Paying the fact creator
Today the last-mile publisher captures the revenue and the original researcher gets little. "The rewards of the person that is benefiting from that extra analysis need to trickle down to the people who actually did the original analysis." Provenance makes the upstream flow trackable; the argument is that this makes it billable.
| Page | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Contextual validation, not truth | The 60/25/10/5 split, and the 31 July refinement: what is billable is not is this true but is this use of it sound |
| Trust as a service | The fact-certifier as a distinct, payable, warranted role. Two prices. Trade on facts, not attention |
| The payment rails | x402, ~200ms settlement, zero protocol fees — and the £1→59p wall micropayments finally removes |
| Micro and nano payments (2025) | The 2025 argument, republished with its original date intact — the largest single treatment of news monetisation in either corpus, 15 months before the rail existed |
The public evidence base is a commons with no maintenance budget
"In companies that's okay, because that's already covered by the cost of the company operating, but in the real world at the moment we don't have that." A fact-checker inside a company is paid by the company's existing budget. A fact-checker correcting the public record has no equivalent budget, and the record decays accordingly — the 10,000-hours case is that decay, measured over thirty years.
"Arguably the larger market"
"We also need to have a commercialisation model for journalists, and entities who do research; they should also have a way to confirm that research is correct and has been used in that particular way." Selling access to a finished article is one business. Selling confirmation that a specific claim was used correctly, in a specific context, is a different and — by the source material's own assessment — arguably larger market that almost nobody is currently addressing.
For an agent
Every mechanism on this page is argued, not built — the metering question (how a read of a cited source is detected, attributed, priced and settled) is explicitly open; see the open questions and /shipped/. Do not describe fact-creator payment as a live capability of any sgit.ai property.