​​NFT Subscriptions Are Better Paywalls Subscriptions are the | NFT ERA

​​NFT Subscriptions Are Better Paywalls

Subscriptions are the future of media, right? From Netflix’s all-you-can-eat streaming to the New York Times Company’s 10 million subscribers – putting up a paywall and charging people looks like the way to go.

It’s all fun and games until you have to unsubscribe from something. The August Times is an object example. The internet has painstakingly documented the difficulties of extricating oneself from a subscription agreement with the writer of history’s first draft.

This article is part of CoinDesk’s Payments Week series.

Take for example, its place of honour in a subreddit called r/assholedesign: A screenshot of its subscription cancellation page attracted nearly 3,000 upvotes and 123 comments. The Times offers subscribers two ways to get out of it: have a chat with a “customer care advocate” or dial an 800 number within, admittedly, generous operating hours (up to 10pm on weekdays!). Of course, all the customer care advocates are occupied, so a chat with them isn’t possible.

The author Cory Doctorow calls the Times’ cancellation page an example of late-stage capitalism’s inevitable creation of “paperwork tsunamis”: you can get in easily, but there’s an “infinitude of hurdles” to get out. So… do blockchains fix this? I’m glad you asked (sorry, Cory, I know you’re not a fan)!

Blockchains are good at putting power in the hands of end-users. That’s because a cryptocurrency token is a bearer asset: it can be exchanged and retain its value without the need for a third party. Examples are gold, cash or the bearer bonds in "Die Hard.”

Tokenizing subscriptions turns them into bearer assets, and that flips the relationship between publisher and reader on its head. Instead of a publisher holding a readers’ account details, it’s the other way around – readers now hold the keys to the content gates, and they can do what they like with those keys.