Earlier this month, we announced the Grant For The Web x DEV Hackathon to help drive community experimentation around Web Monetization.
While hackathon participants have been building away this past month, we here at DEV have also been hard at work in implementing the Web Monetization standard. If you'd like more of the technical details, here are links to two of the relevant PRs in our open-source repo: PR1 and PR2.
Today, we are happy to share that DEV itself is Web Monetized.
Additionally, DEV authors can now enable their own payment pointer to receive micro-payments when Web Monetized browsers visit their profile and posts.
Check out Ben's post for some additional thoughts:
Web Monetization + Grant for the Web
Web Monetization is a standard that provides content creators with an alternative solution to get paid for the content they share on the web. When a user visits a monetized web page, their browser (if it supports Web Monetization) may send micropayments to the site. There are many creative possibilities that are enabled by this technology — for instance, the web page can reward the monetized browser with an enhanced experience. We encourage you to check out some submissions to the GftW Hackathon to see some other interesting applications of the technology.
Grant For The Web is a $100M fund aimed at boosting open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in Web Monetization. The organization is a collaboration between Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Coil. They are providing grants ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 to provide grantees with an opportunity to innovate even further on the technology. We hope that many DEV Hackathon participants choose to extend their projects by applying with an official GftW project proposal.
Getting Started
In order to start generating micro-payments with Web Monetization on your DEV content, just following these steps:
Set up a wallet (here are a few options). We recommend UpHold.
Once your wallet is set up, you'll receive a Payment Pointer address
Add this address in your DEV settings
That's it. You'll now receive a micro-payment every time a monetized browsers visit your your profile page and posts.
If you're interested in supporting creators and the broader monetized ecosystem, you can pay a monthly fee to a Web Monetization provider. Currently, the only provider for sending payments is Coil, but more providers will pop up as the ecosystem expands.
Disclaimer: we have partnered with Coil as our recommended Web Monetization provider, and we'll benefit if you sign up with these referral links.
Earnings for all parties involved will likely be quite small to start, but there’s a bright future ahead as more people and platforms begin to adopt this standard. Soon, we hope that a large percentage of DEV authors will have enabled their own payment pointer, providing monetized browsers with a way to directly reward their work.
As a friendly reminder, our hackathon ends Sunday, June 14 and the Grant For The Web proposals are due June 22.
Good luck, and happy monetizing!
Top comments (41)
Wow amazing! It's nice to see the web slowly move away from privacy sucking advertising and towards a more privacy focused and intuitive way of paying for content. I love that Dev/Coil is at the forefront of this
Its just the old subscription model update with more modern terminology. It's all about the producer not the consumer. I would like to see a similar model applied to newspapers combined with advertising (ie you pay or you accept adverts) because that may allow improvements in the quality of journalism, but I don't see it happening here. Most of what I have read here seems to be junior coders trying to big themselves up when what they write is mediocre at best.
I'm very excited about this! Thank you and good luck to everyone involved in the hackathon.
I'm particularly excited about the healthy crossover this can foster for people using LinkedIn (your friendly social behemoth, a wholly owned sub$idiary of Microsoft) and dev.to simultaneously.
As a social media skeptic, I begrudgingly returned to LinkedIn to pursue work. It's hard to beat the effort/reward payout on that site if you're looking for visibility.
As a technician, I feel like I can enjoy dev.to more directly. The community is more tight-knit, the site isn't trying to appeal to every profession in the universe, and if I want to, I can spend time scrutinizing the source. Not to mention the fact that there's an enormous amount of good content that isn't constantly interrupted by worthless ads - - far better than what LinkedIn currently offers, IMO.
This grant helps bring a little bit more of that healthy sales mindset to a site I really feel at home on. Great work!
What a wonderful step to support creators! 🎉
Incredible step forward Dev community! Welcome to Web3, Blockchain world! Streaming micro payments is one of the most important inventions of the last few years to hopefully shift value from advertisement companies back to content creators and consumers, users. If anyone wants to learn blockchain development I am building a free newsletter 200+ devs strong and growing: web3.coach
Btw, for those who wonder if it works - I made my first $0.05 since I set this up (roughly a week ago). Sure, 5 cents can't get me anything, but this is a very good start. Keep it up!
I made £0.02 in the last two months! It just arrived today! And they took £0.01 in commission!
THE FUTURE IS NOW.
How did you set it up? I am not seeing an option in my settings to add the pointer. ;(
I want to know if it is based on a certain browser or country since I want to set them up as well but I'm afraid they may not supported yet
Anyone else from NYC and noticed this message from Uphold during registration? Did you go through with the process or did you bail?
Micro royalties helped a lot flourishing indie music creation against mainstream ad based publishing. I hope this also boosts the number and variety of voices heard around the web. I suppose this is very important nowadays where web is getting less open with less memory thanks to non-crawlable closed social networks becoming dominant over open forums.
I was about to mention Flattr. Perhaps such examples cannot exceed some certain threshold (of user base) unless they become native part of the platform as in music streaming or say Apple arcade. Web monetization sounds promising closing such gap.
I'm super excited about this. I believe that it will bring better content as there is more reward for doing such.
Amazing work!
Maybe 6 months ago, asked Ben in the chat if there were any plans of introducing some way of monetizing the content on dev in a way that could benefit the writers while still having a good experience for the readers (Unlike Medium for example) and the response was a "Yes!". That´s also how I got to know Coil.
And now here it is. Faster than I anticipated!!
Of course, it´s a long way to go until it becomes a viable income source for creators but I really love the idea behind the Web Monetization standard and paying creators by just using the Web Browser.
It´s nice to see platforms like Coil, Dev, Twitch, and Youtube leading the way.
Would love to see this implemented in GitHub, so you would gain money when someone visits your repos. The possibilities are endless.
Fantastic! Great addition to the platform folks!
So excited!! 🎉🎉
🎉 Great work DEV making so much progress focusing on content creators.
This is so cool, I've already added the meta tag to most of my sites today.
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