Behavior design matters and is a great challenge for engineers.
"The idea is to create experiences that ... are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether."
The most likely use case is to make pop-over ads 100x more annoying, not to complement a paywall. I would hope user revolts would kill this, but I'm not optimistic...
Sorry, but what does this even mean? You may it seem like there is a universally accepted definition of the word "matters" to which these folks are not living up to.
Without mechanisms for publishers to monetize visitors, publisher quality deteriorates or becomes untenable for independents.
In a world where nobody wants to pay for content, this is a minimally disruptive, novel way to pass revenue directly into the hands of publishers that are working hard to create content.
PS: Advertizing is basically a zero sum game. It's a multi billion dollar industry, but most people spend most of what they make and better advertizing does not change that fact.
It's perfectly OK for a startup to do advertising stuff, but I agree with jrkelly that this is not what the world needs engineers for. It's just a way to make some money and I wish them luck with that.
We do our best to measure it and wake-up the brands. They're quite entertained by other flashy & wavy stuff on the screen at this time.
Maybe the best form of protest would be to come up with a one-click way to pay a few cents for something. As far as I know, Flattr is about the only thing in that space.
We did more than 100 of design iterations on millions of people to come to the current simplistic design.