Researching for an article. When explaining Web Monetization to others:
- What points of confusion / misunderstanding do you run into?
- Do you have any tips / advice that helps you to explain Web Monetization?
- What key points do you feel are important to share?
- Do you have any go to resources for helping to educate others about Web Monetization?
Thanks in advance for your input. It's most appreciated.
Image at the top care of Emily Morter via UnSplash.
Top comments (14)
I second the "What am I getting for $5 USD a month?" question as being hard to answer. Also the lack of critical mass in the Web Monetization community means that right now it's not really viable as an income stream and that is a sticking point for creators looking to diversify their revenue.
Another area is explaining the difference/overlap between Web Monetization and the Interledger Protocol.
Thanks Ashvin. I'm curious as to which community you are sharing with that you get into explaining the more technical bits of the difference/overlap between Web Monetization and the Interledger Protocol?
We are trying to build out interledger.dev. So, the target community here is probably a little more technical like beginner to intermediate developers. Or intermediate to advanced crypto investors.
Thanks Ashvin.
The most common question we'd get was "Why not just use Venmo?" - and so we'd have to explain that web monetization is so much easier (once it's all set up) to pay lots and lots of people based on the time spent on their content. We'd also explain that the fees that PayPal/Venmo, etc require make these smaller transactions impossible.
The other thing we ran into was "What am I getting for $5USD a month?" - people are so used to consuming content "for free" and either not realising or not caring that "for free" isn't free at all in terms of data privacy and/or intrusive advertisements. It does seem like a hard sell sometimes, which is why I'm looking to create a post that lists the additional or exclusive content that a subscription provides.
Thanks Adam. This is helpful.
I remember I used Medium subscription analogy last year to explain it to a non-tech savvy person. It's not entirely the same but the principle behind pay $5/month once is the same, so the message easier to come across since Medium has quite become popular now.
Oh!!! Do you mind sharing with me an example of you Medium subscription analogy, Radhy? Would love to quote your example in the article, if you are okay with that.
I have played around with this analogy as well. The problem is without "tipping" it breaks a bit. On Medium the paying reader can essentially give money to article by multiple Hearts. But its all very opaque. Theoretically, if/when tipping, the Coil/WM narrative would be much stronger b/c their is more consumer choice and knowledge of their financial impact.
Thanks for your insights on this, Chris.
Well, I just make Medium as an example because their pay once subscription model works for many writers, and there are lots of supporting articles like articles showing how much Medium writers earn on the internet, though I don't think I can give you a quotable example from this Erica. If someone knows how Medium subscription work then at least they'll have the image how $5/month WM subscription model is gonna work. What I did is just pointing out that.
Of course, this is not including tipping and other novel payment methods that WM and Interledger going to offer like Chris said. Medium with their own developers employ their own algorithm to calculate writers' earnings, WM and Interledger developers could probably do similar things with less efforts and skillsets - and this is I think is the beauty of Web Monetization that I think Web Monetization has advantage of in the long run.
Thanks Radhy.
We took your question and a similar one from @xanderjakeq and created our weekly discussion post here: community.interledger.org/grantfor...
Thanks Chris. Much appreciated.