
If you’ve read our words, you probably rightfully think that the thing we’re building at Unlock is some kind of new
paywall system. This is true, but it is also only the tip of the iceberg: we’re building a protocol to lock and unlock
“things”.

![locks](/images/blog/whatisunlock.jpg)

The [web needs a new business model](https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-web-b98e9b94add1). A
business model is generally how an organization generates revenues AND makes a profit. So far, the business model of
the web has generally been to show ads to users in order to influence their choices. This is
[not working anymore](https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f) because this
model does not sustain creation, creates massive privacy concerns, incentivizes division and hate, or centralizes power
in the hands of a few.

This lead us to believe that since “asking for someone else to pay” was a dangerous path, we could take look at a
simpler approach: “asking the consumer to pay”. The next question becomes “how?”. On the web, most things that people
consume have a marginal cost that tends toward 0. For example, I’ll spent the time writing this post, whether 10,000 or
10,001 people read it. Similarly, whether you listen to 1,000 or 1,001 songs on a music streaming service does not make
a difference, or whether you read 10 more messages a day on chat service has the same cost. The consequence of this is
that, contrary to many things in the physical world, the web native way of paying is to gain access, or to unlock. You
pay for the right to listen to music (1 or 10,000 songs), you pay to access all the stories behind a paywall, or to use
features in a given application.

At its core, our team is building a way for creators to provide access to their premium creations for paying consumers.

One of the key characteristics of the web is that it is, mostly, an open platform. There are no gatekeepers, middlemen
or contract to agree to when building a website or web application. If we are to build an “access control” layer for
the web, we need to do that in a decentralized way, as a “shared protocol”. A protocol is a set of rules that define
how different software platforms and applications can communicate with each other to achieve a specific goal. For
example, HTTP is a protocol which lets anyone create a website without asking someone else’s permission, but while
still making sure that this website can be accessed through any web browser, crawled by search engines… etc.

Why a protocol? Because _nobody owns a protocol and yet, everyone benefits from it_. This is the “permission-less”
aspect of innovation which we think has been so tremendously impactful for the web. Nobody owns HTTP, but it is
available for everyone to use.

Building a protocol is a guarantee that we, ourselves, do not become gatekeepers or control the fate of millions of
websites, web applications and businesses.

By building a protocol, we also make it possible for other individuals, teams and businesses to “adopt” our vision and
make it theirs, without requiring us to approve or even be able to impact their roadmaps. This is important, because
it allows us to reconcile the fact that we’re building something universal, even if we, despite our best efforts, have
our own biases and blind spots. Other people will build different products and businesses for different users, using
different strategies, on top of the same shared infrastructure: the protocol.

We hope this answers some questions… and that it raises even more! In a future post, we’ll give a few examples of
applications which we are building to showcase the protocol, or applications that we think other folks should build.


Why we’re building a business model as an open protocol.

Or, why we’re building a business model as an open protocol.

What is Unlock?

If you’ve read our words, you probably rightfully think that the thing we’re building at Unlock is some kind of new
paywall system. This is true, but it is also only the tip of the iceberg: we’re building a protocol to lock and unlock
“things”.
<img src="/images/blog/whatisunlock.jpg" alt="locks">
The <a href="https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-web-b98e9b94add1">web needs a new business model</a>. A
business model is generally how an organization generates revenues AND makes a profit. So far, the business model of
the web has generally been to show ads to users in order to influence their choices. This is
<a href="https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f">not working anymore</a> because this
model does not sustain creation, creates massive privacy concerns, incentivizes division and hate, or centralizes power
in the hands of a few.
This lead us to believe that since “asking for someone else to pay” was a dangerous path, we could take look at a
simpler approach: “asking the consumer to pay”. The next question becomes “how?”. On the web, most things that people
consume have a marginal cost that tends toward 0. For example, I’ll spent the time writing this post, whether 10,000 or
10,001 people read it. Similarly, whether you listen to 1,000 or 1,001 songs on a music streaming service does not make
a difference, or whether you read 10 more messages a day on chat service has the same cost. The consequence of this is
that, contrary to many things in the physical world, the web native way of paying is to gain access, or to unlock. You
pay for the right to listen to music (1 or 10,000 songs), you pay to access all the stories behind a paywall, or to use
features in a given application.
At its core, our team is building a way for creators to provide access to their premium creations for paying consumers.
One of the key characteristics of the web is that it is, mostly, an open platform. There are no gatekeepers, middlemen
or contract to agree to when building a website or web application. If we are to build an “access control” layer for
the web, we need to do that in a decentralized way, as a “shared protocol”. A protocol is a set of rules that define
how different software platforms and applications can communicate with each other to achieve a specific goal. For
example, HTTP is a protocol which lets anyone create a website without asking someone else’s permission, but while
still making sure that this website can be accessed through any web browser, crawled by search engines… etc.
Why a protocol? Because nobody owns a protocol and yet, everyone benefits from it. This is the “permission-less”
aspect of innovation which we think has been so tremendously impactful for the web. Nobody owns HTTP, but it is
available for everyone to use.
Building a protocol is a guarantee that we, ourselves, do not become gatekeepers or control the fate of millions of
websites, web applications and businesses.
By building a protocol, we also make it possible for other individuals, teams and businesses to “adopt” our vision and
make it theirs, without requiring us to approve or even be able to impact their roadmaps. This is important, because
it allows us to reconcile the fact that we’re building something universal, even if we, despite our best efforts, have
our own biases and blind spots. Other people will build different products and businesses for different users, using
different strategies, on top of the same shared infrastructure: the protocol.
We hope this answers some questions… and that it raises even more! In a future post, we’ll give a few examples of
applications which we are building to showcase the protocol, or applications that we think other folks should build.


[Targeted advertising was the original sin of the web](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/). For years, the accepted business model for consumer startups was to grow exponentially at breakneck speed. Their services were optimized to lure users into spending as much time on them as possible, as regularly as possible: an addictive behavior euphemistically referred to as “engagement”. And because highly targeted advertisements were worth more, those same services were incentivized to collect as much intimate information about their users as possible.

It’s called surveillance capitalism. The bad news is that most modern internet services have been built this way. But the good news is that [the pendulum is swinging](https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f).

Across the world, people — and their governments, through legislation like GDPR — are demanding more respectful services, with hard limits on user surveillance and targeted advertising. It’s become common knowledge that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. And in a world where targeted advertising has helped swing elections and destabilize societies, the tide is continuing to turn.

Startups, publishers, and creators need a strong alternative that meets these new user demands. At Unlock, we’re building a new way for them to make money on this new, more respectful web.

## The Unlock Protocol

[Unlock is a decentralized protocol](https://unlock-protocol.com/), built on the Ethereum blockchain, that will allow any creator to charge for access to their work. There’s no company standing in the middle, choosing who can monetize or be discovered, and there’s no need to gather any personal data at all.

While we’re building this protocol, there’s no need to adopt our code or services to use it. It’s free to integrate it into your websites and products, just as other open standards like HTML or email are, and we don’t take any kind of cut from any transactions. In fact, by design, we can’t. Our aim is to set the standard for services that use the protocol, and kickstart a rich ecosystem of developers, vendors and customers.

While you can use our services, [all our code is open source](https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock) and free to self-host —which is why today’s release is so important.

## Version 0

Today we’re releasing our proof of concept for a decentralized paywall based on the Unlock Protocol.

This first release is aimed at technical, blockchain-aware web publishers whose audiences are also already using decentralized apps. Each of these users has probably got [Metamask](https://metamask.io/) installed in their browser. They’re early adopters at the frontier of the decentralized web.

![new lock interface](/images/blog/announcingv0/newlock.png)

These publishers can create a _lock_, and set a price for content that is protected by it, as well as how long customers will have access to it for. Then, using a few lines of code, they can embed an easy-to-use paywall which uses that lock anywhere on the web. Finally, users can buy a _key_ to unlock the lock at the price the publisher set, for the duration publishers allow.

![paywall demo](/images/blog/announcingv0/paywalldemo.png)

For members of their early-adopter audience, all it takes is one click and a confirmation from their cryptocurrency wallet, and they can access the content.

It’s a lightweight proof-of-concept for the protocol, but it’s also a useful proof-of-concept for publishers. There’s no need to go through an expensive paywall provider: anyone on the web can sell their content without asking anyone else for permission.

Of course, it’s early days. We don’t recommend using this at scale quite yet. And it’s limited to users who are _au fait_ with cryptocurrencies. But we think it’s an exciting first step.

[You can deploy your first lock right here.](https://unlock-protocol.com/) If you decide to embed it on your website or blog, please drop us a line. We would love to learn from you.

(Also, this goes for any decentralized app, but please make sure you withdraw from your lock fairly regularly. Funds are safer when they’re stored in a wallet than sitting on a smart contract.)

You can purchase a key to a lock on [this test blog post by Julien](https://www.ouvre-boite.com/members/) or [this one by Ben](https://werd.io/2019/testing-the-unlock-paywall--protocolcom). We’ll donate double the proceeds from any tests and send them to [She256](https://www.she256.io/).

The genie isn’t getting back in the box. [Anyone who reads a newspaper or stays on top of Twitter knows that the prevailing business model of the web _will_ change.](https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f) It’s up to all of us to try and make it one that works for everyone, instead of a small number of gatekeepers. This release is our first step on that path.


We’re changing the business model for the web. It starts here, today.

Announcing Unlock Version Zero

<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/">Targeted advertising was the original sin of the web</a>. For years, the accepted business model for consumer startups was to grow exponentially at breakneck speed. Their services were optimized to lure users into spending as much time on them as possible, as regularly as possible: an addictive behavior euphemistically referred to as “engagement”. And because highly targeted advertisements were worth more, those same services were incentivized to collect as much intimate information about their users as possible.
It’s called surveillance capitalism. The bad news is that most modern internet services have been built this way. But the good news is that <a href="https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f">the pendulum is swinging</a>.
Across the world, people — and their governments, through legislation like GDPR — are demanding more respectful services, with hard limits on user surveillance and targeted advertising. It’s become common knowledge that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. And in a world where targeted advertising has helped swing elections and destabilize societies, the tide is continuing to turn.
Startups, publishers, and creators need a strong alternative that meets these new user demands. At Unlock, we’re building a new way for them to make money on this new, more respectful web.
<h2>The Unlock Protocol</h2>
<a href="https://unlock-protocol.com/">Unlock is a decentralized protocol</a>, built on the Ethereum blockchain, that will allow any creator to charge for access to their work. There’s no company standing in the middle, choosing who can monetize or be discovered, and there’s no need to gather any personal data at all.
While we’re building this protocol, there’s no need to adopt our code or services to use it. It’s free to integrate it into your websites and products, just as other open standards like HTML or email are, and we don’t take any kind of cut from any transactions. In fact, by design, we can’t. Our aim is to set the standard for services that use the protocol, and kickstart a rich ecosystem of developers, vendors and customers.
While you can use our services, <a href="https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock">all our code is open source</a> and free to self-host —which is why today’s release is so important.
<h2>Version 0</h2>
Today we’re releasing our proof of concept for a decentralized paywall based on the Unlock Protocol.
This first release is aimed at technical, blockchain-aware web publishers whose audiences are also already using decentralized apps. Each of these users has probably got <a href="https://metamask.io/">Metamask</a> installed in their browser. They’re early adopters at the frontier of the decentralized web.
<img src="/images/blog/announcingv0/newlock.png" alt="new lock interface">
These publishers can create a lock, and set a price for content that is protected by it, as well as how long customers will have access to it for. Then, using a few lines of code, they can embed an easy-to-use paywall which uses that lock anywhere on the web. Finally, users can buy a key to unlock the lock at the price the publisher set, for the duration publishers allow.
<img src="/images/blog/announcingv0/paywalldemo.png" alt="paywall demo">
For members of their early-adopter audience, all it takes is one click and a confirmation from their cryptocurrency wallet, and they can access the content.
It’s a lightweight proof-of-concept for the protocol, but it’s also a useful proof-of-concept for publishers. There’s no need to go through an expensive paywall provider: anyone on the web can sell their content without asking anyone else for permission.
Of course, it’s early days. We don’t recommend using this at scale quite yet. And it’s limited to users who are au fait with cryptocurrencies. But we think it’s an exciting first step.
<a href="https://unlock-protocol.com/">You can deploy your first lock right here.</a> If you decide to embed it on your website or blog, please drop us a line. We would love to learn from you.
(Also, this goes for any decentralized app, but please make sure you withdraw from your lock fairly regularly. Funds are safer when they’re stored in a wallet than sitting on a smart contract.)
You can purchase a key to a lock on <a href="https://www.ouvre-boite.com/members/">this test blog post by Julien</a> or <a href="https://werd.io/2019/testing-the-unlock-paywall--protocolcom">this one by Ben</a>. We’ll donate double the proceeds from any tests and send them to <a href="https://www.she256.io/">She256</a>.
The genie isn’t getting back in the box. <a href="https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/the-end-of-the-ad-supported-web-d4d093fb462f">Anyone who reads a newspaper or stays on top of Twitter knows that the prevailing business model of the web will change.</a> It’s up to all of us to try and make it one that works for everyone, instead of a small number of gatekeepers. This release is our first step on that path.

For the last 20 years, every consumer-oriented application, service or content platform used “ads” as its default business model. Like always, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions: we assumed that the mostly innocuous billboards could be transposed to the web… but these banner ads quickly became endless trojan horses into our privacy, feelings and opinions.

Our naive “content-wants-to-be-free” approach failed to account for externalities, including the fact that hostile organizations are influencing us through our media consumption… Using ads to support content creation is not working anymore, whether it is from a purely technical aspect when more and more of the provisioned ads are not being displayed, from an economic standpoint where, outside of a shrinking number of larges platforms, nobody is able to even scrape cents per hour spent staring at ads.

## Technical challenges

Delivering relevant ads has always been the main challenge for ad platforms. As we reaching unparalleled capabilities when it comes to picking the right ad for each user, new technical problems are making even displaying the ads much harder.

Ad blockers have been around for a little while, but there is no denying that their impact has been growing vastly in the last couple years. If anything, the constant alerts to disable ad blockers demonstrates that they are having a real impact.

![ad blocker](/images/blog/adsupportedweb/adblocker.png)
_About 30% of web users in the US browse with an ad-blocker._

On top of the “individual” use of ad-blockers, we’re starting to see institutions enter the arena. The most notorious example is Apple who has started to tighten the use of 3rd party cookies in Safari, as well as opened the gate to ad blocker on their AppStore.

Of course, Apple’s effort can easily be dismissed when confronted with the fact that Apple apparently [sells $12Bn worth of “search users” to Google every year](http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/). The hypocrisy is of course not limited to Apple, since several ad blockers have been caught [selling user data](https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/), or even **showing their own ads** instead of the ones “picked” by the publishers.

On that same front, a couple years ago, the innovative French ISP, Free, decided to [block ads by _default_](https://www.fastcompany.com/3004452/french-isp-free-blocks-all-web-advertising) on its latest modem: this move too was motivated by more than just a sudden care of user’s privacy, but it shows how blocking ads is technically easy to implement at large scales.

The numbers are clear: ad blockers are growing in popularity and they’re also followed by the increasing use of VPN and other privacy-enforcing techniques which are making ads less relevant and effective.

The ad industry has been one of the most creative when it came to tracking users. For example, did you know that by combining email tracking and banner retargeting, ad networks that you never heard of know your full identity (including your full name and personal information) all across of the web? But the rules of what is possible are now being superseded by the rule of law. Europe’s GDPR has been such as game changer that, 6 months in, several US media sites are still blocking traffic from Europe (and foregoing the corresponding ad revenues), because they understand that they are not compliant. And, as [Robin Berjon](https://twitter.com/robinberjon) puts it, there is still a very real chance that even the largest ad-tech companies might soon be exposed to massive legal action.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Recently, the <a href="https://twitter.com/CNIL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CNIL</a> issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named &quot;Vectaury&quot;. It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today&#39;s adtech. It&#39;s thread time! 👇&mdash; Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) <a href="https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/1063549722613432320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2018</a></blockquote>

## Economic challenges

The technical challenges exposed above are adding friction for medium, small and indie creators. Smaller websites and applications do not have the resources to block the blockers or, more importantly to implement native forms of ads which cannot easily be blocked.

Many have exposed that both Apple’s ad blocking crusade and Europe’s GDPR are, in fact, [reinforcing the duopoly](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/10/google-increases-tracking-web-users-gdpr-privacy-law/). By increasing the cost of compliance, these efforts are excluding organizations who could not amortize them through massive scale. It shows that, once more, “protecting the consumer” is a great way to decrease competition by ejecting smaller players, and empower incumbents.

At this point, Google and Facebook already [capture more than 90% of the digital ad market growth](https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/digital-ad-market-soars-to-88-billion-facebook-and-google-contribute-90-of-growth/). Amazon is obviously the elephant in the room here, but the data is clear: anyone else trying to monetize their content with ads will be fighting un uphill battle going forward. Even when they are large enough that they can have direct sales team, platforms like Twitter or Snapchat seem to be struggling to make ads work.

The most upsetting part of this new landscape is that the companies which control ad revenues are also the ones which control traffic distribution. Ad revenues are realized when ads are matched with visitors… but these days, both ads and visitors are actually coming from the same few giant tech companies: [Google and Facebook represent 75% of external referrers](https://www.parse.ly/resources/data-studies/referrer-dashboard/).

I will not go full MBA on you, but you don’t have to be [Michael Porter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Porter) to understand that if your suppliers and buyers are the very same people, your bargaining powers are, at best, limited.

> Clearly, given that [they know everything about us](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-find-out-everything-facebook-knows-about-you-2018-3) AND that we also give them [nearly one hour per day](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-the-rules-of-audience-engagement-to-its-advantage.html), they must be killing it. Right?

But let’s go one step further and ignore externalities, one last time. Are ads even a good way to capture value? Well, they make $2 per user per month… anti-climactic! So much data, machine learning, and engineering work for a miserable yield. It turns out that people spend as much time on Netflix than on Facebook: [about 50 minutes](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/17/netflix-small-portion-of-overall-watch-time-and-competition-is-stiff.html), but Netflix makes $30 per quarter (5 times as much), with virtually no tracking beyond what movies a user has watched (they actually don’t even require your real name apparently, as long as you pay!).

So, even from a purely economic standpoint, ads are a terrible way to capture value, and of course harder and harder for smaller publishers and creators.

## Essential challenges

Now, as an engineer, I know that we could still find ways around the technical challenges:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Alt text = Facebook breaks the word &quot;Sponsored&quot; in 4 spans, and adds 4 visually hidden spans with the letter &quot;S&quot;, so that the textContent for this mess is &quot;SpSonSsoSredS&quot; <a href="https://t.co/iFMKbOedHT">https://t.co/iFMKbOedHT</a>&mdash; Florens Verschelde (@fvsch) <a href="https://twitter.com/fvsch/status/1071522348606595072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 8, 2018</a></blockquote>

And, as an entrepreneur, I know that there are other ways to monetize creation, whether it is content or software that is not ad-based.

But, as a citizen, I start to question the very premise of what advertisement is all about: _someone else is paying for the stuff that I am consuming_. _**But why? And what does it eventually lead to?**_

The quick answer is that whoever pays for the stuff we consume has a message to communicate: some product we don’t know about is great, this service just got cheaper, that politician’s economic policies have been disastrous… Like everyone else, these ‘advertisers’ are looking for better returns on their investments and the data is clear: ads tend to work better when they are more (re)targeted. This obviously **leads to privacy invasion** and, eventually, surveillance. Are we really willing to let go of some of our most basic rights for our right to information and knowledge?

> We got duped: we were told we could get free knowledge for a little bit of our attention, but it turns out that despite all the privacy we increasingly give away, the content we get seems to decrease in value.

Advertisers rightfully want to drive down the unit costs of their ads: who would not try to achieve the same goals at a lower price? But doing so also means that, on the other end of that relationship, the incentive of the publisher becomes to increase the volume of ads they display. As such, in the ad-supported web, the incentive for the creator is to create more content, not better content. All of the metrics that we used, whether it is CPM, cost per click, or performance/conversion eventually all boil down to “how much attention can this content take from consumers”. This started with the “information overload” complaints from 20 years ago and continued with the incessant slideshows, notifications, click bait and eventually fake news: everything that can steal a couple more minutes of the free web users’ time is financially rewarded: **the content itself becomes an excuse for the ads that surround it**.

![1984](/images/blog/adsupportedweb/1984.jpg)
_Image: 1984 by [Lesley Barnes](https://www.lesleybarnes.co.uk/1984-The-Graphic-Canon-3)_

What if we got all this wrong? What if instead of volume, we rewarded quality? What if creators were being paid based on the value they create for their consumers, rather than based on the attention they steal from them?

...

**Ads are not viable anymore for most web creation.** They are now becoming less delivered, less relevant, and even less profitable as well as increasingly more detrimental to the whole web ecosystem: when they were the “default” choice for any kind of online monetization, they are sometimes turning into a liability for the websites which display them.

It is time to remember that if content is free to consume, it must not be very expensive to produce… As a society, we should now understand that if you pay peanuts, you get _monkeys_. Building an ad-supported web was misguided and it is now slowly starting to collapse under its own absurdity. However, we should not rejoice until we have been able to ensure that creators are paid for their work: they alone are changing the status quo and moving our world forward.

What if we got the business model of the web wrong?

The End of the Ad-Supported Web

For the last 20 years, every consumer-oriented application, service or content platform used “ads” as its default business model. Like always, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions: we assumed that the mostly innocuous billboards could be transposed to the web… but these banner ads quickly became endless trojan horses into our privacy, feelings and opinions.
Our naive “content-wants-to-be-free” approach failed to account for externalities, including the fact that hostile organizations are influencing us through our media consumption… Using ads to support content creation is not working anymore, whether it is from a purely technical aspect when more and more of the provisioned ads are not being displayed, from an economic standpoint where, outside of a shrinking number of larges platforms, nobody is able to even scrape cents per hour spent staring at ads.
<h2>Technical challenges</h2>
Delivering relevant ads has always been the main challenge for ad platforms. As we reaching unparalleled capabilities when it comes to picking the right ad for each user, new technical problems are making even displaying the ads much harder.
Ad blockers have been around for a little while, but there is no denying that their impact has been growing vastly in the last couple years. If anything, the constant alerts to disable ad blockers demonstrates that they are having a real impact.
<img src="/images/blog/adsupportedweb/adblocker.png" alt="ad blocker">
About 30% of web users in the US browse with an ad-blocker.
On top of the “individual” use of ad-blockers, we’re starting to see institutions enter the arena. The most notorious example is Apple who has started to tighten the use of 3rd party cookies in Safari, as well as opened the gate to ad blocker on their AppStore.
Of course, Apple’s effort can easily be dismissed when confronted with the fact that Apple apparently <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/">sells $12Bn worth of “search users” to Google every year</a>. The hypocrisy is of course not limited to Apple, since several ad blockers have been caught <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/">selling user data</a>, or even showing their own ads instead of the ones “picked” by the publishers.
On that same front, a couple years ago, the innovative French ISP, Free, decided to <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3004452/french-isp-free-blocks-all-web-advertising">block ads by default</a> on its latest modem: this move too was motivated by more than just a sudden care of user’s privacy, but it shows how blocking ads is technically easy to implement at large scales.
The numbers are clear: ad blockers are growing in popularity and they’re also followed by the increasing use of VPN and other privacy-enforcing techniques which are making ads less relevant and effective.
The ad industry has been one of the most creative when it came to tracking users. For example, did you know that by combining email tracking and banner retargeting, ad networks that you never heard of know your full identity (including your full name and personal information) all across of the web? But the rules of what is possible are now being superseded by the rule of law. Europe’s GDPR has been such as game changer that, 6 months in, several US media sites are still blocking traffic from Europe (and foregoing the corresponding ad revenues), because they understand that they are not compliant. And, as <a href="https://twitter.com/robinberjon">Robin Berjon</a> puts it, there is still a very real chance that even the largest ad-tech companies might soon be exposed to massive legal action.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Recently, the <a href="https://twitter.com/CNIL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CNIL</a> issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named &quot;Vectaury&quot;. It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today&#39;s adtech. It&#39;s thread time! 👇&mdash; Robin Berjon (@robinberjon) <a href="https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/1063549722613432320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2018</a></blockquote>
<h2>Economic challenges</h2>
The technical challenges exposed above are adding friction for medium, small and indie creators. Smaller websites and applications do not have the resources to block the blockers or, more importantly to implement native forms of ads which cannot easily be blocked.
Many have exposed that both Apple’s ad blocking crusade and Europe’s GDPR are, in fact, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/10/google-increases-tracking-web-users-gdpr-privacy-law/">reinforcing the duopoly</a>. By increasing the cost of compliance, these efforts are excluding organizations who could not amortize them through massive scale. It shows that, once more, “protecting the consumer” is a great way to decrease competition by ejecting smaller players, and empower incumbents.
At this point, Google and Facebook already <a href="https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/digital-ad-market-soars-to-88-billion-facebook-and-google-contribute-90-of-growth/">capture more than 90% of the digital ad market growth</a>. Amazon is obviously the elephant in the room here, but the data is clear: anyone else trying to monetize their content with ads will be fighting un uphill battle going forward. Even when they are large enough that they can have direct sales team, platforms like Twitter or Snapchat seem to be struggling to make ads work.
The most upsetting part of this new landscape is that the companies which control ad revenues are also the ones which control traffic distribution. Ad revenues are realized when ads are matched with visitors… but these days, both ads and visitors are actually coming from the same few giant tech companies: <a href="https://www.parse.ly/resources/data-studies/referrer-dashboard/">Google and Facebook represent 75% of external referrers</a>.
I will not go full MBA on you, but you don’t have to be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Porter">Michael Porter</a> to understand that if your suppliers and buyers are the very same people, your bargaining powers are, at best, limited.
<blockquote>
Clearly, given that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-find-out-everything-facebook-knows-about-you-2018-3">they know everything about us</a> AND that we also give them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-the-rules-of-audience-engagement-to-its-advantage.html">nearly one hour per day</a>, they must be killing it. Right?
</blockquote>
But let’s go one step further and ignore externalities, one last time. Are ads even a good way to capture value? Well, they make $2 per user per month… anti-climactic! So much data, machine learning, and engineering work for a miserable yield. It turns out that people spend as much time on Netflix than on Facebook: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/17/netflix-small-portion-of-overall-watch-time-and-competition-is-stiff.html">about 50 minutes</a>, but Netflix makes $30 per quarter (5 times as much), with virtually no tracking beyond what movies a user has watched (they actually don’t even require your real name apparently, as long as you pay!).
So, even from a purely economic standpoint, ads are a terrible way to capture value, and of course harder and harder for smaller publishers and creators.
<h2>Essential challenges</h2>
Now, as an engineer, I know that we could still find ways around the technical challenges:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Alt text = Facebook breaks the word &quot;Sponsored&quot; in 4 spans, and adds 4 visually hidden spans with the letter &quot;S&quot;, so that the textContent for this mess is &quot;SpSonSsoSredS&quot; <a href="https://t.co/iFMKbOedHT">https://t.co/iFMKbOedHT</a>&mdash; Florens Verschelde (@fvsch) <a href="https://twitter.com/fvsch/status/1071522348606595072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 8, 2018</a></blockquote>
And, as an entrepreneur, I know that there are other ways to monetize creation, whether it is content or software that is not ad-based.
But, as a citizen, I start to question the very premise of what advertisement is all about: someone else is paying for the stuff that I am consuming. But why? And what does it eventually lead to?
The quick answer is that whoever pays for the stuff we consume has a message to communicate: some product we don’t know about is great, this service just got cheaper, that politician’s economic policies have been disastrous… Like everyone else, these ‘advertisers’ are looking for better returns on their investments and the data is clear: ads tend to work better when they are more (re)targeted. This obviously leads to privacy invasion and, eventually, surveillance. Are we really willing to let go of some of our most basic rights for our right to information and knowledge?
<blockquote>
We got duped: we were told we could get free knowledge for a little bit of our attention, but it turns out that despite all the privacy we increasingly give away, the content we get seems to decrease in value.
</blockquote>
Advertisers rightfully want to drive down the unit costs of their ads: who would not try to achieve the same goals at a lower price? But doing so also means that, on the other end of that relationship, the incentive of the publisher becomes to increase the volume of ads they display. As such, in the ad-supported web, the incentive for the creator is to create more content, not better content. All of the metrics that we used, whether it is CPM, cost per click, or performance/conversion eventually all boil down to “how much attention can this content take from consumers”. This started with the “information overload” complaints from 20 years ago and continued with the incessant slideshows, notifications, click bait and eventually fake news: everything that can steal a couple more minutes of the free web users’ time is financially rewarded: the content itself becomes an excuse for the ads that surround it.
<img src="/images/blog/adsupportedweb/1984.jpg" alt="1984">
Image: 1984 by <a href="https://www.lesleybarnes.co.uk/1984-The-Graphic-Canon-3">Lesley Barnes</a>
What if we got all this wrong? What if instead of volume, we rewarded quality? What if creators were being paid based on the value they create for their consumers, rather than based on the attention they steal from them?
...
Ads are not viable anymore for most web creation. They are now becoming less delivered, less relevant, and even less profitable as well as increasingly more detrimental to the whole web ecosystem: when they were the “default” choice for any kind of online monetization, they are sometimes turning into a liability for the websites which display them.
It is time to remember that if content is free to consume, it must not be very expensive to produce… As a society, we should now understand that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Building an ad-supported web was misguided and it is now slowly starting to collapse under its own absurdity. However, we should not rejoice until we have been able to ensure that creators are paid for their work: they alone are changing the status quo and moving our world forward.


![this is for everyone](/images/blog/freedomofspeech/thisisforeveryone.jpg)

The web is in trouble. So what?

For a generation of hackers and activists, the “open web” was an ideal to work towards: an accessible platform where anyone could publish, regardless of status, identity, or context. It’s hard to remember from our standpoint in 2018, but before the web, we needed to go through centralized organizations like publishers and broadcasters to be heard. If your voice didn’t fit their idea of what should be shared, it wouldn’t be. Curiously, most of the voices that were heard came from people who looked a lot like the gatekeepers themselves.

Unfortunately, despite all its promise, the web revolution fell flat. It turned out that a lot of the people who wanted to remove these gatekeepers actually just wanted to replace them with their own, and make a bunch of money in the process. Rather than maintaining the web’s spirit of openness, the broadcasters and publishers of yesteryear were replaced with technology companies — run, once again, by rich, white men.

We’re still only at the beginning of understanding the true implications of this shift, but the signs are poor. Policies have been enacted not to protect communities and prioritize user value, but to maximize advertiser value and ensure people look at targeted advertising for longer. Facebook’s “real names” policy has [kicked off transgender users for using their deadnames](https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebooks-pride-rainbows-dont-extend-to-trans-peoples-names), while its advertising-engagement-maximizing feed algorithms provoke [societal divisions](https://nypost.com/2017/02/18/why-facebook-feeds-division-and-stress/) and [even genocide](https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem). The web’s [original sin](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/) of relying on targeted advertising has led to real suffering around the world.

Any time a single entity becomes the gatekeeper for discourse, information, art and culture, that entity’s business model and policies will have a disproportionate effect on what gets published and who gets heard around the world. No matter a gatekeeper’s intentions, its existence places tangible limits on freedom of speech.

One solution is just to make everything on the web free. A lot of people believe it was a mistake to add monetization to the platform in any way. But that ignores a crucial fact: people need to make money. They have to eat; to pay their rent or mortgage; to live. Unfortunately, the need for money is even more present in communities that have been heard the least. There’s no such thing as making something for free: overheads, externalities, and hidden costs affect who can afford to create and broadcast. To give underrepresented people a voice, you need to give them a way to stay afloat.

The good news is, there’s a better way. The potential of an open, inclusive web has not been lost.

In open source circles, truly decentralized platforms have always been the holy grail: technologies with network effects that provide real value to users, but aren’t owned by any single entity. It all depends on protocols, which are agreements over how data should flow in order to achieve a particular purpose.

Email is a protocol. No one company controls it, and you can get email services from more than one company — although in practice most of us only use a handful of services, who then have disproportionate influence over the protocol’s evolution. That’s because protocols are dumb: they’re just descriptions of how data should flow. You need services over the top to provide the functionality that we actually use.

Enter blockchain. Yes, it made its arrival accompanied by volatile, speculative investments into cryptocurrencies — but the underlying technology, which allows anyone to prove that a set of transactions were made in a given order without relying on a central authority or gatekeeper, could power a new generation of decentralized applications. Smart contracts decentralize the logic of those applications in themselves. Suddenly, protocols can be smart.

Among other things, blockchains give us the ability to add payment without any middleman to any page on the web. When Julien told me his vision for Unlock, that’s what jumped out at me: imagine a one-click “pay here” button, or even an in-person tap-and-pay device, without going through a central bank. Here, every creator gains the right to set their own terms and sell under their own steam, without going through a middleman — which means there’s no need to give a middleman a cut, or capitulate to their rules. In restrictive societies, there’s also no systemic reason to comply with censorship rules. The software you use is no longer an extension of the police, or subject to a single corporation’s policies.

If it’s easy enough to use, it could change the way commerce is conducted online forever — which, in turn, changes who can be heard forever. Decentralization isn’t just a way to prevent censorship and heal divisions; it’s a way to make money for every creator on the web, wherever they are in the world. Just like the web itself, this is overwhelmingly a force for inclusion and democracy: a place for all humanity to come together, without permission, and without restriction.


In a world where corporations control our conversations, removing middlemen is more important than ever.

To Save Freedom of Speech, We Must Decentralize the Web

<img src="/images/blog/freedomofspeech/thisisforeveryone.jpg" alt="this is for everyone">
The web is in trouble. So what?
For a generation of hackers and activists, the “open web” was an ideal to work towards: an accessible platform where anyone could publish, regardless of status, identity, or context. It’s hard to remember from our standpoint in 2018, but before the web, we needed to go through centralized organizations like publishers and broadcasters to be heard. If your voice didn’t fit their idea of what should be shared, it wouldn’t be. Curiously, most of the voices that were heard came from people who looked a lot like the gatekeepers themselves.
Unfortunately, despite all its promise, the web revolution fell flat. It turned out that a lot of the people who wanted to remove these gatekeepers actually just wanted to replace them with their own, and make a bunch of money in the process. Rather than maintaining the web’s spirit of openness, the broadcasters and publishers of yesteryear were replaced with technology companies — run, once again, by rich, white men.
We’re still only at the beginning of understanding the true implications of this shift, but the signs are poor. Policies have been enacted not to protect communities and prioritize user value, but to maximize advertiser value and ensure people look at targeted advertising for longer. Facebook’s “real names” policy has <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebooks-pride-rainbows-dont-extend-to-trans-peoples-names">kicked off transgender users for using their deadnames</a>, while its advertising-engagement-maximizing feed algorithms provoke <a href="https://nypost.com/2017/02/18/why-facebook-feeds-division-and-stress/">societal divisions</a> and <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem">even genocide</a>. The web’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/">original sin</a> of relying on targeted advertising has led to real suffering around the world.
Any time a single entity becomes the gatekeeper for discourse, information, art and culture, that entity’s business model and policies will have a disproportionate effect on what gets published and who gets heard around the world. No matter a gatekeeper’s intentions, its existence places tangible limits on freedom of speech.
One solution is just to make everything on the web free. A lot of people believe it was a mistake to add monetization to the platform in any way. But that ignores a crucial fact: people need to make money. They have to eat; to pay their rent or mortgage; to live. Unfortunately, the need for money is even more present in communities that have been heard the least. There’s no such thing as making something for free: overheads, externalities, and hidden costs affect who can afford to create and broadcast. To give underrepresented people a voice, you need to give them a way to stay afloat.
The good news is, there’s a better way. The potential of an open, inclusive web has not been lost.
In open source circles, truly decentralized platforms have always been the holy grail: technologies with network effects that provide real value to users, but aren’t owned by any single entity. It all depends on protocols, which are agreements over how data should flow in order to achieve a particular purpose.
Email is a protocol. No one company controls it, and you can get email services from more than one company — although in practice most of us only use a handful of services, who then have disproportionate influence over the protocol’s evolution. That’s because protocols are dumb: they’re just descriptions of how data should flow. You need services over the top to provide the functionality that we actually use.
Enter blockchain. Yes, it made its arrival accompanied by volatile, speculative investments into cryptocurrencies — but the underlying technology, which allows anyone to prove that a set of transactions were made in a given order without relying on a central authority or gatekeeper, could power a new generation of decentralized applications. Smart contracts decentralize the logic of those applications in themselves. Suddenly, protocols can be smart.
Among other things, blockchains give us the ability to add payment without any middleman to any page on the web. When Julien told me his vision for Unlock, that’s what jumped out at me: imagine a one-click “pay here” button, or even an in-person tap-and-pay device, without going through a central bank. Here, every creator gains the right to set their own terms and sell under their own steam, without going through a middleman — which means there’s no need to give a middleman a cut, or capitulate to their rules. In restrictive societies, there’s also no systemic reason to comply with censorship rules. The software you use is no longer an extension of the police, or subject to a single corporation’s policies.
If it’s easy enough to use, it could change the way commerce is conducted online forever — which, in turn, changes who can be heard forever. Decentralization isn’t just a way to prevent censorship and heal divisions; it’s a way to make money for every creator on the web, wherever they are in the world. Just like the web itself, this is overwhelmingly a force for inclusion and democracy: a place for all humanity to come together, without permission, and without restriction.


At Unlock, we’re on [a mission to fix the web](/blog/its-time-to-unlock-the-web). Unlock empowers each and every creator in the world and helps them find ways to monetize without relying on a middleman. It’s a protocol — and not a centralized platform that controls everything that happens on it. We want to help value spread more easily not through convoluted user tracking or clickbait. It’s about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.

I’ve spent my career building for the open web, whether for Superfeedr (acquired by Medium in 2016) or at Medium where I worked on SEO, syndication protocols and cryptocurrencies, or through the WebSub protocol which I wrote for the W3C.

## 💸 Empowering our team

Today, I am proud to say that Unlock has closed a pre-seed round of funding led by General Catalyst and by Cherry Ventures and with participations from Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, Coinbase Ventures and a group of stellar business angels. It’s an honor to have each of these partners on board and we’re excited to have their expertise as we grow.

## 🤗 Expanding our team

I am also excited to say that Unlock is becoming a “we”: my friend [Ben Werdmuller](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwerd) is joining Unlock as our first hire. There are very few people who can make such an impact on an early stage company: Ben is a talented engineer with a very rich experience building products and leading open source projects such as Known or Elgg.

This new funding will also help Ben and I build a world-class team of talented and creative minds to build this new business model for the web. We’d love you to join us: here’s some more detail as to [what we’re looking for](/jobs), currently.

## 👨‍💻 Contributing to our team

Finally, today, we’re opening up our [Github account](https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock) which includes all of the code that we have written so far for Unlock. Anyone who’s released open source code knows what this means: the code will be inspected, audited and judged… but it will also be improved and anyone can make suggestions, open issues or even contribute fixes, documentations and more. We’re excited to welcome you to the Unlock community!

We’re on a mission to fix the web. We’re proud to announce our new investor partners and we believe we have big ideas to take us to the next stage — we’d love you to [join us](/jobs)!


We’re growing our talented and mission-driven team. Come join us!

Unlocking Some Exciting News

At Unlock, we’re on <a href="/blog/its-time-to-unlock-the-web">a mission to fix the web</a>. Unlock empowers each and every creator in the world and helps them find ways to monetize without relying on a middleman. It’s a protocol — and not a centralized platform that controls everything that happens on it. We want to help value spread more easily not through convoluted user tracking or clickbait. It’s about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.
I’ve spent my career building for the open web, whether for Superfeedr (acquired by Medium in 2016) or at Medium where I worked on SEO, syndication protocols and cryptocurrencies, or through the WebSub protocol which I wrote for the W3C.
<h2>💸 Empowering our team</h2>
Today, I am proud to say that Unlock has closed a pre-seed round of funding led by General Catalyst and by Cherry Ventures and with participations from Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, Coinbase Ventures and a group of stellar business angels. It’s an honor to have each of these partners on board and we’re excited to have their expertise as we grow.
<h2>🤗 Expanding our team</h2>
I am also excited to say that Unlock is becoming a “we”: my friend <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwerd">Ben Werdmuller</a> is joining Unlock as our first hire. There are very few people who can make such an impact on an early stage company: Ben is a talented engineer with a very rich experience building products and leading open source projects such as Known or Elgg.
This new funding will also help Ben and I build a world-class team of talented and creative minds to build this new business model for the web. We’d love you to join us: here’s some more detail as to <a href="/jobs">what we’re looking for</a>, currently.
<h2>👨‍💻 Contributing to our team</h2>
Finally, today, we’re opening up our <a href="https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock">Github account</a> which includes all of the code that we have written so far for Unlock. Anyone who’s released open source code knows what this means: the code will be inspected, audited and judged… but it will also be improved and anyone can make suggestions, open issues or even contribute fixes, documentations and more. We’re excited to welcome you to the Unlock community!
We’re on a mission to fix the web. We’re proud to announce our new investor partners and we believe we have big ideas to take us to the next stage — we’d love you to <a href="/jobs">join us</a>!

Ideas are wonderful and beautiful. They can only be perfect, because they do not exist. I am fascinated by artists, authors and creators of all kinds who are able crack open their own skulls to let their ideas, dreams, and nightmares become real and shared with the world.

Creating a product also has some of this. The business plan, slides and pitches are barely more than a raw idea. It’s easy to make a chart which look up and to the right, or describe a world where consumers have been waiting for the product to be launched. But the truth is, it all starts with a draft, a demo, a proof of concept and this first attempt will likely be disappointing for those who bought your grand vision ([including yourself](https://vimeo.com/85040589)).

In the last couple weeks, I have shown demos of Unlock to a lot of people, with a healthy mix of enthusiasm and anxiety. A couple days ago, I went ahead and decided to record it. In many ways, it is raw and rough, but I also know that it is a required step to slowly, but surely, refine what we’re building [into the world we want](/blog/its-time-to-unlock-the-web).

> Unlock is a protocol which lets creators monetize their content or software. Consumers pay the creators directly in order to unlock words, images, videos or features. Here, I am taking the example of a blogger who may want to limit access to their content only to the people who have purchased a key to their lock.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wktotzmea0E" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

More than anything, we’d love to have your feedback, positive and negative: our opinions are strong but loosely held.

Today we’re sharing the very first demo of the Unlock Protocol.

Setting Unlock’s demo free

Ideas are wonderful and beautiful. They can only be perfect, because they do not exist. I am fascinated by artists, authors and creators of all kinds who are able crack open their own skulls to let their ideas, dreams, and nightmares become real and shared with the world.
Creating a product also has some of this. The business plan, slides and pitches are barely more than a raw idea. It’s easy to make a chart which look up and to the right, or describe a world where consumers have been waiting for the product to be launched. But the truth is, it all starts with a draft, a demo, a proof of concept and this first attempt will likely be disappointing for those who bought your grand vision (<a href="https://vimeo.com/85040589">including yourself</a>).
In the last couple weeks, I have shown demos of Unlock to a lot of people, with a healthy mix of enthusiasm and anxiety. A couple days ago, I went ahead and decided to record it. In many ways, it is raw and rough, but I also know that it is a required step to slowly, but surely, refine what we’re building <a href="/blog/its-time-to-unlock-the-web">into the world we want</a>.
<blockquote>
Unlock is a protocol which lets creators monetize their content or software. Consumers pay the creators directly in order to unlock words, images, videos or features. Here, I am taking the example of a blogger who may want to limit access to their content only to the people who have purchased a key to their lock.
</blockquote>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wktotzmea0E" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
More than anything, we’d love to have your feedback, positive and negative: our opinions are strong but loosely held.


It’s become dangerously clear in the last few years that the business model we thought would support a vibrant, open web just isn’t going to work any more. Driving more and more eyeballs to ads was always considered ethically and morally borderline, but today, monetizing clickbait isn’t just economically fragile: it’s feeding our democracies with more misinformation and fake news.

The thing is, plenty of publishers and creators have been ahead of the curve on this one, even if we don’t give them much credit for it. They knew that free content can, in fact, be very costly and that **real freedom comes from knowledge that’s expensive to produce**. They understood that when Stewart Brand famously said that [“information wants to be free”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free) he meant free as in “speech” (_libre_), not free as in “beer” (_gratis_).

Some publishers, like the New York Times, got a lot of heat when they introduced [their paywall](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html), but the trend they set isn’t reversing: they now have 3M subscribers and aim for 10M by [2020](https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html). Hundreds of other news and content organizations are going in the same direction, [including this very platform](https://medium.com/membership).

Another trend emerged in the last 10 years: ownership does not seem to matter as much as it used to. People are getting rid of their meticulously amassed records and DVD collections to replace them with monthly subscriptions to Spotify and Netflix. Ride sharing platforms have put yet another dent in the car ownership status symbol… etc. **My generation is putting access above ownership.**

## The Impossible Dilemma

And yet getting people to subscribe or join a cause is still just as hard as ever. Many publishers are going at it alone, building their own systems at great expense so that they can stay independent and in control of their decisions, even if it adds friction and create balkanization on the consumer’s side, leading to lower conversion rates.

On the other end, ad supported networks have the ability to leverage the whole web for tracking in order to improve their targeting and since they reward page views, Google and Facebook have slowly but surely captured attention and distribution: they now control both supply and demand.

Some creators lean on gatekeepers like Netflix or Spotify or Patreon, who take payments direct from users and then redistribute them back to creators. Apple, Google or Amazon have also identified the opportunity to become the payment layer of the web and are starting to court publications. But if you’re a creator, why would you rely on a tech company that will change its rules, again? Or one that will censor content for unclear reasons? Or one that could limit distribution to the highest bidders only?

Surely there must be another way?

## Yes, there’s another way.

When I started my last company, [Superfeedr](https://superfeedr.com/), I wanted to solve a different problem that creators were having online. We were looking for a different way to help information spread around the web more quickly, and so we built a way for anyone to take their feeds of information, standardize them — building on RSS, one of the pillars of the open web — and push that information around the web with the PubSubHubbub protocol (or [WebSub](https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/), its successor).

That combination of things wasn’t an accident: I’ve been an open web nerd for ever, and the idea of a world wide network with no gatekeeper has always felt like the future… the future of knowledge, of information, of social interactions. And, obviously, that’s a future worth fighting for.

But distributing information quickly wasn’t enough. Over time, I saw the silos emerging, and the tension between creators, platforms, and users building into full-scale battle. It became clear that [things would never work](https://medium.com/ouvre-boite/take-my-money-290bea3532ba) if the systems weren’t in sync with the needs of consumers and creators. **The lack of clear business model directly led to centralization of data and power in the hands of a few silos.**

Now, I think the technology exists to make those systems. So that’s what I’m working on. **It’s called [Unlock](https://unlock-protocol.com/).**

Unlock is meant to help creators find ways to monetize without relying on a middleman. It’s a protocol — and not a centralized platform that controls everything that happens on it. This time, though, it’s not about helping information spread faster, it’s about helping value spread more easily. It’s about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.

![unlock original logo](/images/blog/itstimetounlocktheweb/unlocklegacy.jpg)

## Here’s how it works.

**For creators**, Unlock provides simplicity. Unlock gives them a JavaScript snippet which lets creators embed locks on their own websites that restrict access to people who have the right key. A lock is just an “access control list”: the list of consumers who are allowed to access their creation (because they own a key). It makes adding a membership layer to your website, or even to a single article, just as easy as embedding an ad.

**For users**, Unlock provides consistency. Up until now, subscriptions have been totally chaotic, with hundreds of different approaches, requiring you to keep a collection of accounts — and passwords! — to access all the things you care about. There’s no intelligent way to connect them together, unless you’re the platform that controls the network. The blockchain allows Unlock and creators to know only who has access to what, and nothing more.

Yes, I said it: **the blockchain**. _And I hear the eyes roll._

It’s true that the blockchain is a huge thing that most people don’t really understand, except that they know some people say it’s meant to fix everything. And it’s true that most crypto projects are confusing or underwhelming or over-the-top.

But Unlock isn’t whimsical or unwanted; it’s very practical, very simple, and very tangible. We’re using the technologies at our fingertips to help solve a real problem which is undermining the world around us, in a fully decentralized way.

I think Unlock will change how content is accessed and paid for, and build a much healthier ecosystem for everyone. It has the potential to become the way people access restricted content on the web, in the same way that the web browser eventually became the way people consumed most content on the web.

## What does it enable?

Because Locks are the “nodes” in the Unlock network, sharing the same code and the same API, they can become a layer on which services can be built — services to perform discovery, recommendations, syndication, and even to build secondary memberships markets.

And what about the network effects that those gatekeeper platforms — the Netflixes, the Spotifys, the Googles, the Facebooks — use to create growth and guarantee attention? That’s achievable too. The protocol is, at its core, **a web-centric protocol that will encourage and reward referrals**. So once a user has unlocked something, the protocol can tell if she shared those links and whether that sharing results in other people getting keys to the same lock. As a reward, the protocol will grant her discount tokens so she can access more content at discounted prices.

This creates a strong network effect where the users who have unlocked content are incentivized to share the best content and convince new users to join the network. That’s good for creators, and good for consumers.

_Can you tell I’m excited?_

## Actually, here’s _really_ how it works

(Feel free to skip this technical section if this bit doesn’t matter to you.)

**Creators deploy smart contracts** (which we call locks) that keep track of who has access to their work. Each creator, and only them, fully owns their locks. They also control these locks: the price, scope, expiration of keys and other terms are set by the creators themselves. They can set up site-wide locks, build shared (bundled) locks with other creators, make distinct locks for each piece of content (micro-payments) or even make locks which don’t represent access to content at all — perhaps just “status” or features.

**Unlock provides a JavaScript snippet** which lets creators embed the locks on their own websites to restrict access to people who have the right key. It makes adding a subscription layer to your website as easy as embedding an advert.

**For users, nothing really looks different** from today. They sign up to access a piece of content, get a key to the things they want through native crypto currencies such as Eth (since we’re building on ethereum). Transactions happen then on the blockchain between the consumers and the creator. There are no middlemen.

**Keys are [non fungible tokens](https://hackernoon.com/non-fungible-tokens-5ba83906b275)**; once they have been assigned, nobody can take them back. Because keys are stored on the blockchain, they don’t require users to use a specific single point of failure in order to gain access or show that they previously did: **keys to locks can be easily used on any application or connected device**. Finally, since the keys are crypto assets, users could also trade them (when applicable) or use them to signal that they belong to a community of supporters.

The Unlock Discount Tokens (Ʉ) are managed by another smart contract which rewards curators and referrers, as well as grant discounts upon purchases. This smart contract is also decentralized, through its ownership and **governance**: each discount token owner can vote on who is the “maintainer” of the Unlock Discount smart contract.

## OK, so what happens now?

Unlock is the next phase in my career, but it’s also the next leg of a fascinating journey which started 30 years ago, when the web was born. We are building on the work of many people who came before us — people who may not have predicted the web that we see today, but did understand the value of decentralization. We also have a clear understanding of the web’s current state: **true decentralization cannot be achieved if economic incentives are not aligned between consumers and creators**.

We’re just starting, and I need your help. We’re hiring a small, diverse and multi-disciplinary team: if you know someone we should hire, send them my way!

If you want to stay in touch, [please leave your email address](https://unlock-protocol.com/). We promise to never share your contact information, or send you unwanted messages.


The web needs a better business model — and we believe the technology is finally here to do it.

It’s Time to Unlock The Web

It’s become dangerously clear in the last few years that the business model we thought would support a vibrant, open web just isn’t going to work any more. Driving more and more eyeballs to ads was always considered ethically and morally borderline, but today, monetizing clickbait isn’t just economically fragile: it’s feeding our democracies with more misinformation and fake news.
The thing is, plenty of publishers and creators have been ahead of the curve on this one, even if we don’t give them much credit for it. They knew that free content can, in fact, be very costly and that real freedom comes from knowledge that’s expensive to produce. They understood that when Stewart Brand famously said that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free">“information wants to be free”</a> he meant free as in “speech” (libre), not free as in “beer” (gratis).
Some publishers, like the New York Times, got a lot of heat when they introduced <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html">their paywall</a>, but the trend they set isn’t reversing: they now have 3M subscribers and aim for 10M by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html">2020</a>. Hundreds of other news and content organizations are going in the same direction, <a href="https://medium.com/membership">including this very platform</a>.
Another trend emerged in the last 10 years: ownership does not seem to matter as much as it used to. People are getting rid of their meticulously amassed records and DVD collections to replace them with monthly subscriptions to Spotify and Netflix. Ride sharing platforms have put yet another dent in the car ownership status symbol… etc. My generation is putting access above ownership.
<h2>The Impossible Dilemma</h2>
And yet getting people to subscribe or join a cause is still just as hard as ever. Many publishers are going at it alone, building their own systems at great expense so that they can stay independent and in control of their decisions, even if it adds friction and create balkanization on the consumer’s side, leading to lower conversion rates.
On the other end, ad supported networks have the ability to leverage the whole web for tracking in order to improve their targeting and since they reward page views, Google and Facebook have slowly but surely captured attention and distribution: they now control both supply and demand.
Some creators lean on gatekeepers like Netflix or Spotify or Patreon, who take payments direct from users and then redistribute them back to creators. Apple, Google or Amazon have also identified the opportunity to become the payment layer of the web and are starting to court publications. But if you’re a creator, why would you rely on a tech company that will change its rules, again? Or one that will censor content for unclear reasons? Or one that could limit distribution to the highest bidders only?
Surely there must be another way?
<h2>Yes, there’s another way.</h2>
When I started my last company, <a href="https://superfeedr.com/">Superfeedr</a>, I wanted to solve a different problem that creators were having online. We were looking for a different way to help information spread around the web more quickly, and so we built a way for anyone to take their feeds of information, standardize them — building on RSS, one of the pillars of the open web — and push that information around the web with the PubSubHubbub protocol (or <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/">WebSub</a>, its successor).
That combination of things wasn’t an accident: I’ve been an open web nerd for ever, and the idea of a world wide network with no gatekeeper has always felt like the future… the future of knowledge, of information, of social interactions. And, obviously, that’s a future worth fighting for.
But distributing information quickly wasn’t enough. Over time, I saw the silos emerging, and the tension between creators, platforms, and users building into full-scale battle. It became clear that <a href="https://medium.com/ouvre-boite/take-my-money-290bea3532ba">things would never work</a> if the systems weren’t in sync with the needs of consumers and creators. The lack of clear business model directly led to centralization of data and power in the hands of a few silos.
Now, I think the technology exists to make those systems. So that’s what I’m working on. It’s called <a href="https://unlock-protocol.com/">Unlock</a>.
Unlock is meant to help creators find ways to monetize without relying on a middleman. It’s a protocol — and not a centralized platform that controls everything that happens on it. This time, though, it’s not about helping information spread faster, it’s about helping value spread more easily. It’s about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.
<img src="/images/blog/itstimetounlocktheweb/unlocklegacy.jpg" alt="unlock original logo">
<h2>Here’s how it works.</h2>
For creators, Unlock provides simplicity. Unlock gives them a JavaScript snippet which lets creators embed locks on their own websites that restrict access to people who have the right key. A lock is just an “access control list”: the list of consumers who are allowed to access their creation (because they own a key). It makes adding a membership layer to your website, or even to a single article, just as easy as embedding an ad.
For users, Unlock provides consistency. Up until now, subscriptions have been totally chaotic, with hundreds of different approaches, requiring you to keep a collection of accounts — and passwords! — to access all the things you care about. There’s no intelligent way to connect them together, unless you’re the platform that controls the network. The blockchain allows Unlock and creators to know only who has access to what, and nothing more.
Yes, I said it: the blockchain. And I hear the eyes roll.
It’s true that the blockchain is a huge thing that most people don’t really understand, except that they know some people say it’s meant to fix everything. And it’s true that most crypto projects are confusing or underwhelming or over-the-top.
But Unlock isn’t whimsical or unwanted; it’s very practical, very simple, and very tangible. We’re using the technologies at our fingertips to help solve a real problem which is undermining the world around us, in a fully decentralized way.
I think Unlock will change how content is accessed and paid for, and build a much healthier ecosystem for everyone. It has the potential to become the way people access restricted content on the web, in the same way that the web browser eventually became the way people consumed most content on the web.
<h2>What does it enable?</h2>
Because Locks are the “nodes” in the Unlock network, sharing the same code and the same API, they can become a layer on which services can be built — services to perform discovery, recommendations, syndication, and even to build secondary memberships markets.
And what about the network effects that those gatekeeper platforms — the Netflixes, the Spotifys, the Googles, the Facebooks — use to create growth and guarantee attention? That’s achievable too. The protocol is, at its core, a web-centric protocol that will encourage and reward referrals. So once a user has unlocked something, the protocol can tell if she shared those links and whether that sharing results in other people getting keys to the same lock. As a reward, the protocol will grant her discount tokens so she can access more content at discounted prices.
This creates a strong network effect where the users who have unlocked content are incentivized to share the best content and convince new users to join the network. That’s good for creators, and good for consumers.
Can you tell I’m excited?
<h2>Actually, here’s really how it works</h2>
(Feel free to skip this technical section if this bit doesn’t matter to you.)
Creators deploy smart contracts (which we call locks) that keep track of who has access to their work. Each creator, and only them, fully owns their locks. They also control these locks: the price, scope, expiration of keys and other terms are set by the creators themselves. They can set up site-wide locks, build shared (bundled) locks with other creators, make distinct locks for each piece of content (micro-payments) or even make locks which don’t represent access to content at all — perhaps just “status” or features.
Unlock provides a JavaScript snippet which lets creators embed the locks on their own websites to restrict access to people who have the right key. It makes adding a subscription layer to your website as easy as embedding an advert.
For users, nothing really looks different from today. They sign up to access a piece of content, get a key to the things they want through native crypto currencies such as Eth (since we’re building on ethereum). Transactions happen then on the blockchain between the consumers and the creator. There are no middlemen.
Keys are <a href="https://hackernoon.com/non-fungible-tokens-5ba83906b275">non fungible tokens</a>; once they have been assigned, nobody can take them back. Because keys are stored on the blockchain, they don’t require users to use a specific single point of failure in order to gain access or show that they previously did: keys to locks can be easily used on any application or connected device. Finally, since the keys are crypto assets, users could also trade them (when applicable) or use them to signal that they belong to a community of supporters.
The Unlock Discount Tokens (Ʉ) are managed by another smart contract which rewards curators and referrers, as well as grant discounts upon purchases. This smart contract is also decentralized, through its ownership and governance: each discount token owner can vote on who is the “maintainer” of the Unlock Discount smart contract.
<h2>OK, so what happens now?</h2>
Unlock is the next phase in my career, but it’s also the next leg of a fascinating journey which started 30 years ago, when the web was born. We are building on the work of many people who came before us — people who may not have predicted the web that we see today, but did understand the value of decentralization. We also have a clear understanding of the web’s current state: true decentralization cannot be achieved if economic incentives are not aligned between consumers and creators.
We’re just starting, and I need your help. We’re hiring a small, diverse and multi-disciplinary team: if you know someone we should hire, send them my way!
If you want to stay in touch, <a href="https://unlock-protocol.com/">please leave your email address</a>. We promise to never share your contact information, or send you unwanted messages.