More People Dipping Toes Into Web Monetization

Léonie Watson:

I do think that Coil and Web Monetization are at the vanguard of a quiet revolution.

Here’s me when I’m visiting Léonie’s site:

My Coil subscription ($5/month) doles out money to sites I visit that have monetization set up and installed.

Other Coil subscribers deposit small bits of money directly into my online wallet (I’m using Uphold). I set this up over a year ago and found it all quick and easy to get started. But to be fair, I wasn’t trying to understand every detail of it and I’m still not betting anything major on it. PPK went as far to say it was user-hostile and I’ll admit he has some good points…

Signing up for payment services is a complete hassle, because you don’t know what you’re doing while being granted the illusion of free choice by picking one of two or three different systems — that you don’t understand and that aren’t explained. Why would I pick EasyMoneyGetter over CoinWare when both of them are black boxes I never heard of?

Also, these services use insane units. Brave use BATs, though to their credit I saw a translation to US$ — but not to any other currency, even though they could have figured out from my IP address that I come from Europe. Coil once informed me I had earned 0.42 XBP without further comment. W? T? F?

Bigger and bigger sites are starting to use it. TechDirt, is one example. I’ve got it on CodePen as well.

If this was just a “sprinkle some pennies at sites” play, it would be doomed.

I’m pessimistic at that approach. Micropayments have been done over and over and it hasn’t worked and I just don’t see it ever having enough legs to do anything meaningful to the industry.

At a quick glance, that’s what this looks like, and that’s how it is behaving right now, and that deserves a little skepticism.

There are two things that make this different

1. This has a chance of being a web standard, not something that has to be installed to work.
2. There are APIs to actually do things based on people transferring money to a site.

Neither of these things are realized, but if both of them happen, then meaningful change is much more likely to happen.

With the APIs, a site could say, “You’ll see no ads on this site if you pay us $1/month,” and then write code to make that happen all anonymously. That’s so cool. Removing ads is the most basic and obvious use case, and I hope some people give that a healthy try. I don’t do that on this site, because I think the tech isn’t quite there yet. I’d want to clearly be able to control the dollar-level of when you get that perk (you can’t control how much you give sites on Coil right now), but more importantly, in order to really make good on the promise of not delivering ads, you need to know very quickly if any given user is supporting you at the required level or not. For example, you can’t wait 2600 milliseconds to decide whether ads need to be requested. Well, you can, but you’ll hurt your ad revenue. And you can’t simply request the ads and hide them when you find out, lest you are not really making good on a promise, as trackers’n’stuff will have already done their thing.

Coil said the right move here is the “100+20” Rule, which I think is smart. It says to give everyone the full value of your site, but then give people extra if they hit monetization thresholds. For example, on this site, if you’re a supporter (not a Coil thing, this is old-school eCommerce), you can download the screencast originals (nobody else can). That’s the kind of thing I’d be happy to unlock via Web Monetization if it became easy to write the code to do that.

Maybe the web really will get monetized at some point and thus fix the original sin of the internet. I’m not really up on where things are in the process, but there is a whole site for it.

I’m not really helping, yet

While I have Coil installed and I’m a fan of all this, what will actually make a difference is having sites that actually do things for users that pay them. Like my video download example above. Maybe recipe sites offer some neat little printable PDF shopping list for people that pay them via Web Monetization. I dunno! Stuff like that! I’m not doing anything cool like that yet, myself.

If this thing gets legs, we’ll see all sorts of creative stuff, and the standard will make it so there is no one service that lords over this. It will be standardized APIs, so there could be a whole ecosystem of online wallets that accept money, services that help dole money out, fancy in-browser features, and site owners doing creative things.