A bet worth making

There’s an idea I find compelling: what if you could pay creators directly instead of watching ads? What if the money currently flowing to Big Tech through your attention and data went to the people actually making things you value?

This is the promise behind “value for value”—a model where you voluntarily pay for content instead of being monetized through surveillance. It’s the philosophy behind Bitcoin micropayments, Podcasting 2.0, and protocols like Nostr. The premise: if you’re paying, you’re the customer. If you’re not, you’re the product.

But if you’re building V4V platforms, Lightning infrastructure, Nostr clients—you need to know what the data actually says. Not to abandon the mission, but to build with clear eyes.

I host my podcast, Trust Revolution, on a V4V platform. I accept these payments. I want this model to work. That doesn’t mean it does.

Companies like Google and Meta capture roughly $670 a year from the average American through attention and data. That’s real money, even if you never see it leave your pocket. The question is whether voluntary payment can redirect even a fraction of that—and whether it can do so at a scale that actually sustains creators and platforms.

This isn’t a new question. People have been trying voluntary payment for decades—in contexts far removed from tech. Street performers. Public radio. Pay-what-you-wish restaurants. Museums. The data is in on what happens when you let people decide what to pay. And the numbers cluster around the same range, whether you’re talking about NPR pledge drives or Bitcoin micropayments.

The Case For

That number comes from quarterly earnings reports. Meta alone pulls $68 per quarter from US and Canadian users. Google’s ad revenue, divided by their user base, adds another $400-plus for Americans specifically.

Real money. You don’t see it leaving because it never arrives as cash. It flows through your attention and data—currencies you don’t track but companies absolutely do.

If even a fraction of that could go directly to creators and services you actually use, the math works.

And some people will pay. Patreon has proven that 1–5% of an audience will voluntarily support creators they value. The top podcasts on Patreon—Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, Chapo Trap House—generate hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly from voluntary subscriptions. No ads. Just listeners who decided the content was worth paying for.

The technology works too. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network routes payments in milliseconds with fees measured in fractions of a cent. Platforms like Nostr enable censorship-resistant communications. The technical barriers that made micropayments impractical for decades are largely solved.

One piece of evidence is encouraging: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency rollout. Before ATT, about 73% of users allowed tracking—because it was the default. After Apple switched to opt-in, that number collapsed to 18%. Same users, same phones, same apps. A 55-percentage-point swing from a single design change.

People aren’t actively choosing surveillance. They’re just not actively rejecting it. Change the default, and behavior changes with it.

Then there’s Spotify. About 40% of Spotify’s users pay for Premium—way higher than the 9% we see with YouTube Premium. That sounds like evidence that people will pay when the value proposition is clear.

But look closer. Spotify launched as a freemium service in 2008. The premium tier was baked in from the start. Users who came in expecting to pay were more likely to pay. And crucially, Spotify’s free tier has always been meaningfully worse—shuffle-only on mobile for years, aggressive ad interruptions, limited skips. The friction of not paying was designed to be high.

YouTube, by contrast, was free for over a decade before Premium existed. Users formed expectations around an ad-supported model. Asking them to pay now feels like asking them to pay for something they already had.

Maybe direct payment models just need better defaults and less friction. Make paying as easy as being monetized, and the economics shift.

The optimistic case. But there’s evidence that complicates it.

The Evidence Against

When people are offered an explicit choice between paying and being the product, they tend to choose ads. Consistently.

YouTube Premium has been available for years. It removes ads, offers background play, includes YouTube Music. Google has promoted it aggressively. And after all that, only about 9% of US users pay.

The other 91% accept advertising.

Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier, and it captured over 55% of new signups. Amazon Prime Video made ads the default and 85% of users stayed on it rather than pay extra. When Meta was forced to offer ad-free subscriptions in Europe, they priced it at roughly what they pull in ad revenue—and most users didn’t switch.

The pattern is consistent: when given a choice, most people choose free-with-ads over paid-without.

These are different models—ad removal, subscriptions, micropayments, donations. But they all bet on the same thing: that people will pay when given a real choice. The data across all of them points the same direction.

You might say that’s because the paid options aren’t compelling enough, or the friction is too high, or people don’t understand what they’re giving up. Maybe.

But then look at Nostr—a social platform built entirely around voluntary payment. Sending Bitcoin micropayments is built into the protocol. The friction is as low as it’s ever been for this kind of transaction.

The participation rate is around 0.5%.

Nostr has millions of registered accounts. Of those, roughly 165,000 have ever sent a payment. Ever. That’s about half a percent. Even if you only count active users with real profiles, participation tops out around 17%.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey and others have put ~$10 million into Nostr-specific development through OpenSats and direct grants. The subsidy from a handful of wealthy believers dwarfs the organic value exchange happening on the platform.

Twitch has 30 million daily unique viewers, but streamers typically see only 5–15% of their audience subscribe. And that’s for streamers who’ve built dedicated communities. The top 6% of streamers—the celebrity tier with real followings—hold nearly 60% of all subscribers. The long tail of creators gets scraps.

Less than 5% of active podcasts even support V4V payments. Of those that do, Blubrry reports that participating shows average $25 to $100 per month from audience contributions. Meanwhile, the podcast advertising market is nearly $2 billion. V4V is a rounding error.

The software that runs the internet—Linux, OpenSSL, Log4j—creates trillions in value. Harvard Business School estimated $8.8 trillion in demand-side value from open source software. And 60% of the maintainers who create that value are unpaid. When surveyed, 81% said they want predictable monthly income—not sporadic donations.

Voluntary payment doesn’t match what creators actually need.

And it’s not just audiences who prefer ads—many creators do too. Advertising revenue is passive. It doesn’t require asking your audience for money, cultivating relationships, or dealing with the guilt of inconsistent support. A CPM check shows up whether or not your listeners feel generous that week. That reliability beats the philosophical appeal of direct payment.

The Historical Evidence

The pattern predates the internet. Voluntary payment has never worked at scale.

Public radio has been running on this model since the 1970s. NPR stations survive on listener donations, supplemented by grants and underwriting. About 6–12% of listeners actually donate. Industry consultants put the average around 8–10%. That’s been the number for decades.

Public radio has had 50 years to optimize pledge drives, refine messaging, build loyalty, and make donation easy. The participation rate hasn’t moved. The same audiences who say they love NPR, who listen every morning, who tell their friends—90% of them don’t pay.

Wikipedia runs annual fundraising campaigns with increasingly urgent banner messages. Their own materials say “fewer than 1% of readers give.” They have 16 billion monthly pageviews and about 7.5 million annual donors. The average donation is around $11. The people who use Wikipedia most still don’t pay for it.

Street performers—buskers—have been testing voluntary payment for centuries. Modern studies put average earnings at $20–50 per hour in good locations, but the variance is enormous. A world-famous violinist, Joshua Bell, once played in a DC Metro station and made $32.

Talent doesn’t determine a busker’s income. Location does. Timing. Luck. The audience isn’t evaluating value—they’re making snap decisions about whether to drop a dollar in a case as they walk by.

And for everyone who thinks “pay what you want” might work if you just positioned it right: Panera tried. From 2010 to 2019, they operated five “Panera Cares” locations where customers could pay whatever they wanted for their meals. The target was 60% paying full price, 20% paying more, and 20% paying less or nothing.

Reality: revenue covered only 60–70% of operating costs. The stores couldn’t sustain themselves. By 2019, all five had closed. Researchers found that customers paid more right after the store opened, then paid progressively less on return visits. The goodwill dried up.

Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” experiment—letting fans name their price—landed in the same range. 38% of downloaders paid something. 62% paid nothing. The average payment, including freeloaders, was $2.26. The band made money, but they were Radiohead—one of the biggest bands in the world with 15 years of major-label marketing behind them. For anyone starting from scratch, those numbers would be unsustainable.

Museums have been grappling with this for years. The Metropolitan Museum in New York operated on “suggested admission” for decades—pay what you wish. Too many visitors, particularly tourists, paid little or nothing. In 2018, the Met moved to mandatory admission for out-of-state visitors. The Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Art Museum—they’ve all restricted pay-what-you-wish to local residents only. The trend is away from voluntary payment, not toward it.

The numbers cluster across all these contexts: 1% for Wikipedia, 5–15% for Twitch and Patreon, 8–10% for public radio, 38% for Radiohead’s passionate fans. The ceiling appears to be somewhere between 5% and 40%, depending on how captured and loyal the audience is. And getting to 40% requires decades of brand-building that most creators don’t have.

What This Means

You could argue these comparisons aren’t fair. YouTube Premium and Netflix ad tiers are asking for extra payment on top of services people already use—not offering something fundamentally different. Maybe V4V hasn’t failed; maybe nobody’s built something compelling enough yet.

Maybe. But the Nostr numbers are harder to explain away. A platform built from the ground up around voluntary payment, attracting people who actively believe in the model. If it was going to work anywhere, it would work there. And the participation rate is still under 1%.

And when you add the historical data—decades of evidence from public radio, museums, street performers, pay-what-you-want restaurants—the pattern holds. The technology isn’t the problem. Neither is the UX. Human behavior is.

Voluntary payment at scale may not work. Not because people are bad or cheap or don’t care. But because revealed preference is overwhelming: when given a choice, most people choose free-with-ads over payment.

Remember that 1–5% Patreon figure I mentioned as evidence it can work? Look at it differently: that’s been the rate for over a decade. It hasn’t grown. Platforms have gotten easier, payment friction has dropped, and the percentage stays the same. The 1–5% who pay on Patreon, the 0.5% who pay on Nostr, the 9% who subscribe to YouTube Premium, the 10% who donate to NPR—maybe that’s not a floor we’re still approaching.

Maybe that’s the ceiling.

If that’s true, what does it mean for anyone looking at these alternatives?

Maybe these models only work for a committed minority, and that’s okay. If you’re in the 5% who actively want to support creators directly, the infrastructure exists. But expecting mass adoption may be unrealistic.

Who are these 5%? Not typical users. They’ve already done the math on the attention economy. They have the income and the ideology to act on it. And the gap between them and everyone else may not be a friction problem. It may be a values problem that better UX can’t solve.

Then again, voluntary tipping might be the wrong model, even if voluntary subscriptions can work. Patreon succeeds because it’s recurring commitment, not one-time generosity. “Pay what you want, when you want” is philosophically pure but economically fragile. Predictable beats spontaneous.

What if “choice” is the wrong frame entirely? The ATT data shows that defaults determine behavior more than decisions do. People don’t consciously choose surveillance; they just don’t actively reject it. Same with direct payment—they don’t reject it, they just don’t actively choose it.

If that’s the dynamic, then the path forward isn’t convincing more people to pay. It’s changing what the default experience looks like. Building systems where you’re not having your attention harvested unless you opt into it.

But who changes the defaults? Apple did it with tracking. Could platform designers do it with payments? That’s a different problem than the one voluntary payment is designed to solve.

So what do you do with this if you’re building in freedom tech? Abandon V4V? Double down anyway?

The Exit Option

That’s a lot of evidence against an idea I want to believe in.

Fifty years of data. NPR, Wikipedia, Radiohead, Panera, Twitch, Patreon—the numbers cluster between 1% and 40%, depending on how captured your audience is. The ceiling is structural, not technological. It all points to an inevitable conclusion: voluntary payment doesn’t work at scale, it never has, and it probably never will.

I left something out.

It’s only the end of the story if you think voluntary payment needs to replace extraction economics.

It doesn’t. It needs to exist as an exit.

In December 2018, Patreon banned a YouTuber named Carl Benjamin—known online as Sargon of Akkad—for something he said on a completely different platform. The ban wasn’t for violating Patreon’s terms of service. It was political. And it triggered a cascade.

Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin both announced they were leaving Patreon in protest. They started building an alternative. Thousands of creators watched their income evaporate as supporters canceled accounts in solidarity.

Many of those creators migrated to SubscribeStar, a Patreon competitor. Within weeks, Stripe and PayPal both cut SubscribeStar off from their payment processing. No explanation. No appeal. The backup plan got deplatformed too.

In 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content—the entire reason the platform exists—because banks and payment processors pressured them. They reversed the decision only after a massive creator revolt. But the lesson landed: your business model exists at the pleasure of Visa and Mastercard.

And this goes back further. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice ran something called Operation Choke Point—the first of many that would follow. The goal was to pressure banks into cutting off legal businesses the government didn’t like—gun stores, payday lenders, fireworks sellers.

No charges, no due process. Just financial strangulation.

The banks are the speech police now. And every creator who depends entirely on ad revenue and traditional payment rails is one phone call away from discovering that.

Voluntary payment doesn’t replace the $670 per year the average person already pays to platforms that harvest their attention. It solves the exit problem.

When Patreon bans you, when PayPal freezes your account, when YouTube demonetizes your channel, when your bank decides your business doesn’t align with their values—most creators have no backup plan.

But if you’ve spent years building a direct relationship with even 5% of your audience—on V4V, on Lightning, on whatever permissionless rail exists—you have something priceless.

You have an escape route.

Look at how the successful creators operate. They’re not choosing between ads and voluntary support. They’re running both.

Chapo Trap House makes $180,000+ a month on Patreon from a single $5 tier. They also have sponsors. Slate runs their podcast “Slow Burn” with eight free, ad-supported episodes plus bonus content for paying members. The Tim Dillon Show pulls in over $200,000 monthly from Patreon subscribers while also running ads.

The hybrid model works. Most people won’t pay. Ads cover them.

But the ones who will pay become your insurance—an uncancellable base that doesn’t depend on any platform’s good graces.

That 2–5% conversion rate from free listeners to paid supporters? That’s not a failure. That’s the size of your lifeboat.

The Bet

The smart play for creators is to build both rails. Ad revenue pays the bills. Voluntary supporters are the insurance policy.

The escape route gets built now, while everything is fine—not after the deplatforming email arrives.

And the pitch changes. “Support the show” is charity language. “Make me uncancellable” is a product. That’s what voluntary payment actually offers: the ability to keep existing when platforms decide you shouldn’t.

Same for builders. V4V infrastructure, Nostr clients, Lightning rails—selling voluntary payment as the future of monetization is an uphill battle that fifty years of data says you’ll lose. Selling it as the escape route when the future goes wrong is a different proposition entirely.

It survives Patreon bans, PayPal freezes, bank closures, and executives who don’t like what you say.

That’s not a niche use case. It’s everyone, eventually.

Voluntary payment can’t dominate. Defaults always beat choice. Human nature doesn’t change. But can it exist at a scale that makes it viable? Can enough people build and use and fund these rails so that when you need an exit, there’s somewhere to go?

That’s a bet worth making.