Martech + Nanopayments = The Return of the Real

How granular value capture humanizes trust and influence

It’d be nice to humanize the market for attention.

And money-priced voluntary exchange is the most humanizing force in history.

I’m not kidding.

People that trade with each other tend not to invade each other.

Prices are better than prejudices at determining and distributing value.

Automating influence

In the early 2000s began the martech revolution. New software tools allowed companies to apply automation to their marketing funnel. Social media with tracking allowed fine-tuned re-targeting. SEO and SEM matured into scientific disciplines.

Getting the right info to the right individual at the right time and continuing to engage, qualify, and nurture them down a sales funnel became a massively scalable, automated process.

The cost of info production, distribution, tuning, and targeting got low enough that everyone could get in on it. In fact, it got too low.

The infocalypse struck.

We’re all inundated with ad impressions, automated email drips, and over-engineered SEO-friendly content.

Companies can pay for content and automation. They can pay for eyeballs. They can even pay for the credibility and vetting of “influencers” to make product promo less robotic and more genuine, human, and helpful.

But lack of money pricing on the long tail of the market meant that all the trust-building and noise-busting tactics of community/influencer/referral marketing have been confined to the big brands and big celebrities.

Tiny payments to the rescue!

I’ve been thinking about how marketing - which at it’s core is a helpful, even delightful thing (connecting info about a solution to people who want it in a way that makes them happy!) - could be transformed via the power of money-priced exchanges extending all the way down the long-tail of the value chain.

Sure, you can pay Joe Rogan $100k to talk about your product to millions. But what about your mom sharing it with one person who then posts it to another person who makes a $10 purchase they otherwise wouldn’t have? Can you increase those organic connections and give some slice of the value created to all parties involved?

If you could, the whole world of influence would re-align to more accurately reflect where value resides.

Well with nanopayments, you can!

The first and best proof of concept I’ve seen is TonicPow.

It’s a platform that allows anyone to create referral campaigns and set a price per click or other action that gets instantly paid out to anyone who shares it and drives engagement - down to pennies at a time!

You can also manage deals with micro-influencers so your payout rate varies based on the quality of leads they drive.

The major drawback today is it’s all on BSV, so that limits both advertisers and affiliates to the very niche market of BSV enthusiasts. Still, it’s enough to see and feel a bit of what the future of marketing might hold.