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devlux writes:

Hey Soylentils,

I was speaking with a client of mine who is looking to monetize his website. To give some clarity of where I'm coming from; right now the client gives trading suggestions about what he thinks will make big moves during the week. He has a small but dedicated following, I have no idea how accurate he is, but people are paying money for the advice.

The advice section of his site is paywalled and a monthly subscription is required to access it. Unfortunately people have begun to share usernames & passwords, going so far as to even put credentials that were paid for with a stolen credit card on bugmenot.

He approached me about a possible solution and I have what I think is a good solution, but I wanted to ask how you felt about it. In a nutshell, the currently "secure" areas of the site would be stripped of any authentication. In it's place the server would return a 402 response code.

If you're unaware, 402 literally means "payment required" and has for decades, but as yet no browsers have implemented it.

I think DOGE or Bitcoin might be perfect here, just need to create a plugin for the browser that can catch the 402 and display a notice that payment is required, showing a QR code the user can scan and pay, before proceeding.

This got me thinking that it might also be an alternative to both traditional paywalling and ads. With adblocking turning into an arms race, it might be the correct way to monetize valuable content.

So here's the question I'm getting at. If a site you were already subscribing to, decided to implement something like this, would you switch over or just cancel your subscription? Keep in mind that at least at first, it would mean installing a plugin but the plugin would be opensource, with hopes it just becomes a standard.

Thanks for the feedback!

Original Submission