In what may be a first-of-its-kind move, consumers who see ads targeted to them via programmatic media buys on the open web will get a piece of the action. You read that right: consumers will get a share of the revenue generated by the ads served to them.

While you get your mind around that concept, I'll go into some of the background -- including the who, what, when, where and whys -- of what led up to it.

Paying people to look at ads is not an entirely new model, even if it seems like an antithetical one.

I mean, when you think about it, most forms of advertising pay consumers indirectly -- usually be defraying the cost of accessing content, or a service like search, navigation, etc. But in recent years, a burgeoning marketplace has emerged of models that reward consumers explicitly for agreeing to be exposed to ads.

Most notably, this has emerged on gaming platforms that enable consumers to unlock premium upgrades by agreeing to view and ad exposure.

Industry bodies have even come up with a term for this model, albeit a clunky one: rewarded opt-in advertising (or ROIA, which is kind of the inverse of ROAI, which stands for return-on-advertising-investment).

But most of those models still are indirect forms of payment -- you know, rewards like upgraded, premiums, points, etc. -- not cold cash, although there are some of those too.

I even tried launching a venture to do that some years ago as a side hustle while editing MediaPost. It was called Bid/r and it failed for a number of reasons, mainly because we ran out of funding, but also because we were too early in the game and most people -- consumers and marketers alike -- looked at me like I had two heads when I explained the model to them.

I'll spare you all the gory details, but a decade or so later, some people have credited me with being a pioneer of Web3 advertising models that cut the consumer in. Bid/r's model was actually very different than that. Our thesis was that consumers were the end-market for advertising, and therefore had the right to sell their own attention directly to brands that wanted to acquire it, and we were simply a platform for facilitating that.

During Bid/r's early startup years, I bumped into a number of people who had similar ideas, but with slightly different angles. One of them was Sue Fennessy, founder of Standard Media Index, which she sold and is now part of Guideline.

Fennessy went on to found social media app WeAre8, which also utilized a model that cut its users in on a share of its advertising revenue, as well as donating a percentage to charities.

She also recently announced she has changed her own personal brand, changing her name to Zoe Kalar. You can read more about that here.

I've written about WeAre8 previously, and it's still pretty early stage, but it is gaining mass, and this week it announced a deal that will extend its advertising inventory off its own platform and take it across the open Web via a deal with contextual targeting platform Public Good, which helps marketers target "values and purpose" based ads to consumers via an ad network or prominent editorial brands including HuffPost, Guardian, Hearst Magazines, Discovery Network.

WeAre8 calls the ads on its own platform, as well as the ones that will be distributed across Public Good's network, "Golden 8 ad units," which I think is an allusion to the "Golden Rule" (you know, do unto others...).

"The deal takes the ad unit that pays people and charity for every ad view (currently only available on the weare8 app) and distributes it across major publishers via Public Goods programatic network," WeAre8 CMO Luke Robinson explained to me this morning as part of a series of emails we exchanged.