Welcome to a literal marketplace of ideas
Payper is a social experiment that enables writers to charge for a-la-carte content, and readers to consume great longform writing, for tiny amounts of money.
The mission
The goal of this experiment is to reward writers for producing great work, and to encourage readers to pay for it: in other words, to be a literal marketplace of ideas.
The Internet has enabled every participant of the creator economy to be in direct control of their livelihood — artists specifically have benefited greatly by the disruption of art-to-audience supply chains that the Internet caused (see: YouTube, iTunes, Substack). Writers specifically have the most to gain from this disruption. The atomic unit of writing — a blog post, article, or book chapter — is extremely low-cost compared to music, video or games, and often requires no middleman to bring to market. Despite these disruptions, art-to-audience supply chain participants like publishing houses and news outlets continue to misprice the value that their writers produce.
The recent democratization of publishing tech is changing this status quo. Many high-reputation writers are going independent, earning a living under their own subscription model — while others are earning their own reputation from scratch. This is a very promising trend, but it still mis-prices the writers' work. We believe writers, like musicians and box office studios, should be compensated proportionally with the value they produce — i.e., pay per reach. If that model becomes the norm, writers will be compensated even more — and more importantly, even more fairly.
We believe that the consumption of all content online is ultimately a two-sided marketplace for attention. Much of this consumption is monetized directly (i.e., by the consumer), but more still is ad-subsidized. The attention economy thrives on distraction, clickbait, and mindlessness — how can that be?
The clearest answer for this is in the supply and demand curves for attention. In theory, all content has a price that you would or wouldn't consume it at. If that price was explicit, the conscious decision to consume or not is easy. (Would you buy this song on iTunes for $1.00? ... would you read this tweet for $0.05?) But when the price is zero, something weird happens — users begin to consume what they do not demand. The only way to fix this, optimistically, is by simply slapping a price on everything.
The goal here is to, more than anything, increase visibility of the pay-per-reach business model, leading by example and eventually encouraging more and more content to be monetized in proportion to its value.
If that sounds interesting to you: sign up! And if you have questions, check out the FAQ.