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Discussion on: 🐶 Akita: Get Involved in Web Monetization With or Without the Price Tag

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Sharon

Thanks for following us on our hackathon journey Eric! We've really enjoyed hearing your thoughts along the way.

During our hackathon ideation process, @elliot and I discussed both user-facing dashboards and web operator-facing dashboards. Both of these are interesting areas to explore, but we decided to go with the user-facing dashboards and built Akita.

In addition to Coil, we think that Web Monetization Wallet Providers (like Uphold, GateHub, etc.) are in a good position to give analytical insight into web operators/creators/etc. It looks like they are already working on helping creators visualize income/revenue/usage, by putting together analytical dashboards. However, just like you said, it seems like existing dashboards are limited in data. This lack of data might be related to the emphasis on privacy and anonymity in the Web Monetization community. As such, there may not be much information associated with streamed payments that can be leveraged in operator-facing dashboards.

Since Akita is a user-facing dashboard, all of the browsing/payment data is stored locally in the user's browser, so the data stays in the user's hands. To expand Akita into something that gives operators/creators analytical insight would involve collecting users' data and sharing it with external parties. It's tricky to figure out how to maintain users' privacy while also giving operators/creators insight. With Akita, we're focused on helping users, but we think that the operator/creator side is an area that could definitely use more discussion.