6 ms·

I think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring. Consumers establish a wallet pr

I think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring. Consumers establish a wallet provider and install a browser extension (for now, until the standard is formally adopted). When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content. Content creators can then do things like grant access/remove the paywall, not load/remove ads, or offer bonus features. Today, GQ, Wired, and ~1,000 other sites are experimenting with the Web Monetization API. The only wallet provider right now is Coil, but the protocol is well defined and ready for other players. References: - https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ - https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ - https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized

ako 6y ago
It solves the problem only partially: newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only, they need bundling to generate enough volume. Same thing can be seen with music industry: spotify doesn't pay enough per play, so artists are now told to use spotify as marketing, and make money from performances. Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like. An election? /s
  - jeegsy 6y ago
    That is excellent
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only Printed newspapers were surviving just fine despite selling for a few bucks despite it being a physical piece of paper that needed to be printed & delivered on very tight schedules. The same model should be applied for the web - the price point is already proven to be affordable enough for the majority of the market, and the lack of logistics would generate higher profits.
  - ako 6y ago
    Newspapers were not surviving from few bucks: they had subscriptions (bundling low value content with high value content) & advertisements (lower margins now, moved to other channels like craigslist). And logistics may have been expensive, but IT infrastructure and staff is not cheap either. A few aggregation sites have tried to bundle news from different publishers for 10$/euro per month (e.g, blendle). But as can be seen from the original prices of a subscription ($250+ / year / publication), this means a much lower revenue per publication than before. For half the price, subscribers get all the publications. This is not going to be enough for the publishers to survive.
  - nl 6y ago
    Ads - especially classified ads - paid for newspapers.
  - znpy 6y ago
    > Printed newspapers were surviving just fine Oh boy, that's so not the case. My previous job was still in IT but the company had a strong foothold in the news&media sector. Most newsroom are struggling and have been for at least the last ten years. Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      > Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much. This is the concept I don't think people get when they say "clearly newspapers used to be sustain themselves in the past" -- the market has fundamentally changed and now newspapers and magazines aren't the only game in town competing for people's passive entertainment time.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
"the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content." This sounds bad. Websites will have even more reason to delay you with slow scrolling, filler text, popup windows just to make you stay on the website longer. Kind of like subscription based MMORPGs have slow travel times, long character leveling and a lot of grind to make you play longer.
- mkl 6y ago
  It sounds really bad, though it's pretty hard to understand. Webmonetization.org/explainer is a 404, but I think I found it at https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/. One thing it says is "It should also be possible to: Tell the browser NOT to pay a particular website any money." We may end up with blocking lists like ad blockers, and getting put on or taken off such a list could be very contentious. Clickbait, introductory waffle, deliberately hard to understand information, bloated articles around tiny snippets of useful information, etc. would all be strongly incentivised. I'd rather just block every payment by default, and manually enable a few. Coil's website is very vague and light on information, but two things it says are 1) you pay $5 per month [1], and 2) Coil pays websites $0.36 per hour spent [2]. That's ~14 hours of engaging with content per month, or just 30 minutes per day. What happens when it runs out? Payments stop? Access is cut off? Have to top up like a pay-as-you-go phone? I think if I ever signed up for such a system I would become very practised at quickly judging a site and closing the tab. I visit plenty of sites I wouldn't give money to. Why not just give me a button to click when I want to pay 10c or whatever? [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ [2] https://coil.com/creator https://coil.com/creator
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    The sensible thing would be to make it opt in. Then the initial interaction is "give us a try" instead of some dark pattern designed to make it hard to leave the page or whatever. Could still have community managed lists, where adding/enabling the list switched payment on for those sites.
eitland 6y ago
> When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content. Will it empty my wallet as I attend an emergency? Will we see an uptick of sleazy tactics? At least for articles I ask: make it inexpensive for providers and simple for me. I pay them for articles, they show me articles, preferably easy to download as pdf. I'd probably pay a few tens more pr year for regional or global news as well as quality blog posts. (I already subscribe to the local newspaper and one national newspaper and I'm forced to pay a few hundred for the national broadcasting.) But like Tim I am not going to add more subscriptions unless they are just like Spotify, - and even then I think that will be a bad deal for both me and the publishers.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I view mobile free-to-play games as the preview of some micropayment-oriented professions. They suck away your time if you don't pay up, and at that point I don't think it's even worth engaging in news reading.
rocqua 6y ago
I truly hope they shy away from paying for 'engagement' and at the very least make it a conscious decision for the user to pay for 'access'. We already have a lot of people and bad techniques dedicated to driving 'engagement' on platforms like facebook and youtube. These are not good for the users. Having many more providers strive to keep our attention for as long as possible is very much not what I want. Besides, the value I get from an article is quite unrelated to my 'enagement' with the article. At least with facebook / youtube. It makes _sense_ because every second I engage is another possibility to show me an add / pump up their stats. But if I am going to be paying for an article, I kind of want maximum oomph per minute spend reading the article. Please don't let the newspapers growth-hack their way into getting more monetization payments. Please just let me pay per article or subscribe if that is what I want. And whatever happens, don't let my browser start spending my money without my explicit consent. If every second my browser is on is gonna cost me money that will give me shittons of anxiety
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
So it trusts the client's browser to determine what they owe? If the payment is relying on goodwill that might be ok, I suppose. Their Documentation and Explainer links are both broken.
- mkl 6y ago
  The explainer seems to have moved here: https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ The Docs link at the top works, so it's supposed to go to https://webmonetization.org/docs https://webmonetization.org/docs, which redirects to https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started
chris_f 6y ago
The other nice thing about Web Monetization is that you can use it to divide earnings to content providers on your site through probabilistic revenue sharing [0]. I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Awarding the length of visit also isn't aligned with the goal of all types of websites. My site is a web search engine, and the goal is for people to spend as little time on the site as possible because it means I sent them to where they needed to go by giving them the right result quickly. I do hope it gains greater acceptance. [0] https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. >The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Please post the name of your site so I can make sure to never visit it. Not because you're bad or evil. Not because your content is bad or doesn't match my "biases." But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users. Hey. I get it. We all need to make money to pay for the things we need to survive. But creating an environment where the decision to visit a site (not even to access content, if I understand the spec properly) requires a calculation as to whether or not I first want to pay is so far from being reasonable (think being automatically charged, say, $10 as a minimum purchase when you enter an Amazon Go[0] store). Please don't consider this a personal attack. It is not. Rather, I'm using strong language to express my point and encourage you to back off that road. [0] https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011
  - retzkek 6y ago
    > But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users. I'm not sure your vitriol is called for here, it seems very easy to selectively enable and disable monetization [1]. I'm not OP, but if I were to monetize a search engine I'd have the <meta> tag on the results page but _not_ on the home page. Likewise if I were a content provider, I wouldn't monetize the index page. I imagine and hope that this would be standard practice, but perhaps I'm being overly optimistic. [1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop
JulianMorrison 6y ago
Oh hey, now my 20 background tabs can cost me money, that's useful. Will they show a ($) icon like they currently show a "playing sound" icon?
- pmontra 6y ago
  Not only that. Am I going to pay twice if I reload the page / close and reopen the browser / reboot the computer / view the same article in another browser or my phone / read it again tomorrow / etc?
  - pc86 6y ago
    Rest assured it will be whatever is most expensive for you. The idea that an HTML tag can cost someone money without explicit approval every single time is ludicrous.
  - JulianMorrison 6y ago
    Given that the implementation seems to be "constant drain of money per time open" then reading it twice costs twice, and the only way to read at your leisure without throwing away money is to paste the text into Notepad.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I expect a browser extension to emerge immediately that transparently clones pages and views them locally.
      - JulianMorrison 6y ago
        That won't necessarily help if there's still a "bleed money to XYZ" HTML tag in there.
        DocTomoe 6y ago
        You mean a piece of text that is easily filtered out?

ako 6y ago

It solves the problem only partially: newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only, they need bundling to generate enough volume. Same thing can be seen with music industry: spotify doesn't pay enough per play, so artists are now told to use spotify as marketing, and make money from performances. Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.

bigiain 6y ago
> Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like. An election? /s
- jeegsy 6y ago
  That is excellent
Nextgrid 6y ago
> newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only Printed newspapers were surviving just fine despite selling for a few bucks despite it being a physical piece of paper that needed to be printed & delivered on very tight schedules. The same model should be applied for the web - the price point is already proven to be affordable enough for the majority of the market, and the lack of logistics would generate higher profits.
- ako 6y ago
  Newspapers were not surviving from few bucks: they had subscriptions (bundling low value content with high value content) & advertisements (lower margins now, moved to other channels like craigslist). And logistics may have been expensive, but IT infrastructure and staff is not cheap either. A few aggregation sites have tried to bundle news from different publishers for 10$/euro per month (e.g, blendle). But as can be seen from the original prices of a subscription ($250+ / year / publication), this means a much lower revenue per publication than before. For half the price, subscribers get all the publications. This is not going to be enough for the publishers to survive.
- nl 6y ago
  Ads - especially classified ads - paid for newspapers.
- znpy 6y ago
  > Printed newspapers were surviving just fine Oh boy, that's so not the case. My previous job was still in IT but the company had a strong foothold in the news&media sector. Most newsroom are struggling and have been for at least the last ten years. Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    > Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much. This is the concept I don't think people get when they say "clearly newspapers used to be sustain themselves in the past" -- the market has fundamentally changed and now newspapers and magazines aren't the only game in town competing for people's passive entertainment time.

skocznymroczny 6y ago

"the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content." This sounds bad. Websites will have even more reason to delay you with slow scrolling, filler text, popup windows just to make you stay on the website longer. Kind of like subscription based MMORPGs have slow travel times, long character leveling and a lot of grind to make you play longer.

mkl 6y ago
It sounds really bad, though it's pretty hard to understand. Webmonetization.org/explainer is a 404, but I think I found it at https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/. One thing it says is "It should also be possible to: Tell the browser NOT to pay a particular website any money." We may end up with blocking lists like ad blockers, and getting put on or taken off such a list could be very contentious. Clickbait, introductory waffle, deliberately hard to understand information, bloated articles around tiny snippets of useful information, etc. would all be strongly incentivised. I'd rather just block every payment by default, and manually enable a few. Coil's website is very vague and light on information, but two things it says are 1) you pay $5 per month [1], and 2) Coil pays websites $0.36 per hour spent [2]. That's ~14 hours of engaging with content per month, or just 30 minutes per day. What happens when it runs out? Payments stop? Access is cut off? Have to top up like a pay-as-you-go phone? I think if I ever signed up for such a system I would become very practised at quickly judging a site and closing the tab. I visit plenty of sites I wouldn't give money to. Why not just give me a button to click when I want to pay 10c or whatever? [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ [2] https://coil.com/creator https://coil.com/creator
- maxerickson 6y ago
  The sensible thing would be to make it opt in. Then the initial interaction is "give us a try" instead of some dark pattern designed to make it hard to leave the page or whatever. Could still have community managed lists, where adding/enabling the list switched payment on for those sites.

eitland 6y ago

> When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content. Will it empty my wallet as I attend an emergency? Will we see an uptick of sleazy tactics? At least for articles I ask: make it inexpensive for providers and simple for me. I pay them for articles, they show me articles, preferably easy to download as pdf. I'd probably pay a few tens more pr year for regional or global news as well as quality blog posts. (I already subscribe to the local newspaper and one national newspaper and I'm forced to pay a few hundred for the national broadcasting.) But like Tim I am not going to add more subscriptions unless they are just like Spotify, - and even then I think that will be a bad deal for both me and the publishers.

selfhoster11 6y ago
I view mobile free-to-play games as the preview of some micropayment-oriented professions. They suck away your time if you don't pay up, and at that point I don't think it's even worth engaging in news reading.

rocqua 6y ago

I truly hope they shy away from paying for 'engagement' and at the very least make it a conscious decision for the user to pay for 'access'. We already have a lot of people and bad techniques dedicated to driving 'engagement' on platforms like facebook and youtube. These are not good for the users. Having many more providers strive to keep our attention for as long as possible is very much not what I want. Besides, the value I get from an article is quite unrelated to my 'enagement' with the article. At least with facebook / youtube. It makes _sense_ because every second I engage is another possibility to show me an add / pump up their stats. But if I am going to be paying for an article, I kind of want maximum oomph per minute spend reading the article. Please don't let the newspapers growth-hack their way into getting more monetization payments. Please just let me pay per article or subscribe if that is what I want. And whatever happens, don't let my browser start spending my money without my explicit consent. If every second my browser is on is gonna cost me money that will give me shittons of anxiety

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

So it trusts the client's browser to determine what they owe? If the payment is relying on goodwill that might be ok, I suppose. Their Documentation and Explainer links are both broken.

mkl 6y ago
The explainer seems to have moved here: https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/ The Docs link at the top works, so it's supposed to go to https://webmonetization.org/docs https://webmonetization.org/docs, which redirects to https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started

chris_f 6y ago

The other nice thing about Web Monetization is that you can use it to divide earnings to content providers on your site through probabilistic revenue sharing [0]. I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Awarding the length of visit also isn't aligned with the goal of all types of websites. My site is a web search engine, and the goal is for people to spend as little time on the site as possible because it means I sent them to where they needed to go by giving them the right result quickly. I do hope it gains greater acceptance. [0] https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/ https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/

nobody9999 6y ago
>I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. >The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Please post the name of your site so I can make sure to never visit it. Not because you're bad or evil. Not because your content is bad or doesn't match my "biases." But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users. Hey. I get it. We all need to make money to pay for the things we need to survive. But creating an environment where the decision to visit a site (not even to access content, if I understand the spec properly) requires a calculation as to whether or not I first want to pay is so far from being reasonable (think being automatically charged, say, $10 as a minimum purchase when you enter an Amazon Go[0] store). Please don't consider this a personal attack. It is not. Rather, I'm using strong language to express my point and encourage you to back off that road. [0] https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011
- retzkek 6y ago
  > But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users. I'm not sure your vitriol is called for here, it seems very easy to selectively enable and disable monetization [1]. I'm not OP, but if I were to monetize a search engine I'd have the <meta> tag on the results page but _not_ on the home page. Likewise if I were a content provider, I wouldn't monetize the index page. I imagine and hope that this would be standard practice, but perhaps I'm being overly optimistic. [1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop

JulianMorrison 6y ago

Oh hey, now my 20 background tabs can cost me money, that's useful. Will they show a ($) icon like they currently show a "playing sound" icon?

pmontra 6y ago
Not only that. Am I going to pay twice if I reload the page / close and reopen the browser / reboot the computer / view the same article in another browser or my phone / read it again tomorrow / etc?
- pc86 6y ago
  Rest assured it will be whatever is most expensive for you. The idea that an HTML tag can cost someone money without explicit approval every single time is ludicrous.
- JulianMorrison 6y ago
  Given that the implementation seems to be "constant drain of money per time open" then reading it twice costs twice, and the only way to read at your leisure without throwing away money is to paste the text into Notepad.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I expect a browser extension to emerge immediately that transparently clones pages and views them locally.
    - JulianMorrison 6y ago
      That won't necessarily help if there's still a "bleed money to XYZ" HTML tag in there.
      - DocTomoe 6y ago
        You mean a piece of text that is easily filtered out?