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Journey into Web Monetization - day 1

Carl Barrdahl on May 10, 2020

I was excited to learn about this new web monetization api and what impact it can have on the future of the web. My basic understanding of it: C...
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Jacob Colborn

Idea #1 strikes home for me. A way to cut out the middle man involved with the current music distribution process. It also provides a great way for a creator to interface with their audience. Would you think you would require WM for listening or just use an incentive model (like the 100+20 idea from Coil)?

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Carl Barrdahl

I think you're onto something with allowing creators to interface more easily with their audience.
I would love to see something more decentralized in how we listen to music. Right now you have to pick an app and you're stuck with their library. I guess the library is dependent on the deals between record labels and the app.

Why not use a similar approach to RSS feeds and blockchains where any client can tap into the data. You can subscribe to feeds, not only from creators but also curators building tracklists and mixtapes to promote content. Creators and curators can of course collaborate together to create groups similar to how some record labels work today.

Developers and designers create clients for these feeds and datalayers and users connect their wallets to stream directly to the creators wallets.

That would as you say cut out the middle man and let content flow in a maybe more organic way.

Of course, this is not limited to music content.

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Rohan Sawant

Hey Carl, this is very interesting stuff. I think this could be huge with Podcasts, don't you think?

Podcast Hosting also is very expensive, (10-20$) right now, I can't see to figure out why, it's a bunch of mp3s, right?

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Carl Barrdahl

That's a great idea Rohan!

Maybe it would be possible to build something to connect a stream from IPFS or AWS S3 to pipe streams together:

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Rohan Sawant

Hmm, if you are up for talking more about this hit me up on rohansawantct83@gmail.com, we could actually collaborate on this! I might even have a group of dev friends who can help us with it too!

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Rohan Sawant

Hmm.. so many interesting ideas here!

Does RapidAPI sound like Number 3?

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Carl Barrdahl

Thank you!

I don't know much about RapidAPI but it seems to be a way to monetize APIs by a subscription model to get x number of calls each month.

I think Web Monetization will allow for more granular control and pull-based payments (instead of pushing money from your credit-card).

Imagine you connect your wallet to your browser (or use an extension like Coil or maybe Metamask?). Websites you visit can then pull payments from your wallet like a continous stream.

So this would be a way to monetize PWAs where instead of a flat-rate monthly fee subscription you only pay for the time you actually use the app (or certain "premium" APIs).

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Rohan Sawant

Hmm, so you mean, add this on top of AWS Lamda-like thing? That sounds interesting.

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GoGoGombo

Rapid are great and do offer a very easy way to earn from your APIs
you can also check out byvalue.org , there's greater flexibility with pricing and half of the commission, plus you can upload raw code/project and the platform creates an API for you.

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Emma Goto 🍙

What would happen if readers go offline to read, turning off the payment stream.

Ooh wow - I hadn't thought of that.

I think idea number 3 is probably the most viable.

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Carl Barrdahl

One solution would be to stream the content back to the client in exchange for payment, similar to how you would stream video or audio.

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Emma Goto 🍙

That's an interesting idea!

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Chris Lawrence

L-U-V Idea 1!!! I think that is a fluid combinatio of content, tooling and concept of WM.

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Carl Barrdahl

Thanks! I will keep it in mind during this journey. It definitely touches many aspects of WM.