 1/10th of a cent. If you really like it, you can share 10 X of your applause… or a whole penny. Enjoying some art shared or creative writing? You decide how much applause to give.

You’ll have people not paying much, but others will be generous. And along with this will come a culture of disliking sites that embed advertising. We will see a lot more ad-free content. News sites might insist on a micropayment. The challenge is how to get people to ‘buy in’ to paying rather than seeing ads. I think this will happen with a social media platform that does 2 things:

1. Charges about $10 to join.

2. Gives you 9,500 ‘points’ to give away. (10,000 times 1/10 of a cent minus a 50 cent or 500 point fee.)

Basically, you will be given the points to give away through applause for websites you like. Because these points will be called something fun besides 1/10th of a cent, and because you get so many of them, you’ll think nothing of sharing a few of them on content you like. When you run low on them, you can purchase another $5, $10, or $20 more, but with a decreasing commission:

$5 gets you 4,250 points

$10 gets you 9,500 points

$20 gets you 19,700 points

The sweet spot will be $10, which isn’t a lot of money if the points last the typical person more than a month.

Some people will use their points miserly, others will spend over $20 a month. Overall, an economy of paying, or rather ‘applauding’ content that is shred ad-free will become something people are happy to do.

It will be interesting to see how micropayments will influence the content that is shared. Will we see sites begging for applause? Viral videos earning more money than advertising could ever get them? Sites donating their applause to charity? There are many ways this format could go, but I think one thing you will see is a genuine hate for websites that share ads embedded in content… and I’m looking forward to this!