Journalism is about to reinvent itself. You can feel it, especially if you obsess as I do about “media twitter” — the network of personalities who question, debate, and amplify a broadening discussion about the next future of news. We know the current system is teetering, the rot in the system has become visible in the adblocking of adspam, the obscene financialization of ads, and the ensuing trumpification of our attention. The equilibrium of digital publishing is about to punctuate and everybody knows it.

Our digital news organism has cancer. We’ve diagnosed the disease elsewhere, profusely. Some think it’s terminal and it will wither away in hospice care while new hybrids crack out of their shells. Otherwise a duopoly yields a dystopia of surveillance capitalism to “change behavior at scale.” Most of us are more optimistic about the prognosis. We have to be. We’re already seeing audacious attempts at solutionisms. I see a few models emerging depicted here as snapshots and then I’ll sketch out a radical #platformcoop vision that could arise from the ashes of a post-adblocked mediascape.

Paid Adblocking

What if you could pay to block the ads and still offer content producers a revenue stream? What if you could get paid to allow some safe ads while offering producers a fairer deal on revenue? A few entrepreneurs are trying to find out, right now.

Brave

Founder. It is fitting that the person who invented JavaScript and had a stint running Mozilla would release an all-new browser called Brave. BrendanEich’s venture focuses on giving web consumers a powerful tool to attack adtech adspam and reform the system. The whole two-decade old adtech ecosystem (the Lumascape) relies on exploits in JavaScript and the essential design of HTML and HTTP to extract our user data “exhaust” (as they like to say) to target “interest based” ads that no one is actually interested in.

Product. Brave is an insanely fast browser that hopes to pay us in Bitcoin for a share of our attention by allowing some safe ads. It also hopes to offer publishers a slightly better margin on adsales, 55% of an ad dollar instead of adtech’s 60%+ take.

Risks. However, this business model goes after the so-called programmatic ad supply and demand of the fully automated ad market. Brave’s numbers do not consider the ad revenue that publishers earn from direct-buy and private exchanges. This skews the potential impact on publisher bottom-lines but we’re not sure by how much. We know that the behavorial advertising that ruins our privacy, creeps us out, and helps drive adblocker adoption accounts for single-digit of revenues for high-end publishers. Small and independent publishers live and die by the drop-a-tag-collect-a-check automated markets but these highly skilled architects of our original web technology have limited experience winning in the brutal business of media and advertising.

Response. Unsurprisingly, the Newspaper Association of America issued a cease-and-desist letter to Brave accusing it of infringement, extortion, and ad-injection. I realize the lawyers put them up to this and they’re obliged to protect their interests but this seems like a poorly informed legal action. It does nothing to address the rot at the root of the system. Legacy publishers are usually faulted for being retrograde in their approach to technology and this is no exception to their stubborn pattern of resisting disruption with futility.

Evaluation. I’ve been testing Brave in comparison with Safari Content Blockers on my iPhone. I use Mozilla’s Firefox Focus and Luke Li’s Refine for user generated rules because I’m a complete nerd about this stuff. I also have the free Disconnect.me malvertising profile installed to block as deeply as possible on iOS.

My Mobile Safari settings are configured to request the Do Not Track response (which I know is widely but not absolutely ignored, bravo to Medium, Twitter, Pinterest, and Hulu, the only Silicon Valley darlings that actually respect our privacy) and third-party cookies are blocked (which breaks the adtech industry’s official opt-out AdChoices because it’s broken-by-design). I’m pretty sure I have availed myself of all tools currently offered to seize control of my data privacy and signal to the industry my breach of trust.

I appreciate the fact that Brave will not block ads from sites that honor the Do Not Track signal. This offers a fair and ethical mechanism around Brave blocking for the status quo revenue model but the publishing and adtech industries struggle to grab this escape valve before it all blows up in their faces. They are trapped in a surveillance-based infrastructure that distorts both signals and supply. They seem to be unable to honor Do Not Track even if they wanted to. You’d think they could just sell an ad without an invasive codebase tagging along, but apparently this technology is a dumpster fire.

Brave does an impressive job of blocking ads and improving the user experience if you discount the fact that you’re expected to switch browsers. Brave also manages to defeat blocker-blockers in my tests. These are the pernicious messages you get on publishers such as Forbes and Wired. This blocker-blocking technology is supplied by companies like Sourcepoint, which was founded by the same sociopaths that created the privacy killing model of behavioral advertising in the first place. They won’t admit that their baby is ugly and has chosen a corrupt and criminal lifestyle that was probably hereditary. It’s pretty outrageous that this industry is giving the finger to web consumers at a time like this.

Reception. Meanwhile, Brave is appealing to the typical young, white, male brogramming demographic in its early gestation judged by following their Twitter account and seeing the evidence of happy customers. This means that the existing adblocker userbase is experimenting with new tools as this new marketplace activates. It seems likely that the Brave early adopters will correlate with Bitcoin early adopters so if and when this happens, the nerds may show us a new way, as usual.

Prediction. Brave will fight the lawsuits in court and probably win in the court of public opinion because they seem to be one of the only operators in the entire industry that is committed to serving users.

Optimal

Founder. It is also fitting that adtech and LinkedIn veteran, Rob Leathern, has soft lauched his new venture, Optimal.com which is a subscription based paid adblocking service.

Product. By spending $5.99 a month, Optimal recommends their “certified” adblockers in one scrolling list and then hopes users will upvote, like, and tip content sites in another scrolling list. This reddit-style crowdbased interaction determines the revenue share of publishers who have agreed to participate in Optimal. Participating publishers draw down their 70% share of the share of what adblocking subscribers put in escrow.

Risks. Users get to feel-good about adblocking, assuming enough publishers participate. That said, Optimal’s users need to be deeply engaged as well for this to work. If you don’t take the time to find your favorite publishers by manual labor and make your vote count, your money won’t go to your favorite publisher. You might not feel so good about that especially if users upvote lowest-common denominator sites. In that sense, Optimal outsources the allocation of revenue to a user democracy of sorts, flat-taxed by subscription.

Response. Too early to tell.

Evaluation. I admit to being Twitter buddies with Eich and Leathern — just peruse my timeline tweets & replies to see our adtech chit-chat. Rob tells me that he’s working on additional layers of the Optimal UX that help his community discover and collectively promote new publishers and their valuable content to highlight and support great journalism.

Predictions. Will enough engaged Optimal users serve as a viable proxy for marketshare? Will Optimal’s governance and transparency be sufficient to establish a new trust proxy between web producers and consumers? Will its ability to help you save lots of money on your mobile phone bill drive adoption to pay his bills and more importantly publishers’? That is Rob Leathern’s gamble.

Carrier Adblocking

What happens when your mobile phone provider kills all the ads? What happens when another carrier you don’t use starts offering adblocking as a feature to save on your data (and battery, and security, and time, and sanity)? Do you switch?

Shine

Funder and Product. Shine, an Isreali company funded mainly by Taiwanese mogul, Li Ka-shing (Net worth $31.1B), employs deep packet inspection technology at the router level to intercept and annihilate adtech at the jugular. If there ever was an apt metaphor of chemotherapy to the cancer of adtech, this is it.

Prediction. I have no insider information but an educated guess would say that T-mobile would be the most likely first-customer in the US market for Shine’s “military grade” DPI blocking. Here’s a company that cultivates a maverick “uncarrier” brand image and has no problem taunting the FCC at the margins of net neutrality.

In this scenario, Verizon will go ballistic because it owns Aol which is a big nasty slice of the adtech industrial complex. Even though FCC has forced Verizon/Aol to switch to opt-in instead of opt-out for its consumer surveillance regime, the company is relentlessly devising creepy and invasive cross-device adtech to insidiously “change behavior at scale” by doing nefarious things like observing if we enter a store after being exposed to an ad. (Um, Minority Report? No thanks.)

Risks. We could bear witness to a new round of carrier wars where consumers get caught in the cross-fire between T-mobile and Verizon in a dangerous showdown on whether or not to administer chemotherapy to the publishing patient. It’s easier to imagine AT&T teaming up to fight the smaller carriers who end up needing to follow T-mobile’s lead (in this imagined scenario). It’s a tragic end-of-life family conflict that takes place over the deathbed.

The Internet of Ownership

There is another way. No, it isn’t paywalls that lock out the poor nor is it crowdfunding in the typical sense of the term.

It’s platform cooperativism.

What happens when content producers and consumers co-own their publisher? What happens when writers and readers buy into a publishing co-op online that they democratically self-govern enabled by co-owning cooperative shares?

What happens when we don’t need the extractive and invasive model of attention economy surveillance capitalism to fund our media?

What happens when writers and readers co-own their work together?

We’re about to find out.

Our #platformcoop publishing future

What happens when the internet of ownership confronts the crisis facing publishing, journalism, free expression, and our collective imperative to preserve our democratic media from the surveillance capitalism oligopoly (Facebook, Google, Verizon/Aol/Yahoo?)?

Vision

Publishing cooperatives shall emerge as new distributed technologies mature that enable public digital contracts (Blockchain) and democratic shared-governance models (#platformcoops to come like Backfeed and ConsenSys). At the minimum, producers of media would co-own shares in their co-op.

Stocksy United leads the way in showing us how the #platformcoop movement is rescuing the stock photography industry from its otherwise VC funded extractive race-to-the-bottom. What if we could have a Stocksy United for journalism and general publishing?

At the maximum, producers and consumers of media co-own their work together, cooperatively advancing its mission and business.

Business Model

As a kind of venture communism, platform co-ops appropriate certain language of late-stage capitalism but then hybridize it with the traits of democratic and distributed collectives and mission-driven NGOs.

Platform co-ops are not incepted as traditional corporations. Even the B-corp, the Public Benefit Corporation, doesn’t assure the structure required to nurture a radically new ethical and sustainable business model. A platform co-op for publishing might gain its initial seed funding round by content producers buying producer-class founding shares. Once operational, consumer-class founding shares would be offered to users to fund the A-round. Once established and product-market fit further achieved, a B-round of consumer-class co-op shares would be offered, and so forth.

Each class of platform co-op shares offers different rights and responsibilities related to shared-governance of the co-op. Rather than diluting the founders with a monetary valuation based on an unsustainable mortgage leveraging unlikely growth, they retain their governance roles, while consumers gain different degrees of membership rights.

Once established, a publishing platform co-op is free to run its business as it sees fit as collectively decided by consensus within the co-op as measured by some co-opted social media mechanics pioneered by Silicon Valley.

You could imagine a broad array of transactional models for revenue for publishing platform co-ops. Stocksy United sells photo rights from a photographer’s cooperative and assures quality and integrity to its customers. Members Media looks to build a community around this model for narrative and documentary films. Resonate is a platform co-op for the music industry to counteract how streaming services devalue music while reforming the perverse incentives of legacy royalty structures. The newly spun-off Matter Studios from Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, will reportedly let their content producer partners have some skin-in-the-game using the studio model.

These are all early expressions of the next wave of economic models being forecasted across the spectrum from douglas rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus) to Steve Case (The Third Wave).

A journalistic enterprise built upon the #platformcoop movement would similarly assure trust, quality, and the highest standards of ethics to its readers. It could value its content with microtransactions, recurring subscriptions, or by using artisanal adtech (a new kind of ethical and sustainable advertising vendor, itself perhaps a #platformcoop). Currencies would be exchanged according to the prevailing customs. Maybe Apple Pay by TouchID tomorrow, maybe Bitcoin or Ethereum in a few years?

Actions

If you’re interested in helping to amplify the #platformcoop movement, please recommend this article and adopt the hashtag in your social media discourse.

If you’re interested in talking more, feel free to reach out by Twitter DM, and stay tuned as this all unfolds.

Check out my other Medium posts about adtech if you enjoyed this one.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider for sparking the #platformcoop movement. Thanks to Shoshona Zuboff and Doc Searls for being visionary to see what’s on our horizon. Thanks to adtech experts not mentioned directly including Don Marti and Mikko for helping me navigate complexity.