Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Project Development => Topic started by: Stegobit on January 26, 2018, 04:30:19 AM



Title: URL shortener with paywall
Post by: Stegobit on January 26, 2018, 04:30:19 AM
I cannot assure it's an original idea, but I haven't found anything similar with Google.

Let's imagine you have created an original blog post or video and want to monetize it. You publish it on your blog and enter its URL into paywall shortener, as well as specify your Bitcoin address and amount that you want to charge from every user who want to click your link. When someone clicks this link, he will be sent to the payment page and after making a payment redirected to the original URL. Link creator  will immediately receive this payment.

I think this business model will become viable using Lightning Network, as well as help promotion of the LN itself.


Title: Re: URL shortener with paywall
Post by: nc50lc on January 26, 2018, 05:51:16 AM
No one wants to do the hassle just to open a page or article, that's why the options to monetize like Page Ads or Video Ads exist.
Lightning Network is fast but the hub model is not convenient for those type of services.
We got a lot of traditional fast payment options and yet no one ever successfully deviced a similar scheme.

Google's URL shorteners works not for monetization but really for "shortening" long URLs, along with their shady tracking business.


Title: Re: URL shortener with paywall
Post by: davis196 on January 26, 2018, 07:31:06 AM
I cannot assure it's an original idea, but I haven't found anything similar with Google.

Let's imagine you have created an original blog post or video and want to monetize it. You publish it on your blog and enter its URL into paywall shortener, as well as specify your Bitcoin address and amount that you want to charge from every user who want to click your link. When someone clicks this link, he will be sent to the payment page and after making a payment redirected to the original URL. Link creator  will immediately receive this payment.

I think this business model will become viable using Lightning Network, as well as help promotion of the LN itself.

The service you are describing is called a content locker and it`s one of the most popular ways to make money online.The biggest content locker CPAlead was accepting 1$ PayPal payments thru their locker gateways,but they removed that feature.As far as i know,there`s no content locker that accepts cryptocurrency payments for unlocking premium content,so your idea is a little bit original.
There are crypto content lockers like Coin Hive, that use the computer power of  people ,who want to unlock a page and they mine Monero with their browsers.


Title: Re: URL shortener with paywall
Post by: Stegobit on January 27, 2018, 02:56:13 AM
No one wants to do the hassle just to open a page or article, that's why the options to monetize like Page Ads or Video Ads exist.
Of course people don't want to pay for anything and I can understand them. But also I can understand hi-quality content creators, who don't have enough subscribers to live from advertising revenue, therefore charging their readers a fee is the only possible way to earn a living for them.

We got a lot of traditional fast payment options and yet no one ever successfully deviced a similar scheme.
Traditional payment methods  (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal etc) are unsuitable for this model due to high transaction fees. Therefore most sites with paywall use subscription model. With LN you can charge for every view separately as transactions are virtually free!

The service you are describing is called a content locker and it`s one of the most popular ways to make money online.The biggest content locker CPAlead was accepting 1$ PayPal payments thru their locker gateways,but they removed that feature.
I don't know about CPAlead, but $1 is a bit large amount for reading an article or viewing video. No wonder nobody wished to pay it!