I loved this post by Jemima Gibbons about the difficulty of converting users to become Web Monetized.
I encourage you to read/respond to her, but I wanted to pullout one questions for our weekly discussion:
How are you promoting the benefits of Web Monetization and Coil to your communities?
Header image is "discuss ideas" by Weltenraser from the Noun Project
Top comments (15)
We've spent a lot of time trying to convert social media users over to our platform... if people are open to a discussion, they absolutely love the concept. Lots of heavy social media users are really fed up with the algorithms changing all the time and having their content suddenly hidden for no reason.
The opportunity to make money off their content instead of having to work with brands is a huge benefit to them... but we've also found a lot of friction in setting up Coil accounts, Uphold accounts and XUMM accounts - it is super overwhelming for people.
Posting step by step instructions hasn't worked so well, I've had a lot more success taking individual users through each individual step... but obviously that's time consuming for me and doesn't scale well.
If someone can make a fun interactive game that helps people set up these accounts and gets everything linked up, that'd be amazing.
Thanks - that's interesting. The time suck / friction is something that bothers us too. Especially as designers - we are trying to make things easier for everyone!
Any interesting ideas? We are all experimenting, growing early tech. Love the sharing on this thread. @jemima if you need some codes for free Coil accounts to motivate people to help you experiment, let me know.
Thanks Chris - yes, please! Some codes would be awesome!
email me (chris@interledger.org) with a request
Thanks Chris - I'll email you!
On it ππ€
The part that is overwhelming is not the process, but the lack of visibility of the system status here. The first thought the user get when they think of signing up on the listed platforms is "how much control am I going to have over this?". The interface fails to give the confidence to users in most cases. An area we could wrk upon.
Potentially... but I think a big part of it is just platform fatigue and the sunk cost fallacy... a lot of our target demographic have already put so much time and energy into traditional social media to go onside with the algorithms that the concept of adding another platform on top just doesn't sound that fun... which we understand and it's not until people take the plunge and start to earn more with a couple of posts that they've ever earnt on traditional social media that they start to get it. Our userbase was really small but extremely enthusiastic.
True. Figuring out the right onboarding startegy here can be a very interesting task to engage in. If the trigger for trial/onboarding could be placed very close to the phase where user experiences a disappointment in the existing workflow/system could improve the chances.
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Our experience has been the same regarding the friction of setting up all the various accounts being a barrier to getting new people on board. Another barrier is the chicken and egg issue of convincing people to pay for a subscription for a standard that has not been widely adopted yet.
When users click on my math lesson audio read-thrus, if they're not monetized (by either COIL or PayGo) then they see this drop-down (I've only included the COIL-relevant parts):
[more stuff here]
"Reason #2: We Need To Change the Web Mentality
In the early days of the web, advertisers largely paid for web content. Ad income was reasonable, and pages didn't have to be too annoying to get those ads to users. Those days are long gone. It costs money to put content on the web. Want a web filled with high-quality, unbiased, annoyance-free web pages? We need to pay for it. No longer can we expect to have it allβfor free.
[more stuff here]
I'm experimenting with two start-ups that I think are promising: COIL and PayGo. If you're able, please consider supporting my siteβand the web-at-largeβby checking them out."
Thanks Carol. That's really useful. I like your approach and tone. Do you have any way of knowing the impact of these messages? (eg: how many of your users have signed up to Coil after seeing this prompt?)
Absolutely no success, unfortunately. (So maybe this message is something not to duplicate! Hah!) But, I've tried a variety of messages, with equally no success. I have basically no COIL traffic other than my own, even though I get (when school's on) about 80,000 users each month. Based on the affiliate program data, I have only one known person who converted to COIL (this is in over 6 months) due to my messages. Sorry for the dismal stats. This is all since January 2021. But I still think COIL is one of the most promising ideas to save the web, so I'm continuing with it (together with Pay-for-Read thru PayGo).
I'm really interested to learn more about gamification and it's potential to highlight sponsors and partners on our website. Any insight to this would be greatly appreciated. The monetization as it applies to motorsports and eSports would be great to have as well.
In every community they'd have their own each pain points that wouldn't be solved through traditional monetization model. In a community I'm usually visited of, content creators tend to group themselves in organizations with horizontal structure, where everyone has the same amount of voice in their groups.
But this often times not really working well because whether it's ads revenue or Patreon subscription, there will be one or two person who handle the money and pay for the rest of the group, which sometimes led the group become hierarchical structure organization by the time goes by--which in return created many dogblood dramas in the community. Because of this I'm still think a healthy model of revenue share is a way to maintain groups with decentralized organization style.