Micropayments Won't Replace Ads

Crypto will replace fiat money. But it won't replace ads. 

I'm as excited about the possibilities for crypto as anybody. Replacing fiat money is a massive change to not only how we have understood economics for about a hundred years, but how most people have understood civilization in general for the past few hundred years at least. 

The one facet of crypto that I don't think will become widely used is micropayments in place of ads. Let's take a look first at the purpose of ads and the cycle they complete.

1. Companies want people to buy their products. 

2. They create ads to persuade people to buy their products

3. Companies find media through which to place their ads to get the most people/best fit demographic seeing their ads

4. Those companies pay that medium to run their ads in between other content

5. People watch these ads because they want the surrounding content. 

The ads are really a trade, people begrudgingly sit through ads because they want the content that's going to be withheld if they don't watch it. Instead of paying for content with money, they watch an ad. They're consistently willing to part with 30 seconds of their time like it's nothing. Sure, 30 seconds doesn't seem like much, but think about all the ads you've watched in your life. They add up to a significant amount of time that you could have spent at work or doing something productive, right?

Unfortunately, this isn't how time works. You can't save it up a little at a time and then cash it in, but you can with money. Time needs to be spent immediately or it's wasted. Time is a fluid commodity, whereas others are static. You can sell any amount of gold for the same rate no matter if it's 1 gram or 1 ton. Time necessarily needs to be cut into pieces of a certain length to be productive with it. 

0.0000001 seconds has no value to anybody. Time only has value once it's hit a certain point. There's a threshold for which time becomes something you can actually use. This threshold changes for different people performing different tasks at different times on different days, but it always exists.

This threshold does not exist for money. It can always be valuable in certain denominations and so instead of spending it, people will save it and the small amounts come together and turn into large amounts. 

This is exactly the reason micropayments won't widely replace ads. People value small amounts of money more than small amounts of time. Time cannot be saved. Its value decreases over time, in fact it goes to 0 immediately if it's left unused.

Certain crypto sites are utilizing the fact that transaction fees are basically 0 for many altcoins to replace ads. For example, yours.org lets people publish content and show a preview, but the whole article is hidden behind a paywall. More people would be viewing this content if there was an ad before it instead of a paywall. I think yours.org is working and will continue to because of the other features it has such as tipping for good content. I also think there may be a niche market of people that actually do value that small amount of time more than they value 25 cents, and your.org and others like it are a perfect place for them to consume content.

Value is subjective, so of course if you don't personally value that 25 cents more than 25 seconds of your time, then obviously you're going to take that deal happily. My point is simply that this is not the prevalent view, that most people would rather sit through the commercial and keep the quarter.