You are assuming that any effort will be trying to break the advertising paradigm in favour of a direct payment one. The article/grant doesn't seem to be about

You are assuming that any effort will be trying to break the advertising paradigm in favour of a direct payment one. The article/grant doesn't seem to be about that. Whatever the business model, this seems to be more about breaking platform capture than breaking business model. The alphabook platforms particularly. Ultimately it's a big field. We have direct payment models (netflix, spotify, iTunes, kindle...), ad-suported models and quite a lot of online content production where monetisation is secondary to distribution. I think it's a good time for this initiative. YouTubers (for example) with millions viewers can (a) make very little money (b) chaffe at various policies, either money or content related and (c) generally have far less power vis-a-vis alphabook than their audience size implies. Meanwhile, podcasts, a much freer medium, is both more profitable and quality oriented because of the platform openness. ...open doesn't mean no advertising. The main thing it means is decentralised, or centered around content creators. This a a good idea. YouTube is no longer necessary. If it suddenly disappeared, online video content would quickly recover fully around alternatives. They contribute the least value while extracting the most.