Introducing the Experiment: The Atri 10,000

We want to show you how the Internet — and journalism — could support itself without ads or paywalls.

As a thought experiment, imagine if the Digital Commons were supported like this:

1) Participants put $10 into a fund at the start of the month.

2) They record all the content consumed along with how much time is spent reading each piece. And, just as importantly, they records who created that content.

3) At the end of the month, the divvy up the $10 to the writers (and in some cases, editors, illustrators, photographers, etc.) who created the content, in proportion to how much time was spent enjoying it.

Yes, it’s a very different way of using the internet. But the way we see it, it’s designed to create a better media — one in which quality, not clicks, are rewarded, and in which writers can be paid without the ads we all hate.

Meet Atri

Atri is the software that makes practical the thought experiment above. Atri, implemented as a browser extension, is a new way to pay for and get paid from the web.

How Atri works

Atri piggy backs on top of the ubiquity of Twitter to answer the question: “who created this content?” We glean the creators from the meta data embedded in the content, specifically focusing on @Twitter screen name to start with. As it turns out, most of our target content already has a Twitter screen name on the page. Bingo, we built Atri so it records all the Twitter screen names it encounters.

Furthermore, at the end of the month we can use Twitter to authenticate screen name owners (like, say, @AtriDotMe who you should follow) and transfer micro-dollars to the bitcoin or bank accounts of their choosing.

Atri (a nod to the “Attribution Economy,” from our Manifesto) helps users wandering the digital commons understand where they spent their month. It’s very early days, but one of the key design decisions was to focus on tracking the individuals responsible for content creation rather than just the sites. In the current experiment, we pay any verified @ names.

Participants fund an account and we distribute that fund to the creators that matter, without ever having to think about it or click a tip button.

For large publishers this means they suddenly have a revenue stream besides advertising. For the rest of us online we’ll get a few cents or dollars back every month, depending on how chatty we happen to be that month. If we happen to post the next “Dress” (black/blue obvi), well, we might just be able to take a longer vacation.

This hasn’t been tried before, so it’s unclear what kind of market dynamics and real-world thorns we might encounter as Atri integrates with the lives of content creators globally. How much money is an average creator going to make? When you compare that to existing methods, is it going to be enough to make a dent in our Internet-sized problem? As we talk with more traditional publishers will they be willing to take the direct payment from Atri users (possibly using an ad blocker) in lieu of the ad revenues they’re so fixed on?

We don’t know, but we think it’s important for us all to figure it out.

Our ask: Become a participant, join the Atri experiment

If you’re interested an open, accessible web, we ask that you consider joining our Atri experiment. The experiment starts today, March 1, runs for three months, and costs $10 per month (a maximum participation cost of $30). We’re limiting the participants to 10,000, but will proportionally distribute your money to an unlimited number of creators you encounter using Bitcoin or PayPal as appropriate.

Besides the warm fuzzy feeling you get by knowing that you’re supporting people who create the things you love, you’ll get personalized analytics of the content creators you encounter over the experiment. We hope there will be some surprising stories there as well. Furthermore you can sleep well at night knowing that you’re at least trying to find another way forward for us all.

Follow along

As the experiment progresses we’ll be posting updates as well as engaging with participants in our Slack channel and are looking for advice on where we go next. When the experiment phase is over you should expect a full report via @AtriDotMe along with your own personalized creator analytics summary.