Digital Media & Content
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By lowering the barriers to publishing, the Web has led to an explosion of digital content available in many languages around the world. Videos, articles, and more interactive experiences can be accessed simply by visiting and sharing a link. But when it comes to monetizing this content, or even commenting on it, each site still has its own login system and subscription plans. Here are some examples:
Managing Accounts
People share links across many different sites, including news organizations, magazines, video sites, and so on. After following a link that a friend shared, they often hit a paywall on a site like nytimes.com or medium.com . The site will let them read the first part of an article, or watch the first minute of a video, and then require payment.
However, it's tedious to register and maintain accounts across many different sites, each with their own username and password. Moreover, each site subscription works only for that site, and people's typical experience these days is to share and follow links every day to resources across many different websites.
QBUX enables micropayments to happen when a paywalled article embeds an iframe hosted by the Community which sent the user to the article. For example, NYTimes.com may embed an iframe hosted by Yang2020.app, Qbix Browser or any other Community. The Communities can then sell various monthly packages to their members, and pay out {Publisher}BUX to the company hosting the content (in this case, NYTimes.com) similarly to how they would have paid {App}BUX to a company hosting videoconferencing software. The micropayments via embedded iframes can go in either direction.
This enables a "bundled" business model similar to Netflix or cable channels, where people pay for recurring monthly plans by various Communities, and spend credits on various content around the web that is shared by this Community. It will be an alternative to the advertising-supported Community model (Facebook, Twitter, et al), and be more similar to a decentralized micropayments model (Patreon, Brave, et al). Forums and Communities around the web can use QBUX to let their members have access to a growing amount of content on the Web. Both independent and hired content creators (journalists, podcasters, musicians) can use QBUX to earn money for their content, after letting people watch the first minute of the video or read the first part of an article.
Aggregators
Qbix Social Browser will be the first piece of software to implement QBUX at scale, with an open offer to any platform to earn QBUX in exchange for making their paywalled content available to others. If a link was shared from A to B, who are two different users on the Community, then B would be allowed to view the content at that link without restrictions. If the content creator is concerned about cannibalizing their existing subscribers, they can choose to give visitors full access only to see the shared article or video, but require a site subscription for any visitors who start clicking around the site and expressing interest in their other content.
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With time, other Communities can set up their own QBUX-powered deals and payouts with other rules — it is an open system. Aggregators may appear, which negotiate deals with many different sites, and sell their own "bundle" subscription plans. They can offer to decorate links with a cryptographically signed identifier, telling the publisher to open an iframe to the Aggregator's domain and earn a micropayment through it. Smaller Communities can then partner with these Aggregators to let their members have access to large "bundles" of domains.