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Cover image for You can now web-monetize your DEV posts! (But don't get your hopes up too quickly)
Ben Halpern Subscriber for The DEV Team

Posted on • Updated on

You can now web-monetize your DEV posts! (But don't get your hopes up too quickly)

...You won't make a lot of money right away with this new feature, but you can now enable web monetization by adding a "payment pointer" to your account.

👉 settings/misc to add a payment pointer

It's also in beta so there may be some kinks to work out.

Full details of how payment pointers in this other post...

I just wanted to mention how happy I am personally that we were able to ship functionality. It allows individual authors on DEV to get on board — right through their settings! As more Forems pop up, platform creators and individual members may be able to share in the pie. A lot of adoption has to happen for this to work out, but it's a future we're happy to be pushing.

Web monetization is not baked into browsers yet, but it may be sometime soon. Mozilla's support for Grant for the Web is cool to see. This could be an important part of content-driven web in the future.

I'm so excited about this collab! Immediately thought of you all when I met Coil in Amsterdam! I think adding web monetization to DEV is the perfect fit and incentive for authors!

Coil is the company principally behind web monetization. You can support web-monetized content creators by spending $5/month through their service.

Disclaimer: that's a Coil referral link.

Happy monetizing 🤑

Top comments (48)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

web-monetization

By the way, this post is monetized with my pointer.... Show me the money 🤑

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victoria profile image
Victoria Drake

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andypiper profile image
Andy Piper

I realise this was a comment from an older post, but I just wanted to congratulate you for an excellent use of a Buffy GIF :-)

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mithil467 profile image
Mithil Poojary

Hey, I just added my pointer to the setting. But I see a different pointer in view page source. Can you explain to me why is that so?

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muhimen123 profile image
Muhimen

Encryption type something?

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mithil467 profile image
Mithil Poojary

I confirmed with Ben that it's being taken care of on server side. It would be changed shortly.

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spekulatius1984 profile image
Peter Thaleikis 🍪

Yeah, I noticed the same. I added mine and can't see it - instead some other pointer is displayed.

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dtinth profile image
Thai Pangsakulyanont • Edited

Just a small tip: You can use your domain name as a payment pointer by setting up a 302 redirect from /.well-known/pay to your real payment pointer, replacing $ with https://.

For people who use Netlify, here’s an example _redirects file that does this:

/.well-known/pay https://coil.xrptipbot.com/bUJCmmzwRWaC8FIx4jeppg 302
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

…and now my payment pointer is just $dt.in.th.

This has been spec’d in the Payment Pointers Spec, under the “Resolution” section and supported by Coil extension.

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potherca profile image
Ben Peachey

...and now my payment pointer is just $pother.ca

Freaking awesome! Great tip, thanks!

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ikumen profile image
ikumen

Is the contributor payment pointer working? All the post on DEV have the same payment pointer, I tried adding my own and nothing changed?

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jasmin profile image
Jasmin Virdi

Whoa!, Really excited to try this out!

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lauragift21 profile image
Gift Egwuenu

This is amazing! I've been putting aside adding this to my personal website for the longest time this just gave me that push.

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emma profile image
Emma Goto 🍙

This is super exciting! Keen to see the cents start rolling in 😎

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sergix profile image
Peyton McGinnis

Let's gooo 🙌 Just added it to my personal site as well!

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bhupesh profile image
Bhupesh Varshney 👾

🎉 🎉 🎉

DEV.to to ad companies

future

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

Wow, I absolutely love this show. Good call.

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brodan profile image
Brodan

Yessss! Just added my payment pointer, time to get those fractional pennies!

Now I'm much more excited to get my latest post out! Thanks DEV team!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Fractional pennies? I’m way past that phase, check out these whole pennies streaming in 😎

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turnerj profile image
James Turner

It would be interesting in the next few weeks to see some rough analytics for avg. $/view that a popular post gets. Then in the longer term, actually plotting that across months to see if there is a measure increase or trend.

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tallship profile image
Bradley D. Thornton • Edited

Hi Ben!

Hey wouldn't this be even more Neato if we could see the source that sent to the ledger network? Coil isn't the only stream of assets into my Uphold, but when it is, I would especially like to know which of my own properties that a Coil subscriber was visiting, so as to improve the focus of content creation on those platforms.

Suggestions?

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kokaneka profile image
kapeel kokane

Hey Ben, a small doubt about web monetization. Where does this money come from? If you could point to a doc which explains how the whole thing works.

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brodan profile image
Brodan

The money comes from other users/readers who use web monetization. As far as I know, Coil is the only payment service available right now, and costs $5/month.

DEV is actually hosting a hackathon right now centered around web monetization and the announcement post explains it all pretty well. Here's a link to it.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

😎 Cool to see DEV making steps forward to give back to the content creators on the site!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Definitely. In the long run we really really want to position ourselves as an important, but small part of a much bigger ecosystem where value is broadly distributed.

Of course Forem does that on a community-by-community basis, but we want each community to have that relationship with their end users.

Hopefully this is just a little part of an ongoing journey to make this all happen.

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faenor profile image
faenor • Edited

@ben May there be a chance to also see brave rewards added?