Pagey is an experiment in cryptocurrency micropayments for content. Instead of paying for an entire eBook upfront, users pay per page that they read, as they read.

Both parties stand a chance to benefit from such a system. Users who lose interest in a book half way through are able to recoup their investment (in the sense that they never originally had to fork over the full cost). This potentially lowers the barrier to them reading other books - knowing that the initial commitment is low, they’re willing to give more books a try, possibly leading to favorable outcomes for authors as well.

There are also interesting metrics that could be tracked and analyzed per user (for individual review - how far do I usually go in books vs the crowd at large?) or per author (how do my specific writing styles throughout the chapters correlate with reader dropoff?). Generally, I’d have more faith in data backed by paid pageviews vs. the “costless” page flipping of traditional eBook marketplaces, with their “one and done” transactions.

Pagey won a grand prize at the 2015 Money20/20 hackathon.