I don’t doubt there will be one, or more even, SMTs catering to authors. The real question is how will the curation model stand up long term.

What with ever more SP used every day for other content creation models. What will be the value of tokens for that type of SMTs if they tokenize.

Fact is that Medium, despite high quality content, struggles financially. WattPad’s valuation isn’t too stellar either.

Now I think there are options and I discussed a possibility here.

Generally though, unless going for a “serialization” model, fiction and even journalism require a certain degree of “transaction” to become viable models. For fiction more often than not that’s the completed work. For journalism that’s since decades already advertising. Other than that, and so would be the delegation, it’s very much a philanthropist venue.

I’m curious whether blockchain can break the failure of micro-payments. When I published online while in Germany (more than a decade ago) it was coming to see micro-payment gatewalls on older content in the archives. On all but the biggest hits in Google, obviously.

That model never scaled internationally but it definitely is the pitch that blockchain gives. Yet, BAT (in Brave browser) and before that Flattr never became runaway successes either.

Reality: only the best and those with volume can risk a paywall. The Patreon model doesn’t work for small, indie publishers. Not unless they have large enough scale to be satisfied with it a conversion rate of 5% only and can design their own membership program.