All it would take would be a platform that handles the payment and supplies a tracking pixel. Websites could join and become part of it. At the moment, every single publisher has their own payment solution. If I want to read one local article from Houston today and one from Tokyo tomorrow, I won’t join two payment plans. I want them to be paid automatically, like when I play a song on Spotify or watch a video on YouTube. Just a decent amount of money instead of paying mostly middlemen.

Unpopular opinion: The missing business model for websites is killing the web. If there was a platform that would distribute a monthly fee to the websites we visit, the web would be much better.

50% could be allocated through traffic, 50% by choice. I could pay 20€ a month for example. Some would go to lemmy, some to my local newspaper, some to my favorite YouTube channels, authors or bloggers.

If enough people did this, investigative journalism would be funded, product testers wouldn’t be reliant on sponsoring and hobbyists could gain serious funding without selling out.

I’d love to have people move over to other apps. But here in Germany it’s nearly impossible to have a messenger group on any other app than WhatsApp. Everybody is on there. For every other app there will be someone not having it installed. It doesn’t matter if 80% are on Signal, 80% in Threema and 80% on Telegram. 100% are on Whatsapp and that’s what the group will be using.