The Interledger Community 🌱: Andrey Torres de Lima

Pipe Web Monetization — ILF Grant Final Report

Andrey Torres de Lima — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 07:17:12 +0000

Brief Project Description

Pipe Web Monetization, your go-to tool for web monetize your WordPress sites! Tailor your web monetization effortlessly with our user-friendly plugin. Control content visibility, share revenue with flexibility, and introduce a seamless paywall. Connect with the community, and check your site's performance on our dashboard. It's made for you, the WordPress website owner, keeping things simple and effective. Let Pipe redefine your online earnings experience!

Glossary:

Friend: What every software company calls a "user" we at Pipe call a Friend. It's easier to give our best to a friend. 💛

Project Update

Hello everyone! A lot has happened in the past few months, but rest assured, we've got it all covered.

To kick things off, we'd like to share some victories we've achieved! The goal was to have a stable version of Pipe Web Monetization ready and available for you to use. We're thrilled to announce that, with the help of the community and individuals like Ayesha, Adam from gFam, and Erica Hargreave, we've successfully created this version and conducted our initial tests.

Here are some improvements our friends suggested:

Display tips in Pipe’s dashboard
The Pipe’s dashboard accuracy is not so reliable
At Wordpress plugin, the dashboard’s link was not working
It should be better if Pipe had Cross-Browser login

And a suggestion: Insert Pipe’s dashboard inside Pipe’s plugin

With the improvement suggestions, we were able to meet our friends' expectations as follows:

Displaying Tips on the Pipe Dashboard:
We added the display of Coil Tips on the Pipe dashboard. Currently, the new Interledger technology does not yet support Tips, but as soon as it does, we will provide support for it.

Enhancement of Pipe Dashboard Accuracy:
The accuracy of the Pipe dashboard has been improved by adjusting the number of requests made and the batch size sent from the plugin to our servers. With the ongoing infrastructure update, we aim to achieve complete accuracy soon, either through data streaming to the backend or via potential queries facilitated by Open Payments technology.

Non-functional Link to the Dashboard on the WordPress Page:
We fixed this bug, ensuring that the link to the dashboard on the WordPress page is now functional.

Cross-Browser Login:
Implementation is planned for future releases.

About the tests
The first tests were crucial and provided valuable insights into how our users would behave in relation to our product. With the insights received, we were able to make some modifications and improvements to Pipe!

After a thorough journey of testing and validation, we launched a marketing campaign to increase the number of users utilizing web monetization through Pipe. Named Pipeween, it was a Tipping Party in partnership with Erica, allowing users to visit websites with web monetization technology and reward those they liked.

During this period, we attempted partnerships with various WordPress hosting services. Unfortunately, as the Web Monetization technology is a new technology, we couldn't secure successful partnerships, mainly because of the difficulty in withdrawing funds to our users' countries. But during the timeframe between Pipeween in October 2022 and the Coil Shutdown notice in February 2023 (a span of 5 months), Pipe was utilized by 35 diverse WordPress sites across North America, South America, and Africa. Throughout this period, these sites collectively processed around 282,004 microtransactions with their web monetized visitors.

Post the Coil Shutdown, our focus shifted to understanding how the community would respond and how we could provide our friends with a solution for their websites. The best solution, identified through conversations with the community and the Interledger team, was to await updates revealed later at the 2023 summit in Costa Rica.

During the Summit, we learned about the Interledger's latest development – the revival of Web Monetization through a new model. During the Hackathon, the Pipe's team dedicated efforts to update the Pipe's tool for this new technology, putting us back in action.

Anticipating the upcoming demand, we are preparing Pipe's infrastructure to handle the data load and provide our friends with the best Pipe experience.

The summit also provided an opportunity to strengthen ties and friendships with other projects, especially the Interledger, Kult, and Snake Nation teams. Additionally, we met some individuals working with WordPress during the event. The connections made during this period have been invaluable, paving the way for exciting collaborations and shared learnings.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

Project Impact:
Pipe Web Monetization stands as a transformative force in the realm of web monetization with WordPress, specifically designed for them, the WordPress site owners. By introducing user-friendly features like content control, revenue sharing, and an intuitive paywall, the project not only empowers creators to enhance their web monetization experience but also aligns with the Interledger Foundation's mission of spread the web monetization technology with everyone by easy way. Beyond individual sites, Pipe fosters a connected community, contributing actively to the evolution of digital content monetization while championing the broader global financial inclusion goals set by the Interledger Foundation.

Target Audience(s):
Strategically aligned with the fact that 40% of the internet is powered by WordPress, Pipe caters directly to site owners within this influential ecosystem. Tailored for creators valuing simplicity and efficacy in web monetization, the platform appeals to a diverse audience. Individuals and businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate dynamic content control, probabilistic revenue sharing, and subscription models into their WordPress sites find Pipe's approach exceptionally user-friendly. In doing so, Pipe contributes to the Interledger Foundation's overarching mission of building equitable pathways to financial access and digital participation within the expansive WordPress community.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Progress on Objectives

Planned activities:

Research about WordPress plugins development:
Conducted comprehensive research on WordPress plugin development, identifying how we can better build it into the WordPress world.

Research and interviews with the target demographic (WordPress developers):
Conducted interviews and surveys introduced at 2022 June Community Call to understand the needs and preferences of WordPress developers, contributing to plugin design.

Groundwork for WordPress plugins:
Established the necessary foundations for WordPress plugin development, ensuring a solid and scalable structure.

Boilerplate for the platform (backend):
Developed a backend boilerplate for the platform, ensuring a strong foundation for future implementations.

Plugin for inserting one or many wallet addresses in WordPress pages:
Implemented a plugin allowing users to insert one or many wallet addresses into WordPress pages, facilitating web monetization.

Backend support for wallet address storage:
Developed the necessary backend infrastructure for securely storing user-configured wallet addresses.

Documentation for the wallet addresses feature:
Prepared comprehensive documentation for the wallet addresses feature, providing clear guidance for users inside our docs website and social medias.

Implement feature to display/hide page content based on web monetization status:
Added a feature allowing users to control content visibility based on web monetization status.

Backend support for dynamic content in pages:
Developed backend support for dynamically displaying content based on web monetization status.

Documentation for dynamic content in pages feature:
Created comprehensive documentation for the dynamic content in pages feature, facilitating understanding and implementation inside our docs website and social medias.

Create a project landing page and start tracking engagement:
Developed a landing page and initiated user engagement tracking to assess initial impact.

Allow pages to be configured with probabilistic revenue sharing:
Enabled pages to be configured with probabilistic revenue sharing, promoting equitable revenue distribution. The user is able to set the percentage as they want.

Backend support for probabilistic revenue sharing:
Developed backend support for facilitating configured probabilistic revenue sharing.

Documentation for probabilistic revenue sharing feature:
Elaborated comprehensive documentation for the probabilistic revenue sharing feature, ensuring efficient implementation inside our docs website and social media.

Progress Report:
Prepared and presented a progress report, highlighting achievements, overcoming challenges, and outlining next steps.

Design the Analytics UI page:
Developed the design for the Analytics UI page, focusing on usability and clear presentation of relevant data mentioned at the progress report.

Implement Analytics UI boilerplate (frontend):
Implemented the frontend boilerplate for the Analytics UI, providing an intuitive experience.

Plugin to save analytics about monetization per page:
Developed a plugin feature to collect and store web monetization-specific analytics per page.

Backend support for aggregating analytical events:
Implemented backend support for aggregating analytical events, facilitating comprehensive analysis.

Documentation for the analytic events feature:
Prepared detailed documentation for the analytic events feature, making it accessible to all users inside our docs website and social media.

Continue tracking engagement:
Continued actively monitoring user engagement, adjusting strategies as needed.

Polish developer documentation of the plugin:
Enhanced developer documentation for the plugin, ensuring clarity and proper understanding.

Created examples, screenshots, guides and tutorials for the plugin:
Developed comprehensive educational material, including practical examples, screenshots, and guides, to facilitate plugin adoption.

Create a documentation website:
Established a dedicated website for documentation, providing easy access and reference for users.

Host documentation website:
Conducted hosting for the documentation website, ensuring continuous availability for the community.

Fix potential bugs:
Investigated and resolved potential technical bugs using real user’s feedback, ensuring continuous stability and efficiency of the plugin.

Unplanned Activities:

Host a Community Call about Pipe and WordPress (June 23, 2022) (Community):
Organized a community call to discuss topics related to Pipe and WordPress, promoting interaction and knowledge-sharing with the web monetization’s community.

Videos and materials on Instagram, LinkedIn, and gFam explaining how to use Pipe and web monetization technology (Marketing):
Developed visual materials and informative videos about using Pipe and web monetization technology, raising awareness.

Tipping Party (Pipeween):
Organized a Tipping Party (Pipeween) event to encourage community participation and promote the platform.

Support for Tipping events (Tech):
Added support for Tipping events, offering a more interactive experience for users.

Update Pipe to the new Interledger system (Tech):
Updated Pipe to integrate with the new Interledger’s web monetization system.

Product Testing with Real Users (Product):
Conducted practical tests with real users to evaluate usability and identify potential improvements.

Creation of the Induktor tool that simulates web monetization events for internal testing (Tech):
Developed a tool called Induktor to simulate web monetization events, facilitating internal testing and enhancing platform robustness.

Web Monetization Paywall (Tech):
Implemented a Web Monetization Paywall, providing a new option for content monetization.

One-time web monetization subscriptions for WordPress websites exclusive contents (Tech - In-progress):
Currently working on the implementation of one-time web monetization subscriptions for exclusive content on WordPress websites (presented at Interledger’s summit).

Monthly web monetization subscriptions for WordPress websites exclusive contents (Tech - In-progress):
Currently in the process of developing monthly web monetization subscriptions for exclusive content on WordPress websites (presented at Interledger’s summit).

Infrastructure update to support streaming of events without data loss (Tech - In-progress):
Currently making updates to the infrastructure to ensure adequate support for streaming events without data loss.

Key Activities

WordPress Plugin:

Dynamic Content Control: Users can now manage the visibility of page content based on the web monetization status, providing a flexible and personalized experience.

Probabilistic Revenue Sharing: The plugin allows pages to be configured with probabilistic revenue sharing, promoting fair and transparent distribution of earnings.

Analytics Integration: A comprehensive Analytics UI has been implemented, allowing users to track and analyze monetization data per page.

Web Monetization Paywall: An user-friendly paywall for Web Monetization has been introduced, offering an additional monetization avenue.

Subscription Models (In-progress): Ongoing development includes the implementation of one-time and monthly web monetization subscriptions for exclusive content on WordPress websites.

Infrastructure Upgrade (In-progress): The platform's infrastructure is currently being upgraded to support seamless streaming of events without data loss.

Community Engagement:

Community Call and Discussion (June 23, 2022): Successfully organized a Community Call to facilitate discussions and knowledge-sharing among Pipe and WordPress enthusiasts.

Social Media Awareness Campaign: Developed and executed a strategic social media campaign on platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and Gfam to increase awareness and user engagement.

Tipping Party (Pipeween): Tried to host a Halloween tipping party. It didn’t ran, but we learned a lot and had some nice tests with Erica Hargreave and her students.

Technical Enhancements:

Interledger System Integration: Upgraded Pipe to seamlessly integrate with the new Interledger system, enhancing efficiency and compatibility.

Real User Testing: Conducted practical tests with real users to identify areas for improvement and enhance overall platform usability.

Induktor Tool Development: Created the Induktor tool to simulate web monetization events for internal testing, contributing to platform robustness.

Bug Resolution and Maintenance: Investigated and resolved potential technical bugs, ensuring the stable and efficient operation of the plugin with ongoing maintenance.

Documentation and User Support:

Documentation Website: Established a dedicated website for comprehensive documentation, providing users with a centralized resource for guidance and reference.

Developer Documentation Enhancement: Improved developer documentation, ensuring clarity and ease of understanding for plugin integration.

Educational Material Creation: Developed a variety of educational materials, including examples, screenshots, guides, and tutorials, to support users in implementing and utilizing the plugin.

Ongoing Monitoring and Reporting:

User Engagement Tracking: Continuously monitored user engagement at various stages, adjusting marketing strategies to optimize community interaction.

Communications and Marketing

The marketing team was created in June 2022 to attract users, customers, and potential investors to the project. At first, we focused on producing content for internal and external communication, as well as for the project's social networks, in addition to studying and developing a strategy and visual identity - and also a mascot: the Pipebara.

For internal communication, the person responsible for internal marketing developed t-shirts, pens, water bottles, and personalized stickers to deliver to Pipe members, in addition to establishing a weekly meeting with the entire team to exchange ideas and information about the project, and also to get to know a little about each one and add to everyone's knowledge with different areas such as computer engineering, journalism, and design.

Pipe Web Monetization made it a priority to work with content on its social networks (Instagram and LinkedIn) about the project itself and about Web Monetization and everything related to that universe, to explain and arouse the interest of even those users who do not know about the Web Monetization and who seek information and can be converted to this world.

In addition to social networks, the Pipe website has a tab dedicated to the blog, with some content already produced. However, he has not yet agreed to put the blog into operation due to other momentary priorities, but it is about to be put into practice.

We also use our social networks to publicize events in the community, such as our Community Call, presented on June 23rd, and events related to the world of technology and web monetization.

With the arrival of Halloween and the need to test our product with users, a marketing campaign was created: Pipeween. It was a tipping party, created in order to connect two types of public: the creators, people from the WordPress community that uses Pipe Web Monetization, and visitors, people that consume content and have a coil's wallet. To participate in it, the website owner must have a WordPress website and install Pipe Web Monetization’s plugin by uploading and activating the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

However, the campaign had to be postponed due to some technical errors that needed to be resolved before hosting an event such as a tipping party. Despite the sadness, we are happy with the result - both the campaign and the improvement of our plug-in - and we intend to host another online event with the community.

Throughout the semester, we also started to interact and get to know other projects, so we had a rich exchange of ideas, help, and information. Based on that, we developed a video tutorial to show the user how to install the tool on their website and to work together with Gfam.

After the improvements, we were able to finalize our landing page and focus on launching this one. And as a result, we were able to get into webmonetization.org as the Web Monetization Tool, being the only tool targeted at WordPress.

What’s Next?

As we move forward, our focus is on evolving the Pipe platform and extending its positive impact. Here are the key areas of concentration for the upcoming phase:

Continuous Plugin Refinement:
As Rafiki is healthy and growing up, we are ready to use it, seek and integrate user feedback to enhance features and usability. We will also maintain a vigilant approach to monitor and resolve any potential bugs, ensuring a smooth and seamless user experience.

Subscription Model Completion:
One of our primary goals is to finalize the development of both one-time and monthly web monetization subscriptions. This will provide users with versatile options for monetizing their content, enhancing the overall flexibility of the platform.

Business model
The subscription model with open payments technology is going to be useful for Pipe, because it will also give Pipe a way to have its own revenue. We're going to plan how exactly it will happen, but it seems to be what we need.

Infrastructure Upgrade Completion:
The ongoing effort to upgrade our infrastructure is crucial for ensuring the seamless streaming of events without data loss. We noticed a Data loss thanks to our friend Erica Hargreave, that helped us with our tests. We are dedicated to completing this upgrade to enhance the platform's performance and reliability.

Community Engagement Strategies:
Community engagement remains a top priority. We plan to continue organizing community calls to foster discussions and gather insights. Additionally, interactive social media campaigns will be ongoing, aiming to increase awareness and encourage active participation.

Analytics and Insights:
The analytics features of the Pipe platform will see further development to provide users with deeper insights into their monetization data. Our focus includes continuous analysis of user engagement data to tailor strategies for improving overall user satisfaction.

Documentation and Support:
Documentation is a cornerstone of user support, and we are committed to keeping it regularly updated with new features and enhancements. We also plan to expand our collection of educational resources, including guides, tutorials, and materials, to support users in maximizing the benefits of the Pipe platform and ILP technology.

Community Support

To propel the Pipe project forward, community support is paramount. One notable challenge we encounter is the reluctance of WordPress website owners to adopt ILP and Pipe due to difficulties in withdrawing their earnings to their respective countries. Addressing this challenge is crucial for widespread adoption and sustained success.

An initiative that holds promise in overcoming this hurdle is the Digital Wallet CFP by the Interledger's team. Currently, our optimism is particularly directed towards ILP digital wallets that are in development, especially for Kult’s solution, given its integration with PIX — a feature that enhances accessibility and ease of Brazilians financial transactions.

While Pipe has a diverse user base with websites spanning South America, North America, and Africa, it's essential to leverage the team's Brazilian roots to attract more users from Brazil. The local connection provides a unique advantage and positions Pipe favorably for increased adoption within the Brazilian community.

Additional Comments

We got here, but we would never got it without our friends, so we want to let here some special thanks for some of them: Ayesha(@ayeshaware), Erica(@ericahargreave), Chris(@chrislarry), Adam(@gfam), Patrick(@patrickrahy), Helena(@helenatude), Julaire and Sabine(@sabineschaller)

A big hug for u all from Pipe’s Team and our mascot, the PipeBara

PipeWebMonetization — Grant Report #1

Andrey Torres de Lima — Wed, 18 May 2022 16:29:02 +0000

Project Update

The project is on schedule, as detailed below. In summary, we’ve got a functional WordPress plug-in and we’re currently working on our Analytics platform and further research.

Progress on objectives

The objectives of the project are:

Create a WordPress plug-in to facilitate the insertion of payment pointers in order to monetize a WordPress site and make revenue sharing automatically;
Add the ability to hide and show unique content from a WordPress site, only for people who contribute;
Create an analytics system to show data about received payments from a WordPress site.

WordPress Plugin

As for the first objective, the WordPress Plug-in is already functional. The user is now able to add multiple payment pointers to a website. Our plug-in will handle probabilistic revenue share, and will automatically insert the pointers metatags.

All the code can be found here: Code
Our mockups can be found here (there are multiple pages, use the top-left icon to switch between them): Figma

Besides inserting the pointers, the plug-in will also send data from the payments events to the Analytics tool. We are currently working on this integration, writing down the APIs to connect the plugin to our database.

Here are some screenshots of the working plugin:

Unique Content Display

We decided to work on the second objective later on, and focus our efforts on the analytics platform now. We’ve done prototypes, but there’s currently no coding progress on the unique content feature.

Analytics Platform

As shown below in Key Activities, all the interface prototypes were done. After that, we moved to development. The Dashboard and Login interfaces were developed using Next.js. We also implemented a passwordless login system with next-auth. This reduces the need for password recovery systems and improves the overall user experience.

Key activities

WordPress Plugin

A local prototype of this plug-in was developed, and the user can add the payment pointers and their probabilities, but so far it is not possible to hide or show specific content.
One difficulty encountered was the simulation of payment events, which was necessary for reading them in our plugin, to send the payment data to the web system displaying them. However, we were able to simulate the events and obtain and treat the data from the micropayments.

Market Research and Strategic Marketing Planning

Our goal was to better understand our public, and get the answers to our essential questions, like 'who would use our technology?', 'what needs of our audience would we meet?', and 'How can we effectively use the web monetization technology to meet these needs. The main method we used to get the answers was in-depth interviews with our target audience: WordPress website managers. The interviews were focused on discovering their routines, goals, and necessities related to monetization.

Here are some of our conclusions:

A large part of WordPress sites do not monetize the content

There are many websites on the WordPress platform that do not monetize their content and do not aim to monetize. Most are made up of landing pages and institutional sites focused on marketing goals. Therefore, it is important, at first, to focus our efforts on attracting an audience that effectively generates relevant content and wants to monetize its content.

Use of metrics and how our Analytics tool can be used

Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar are used for managers to get metrics like CAC and LTV. Tools are often used at the same time to complement the information and have more than one source of truth. Therefore, insights such as monetization performance may be useful for managers.

The adoption of wallets by users would be a great challenge

As web monetization is not yet a widely used practice by users who consume website content in general, it will be necessary to think of interfaces that take this into account and that are instructive and intuitive enough to introduce the technology for the first time to any type of user.

"It would be helpful to make larger transactions"

It was something recurrent that was heard throughout the interviews. Even though it is not the current focus of the project, we will take into account the development of technology and the future possibility of new features for the product roadmap.
From the survey results, we will be able to more effectively target the product roadmap, meeting the needs of users and also marketing strategies.

Branding

The objective was to have consistent and flexible elements, both for marketing actions and for the construction of interfaces, in order to strengthen the "Pipe Web Monetization" brand. Already foreseeing the use of modular and accessible interfaces, basic elements to be followed were defined; such as colors, logo, and typography.

Interface

Following the principles of atomic design, basic components were created whose purpose in the future is to compose an accessible and responsive design system, both for the plugin menu, within the WordPress platform, and for the monitoring dashboard.

Plugin Menu Interface

Dashboard Interface

Analytics Platform

Front-end

We developed the front-end using Next.js, a React framework. The authentication flow was made using next-auth to provide a passwordless (magic link) login. The dashboard uses react-chart-js-2 to provide responsive and animated charts to show the data.

Back-end

Most of our time in the Analytics Platform was spent with the back-end. The main challenge was the data modeling to allow frictionless scalability and performance, no matter the number of users.
To accomplish this, we chose the serverless approach with a single-table architecture NoSQL database.

This way, we’re developing APIs within Amazon API Gateway to allow both WordPress Plugin and Analytics Tool to communicate with the database in AWS DynamoDB through Lambda Functions.
The writing function (POST method) is already functional, and we’re now working on writing statistics as well (e.g revenue per day, day of week, month, and year).

Communications and marketing

Our next step is to, based on all the research mentioned in Market Research and Strategic Marketing Planning section, attract an audience that effectively generates relevant content and wants to monetize its content, engage the users who consume website content in general, to get used with wallets, understanding why are they so doubtful with them, and also engage the web monetization community with Community Calls, explaining about the WordPress researches made and the PipeWebMonetization project.

What’s next?

Here’s what we’re doing next:

Develop the feature to control exclusive contents in the plug-in
Develop reading capabilities in our API
Connect the Dashboard with the Database
Implement security tokens to connect de Analytics Tool to the Plugin
Elaborate on our marketing plan to reach potential customers
Write the documentation for the project
Share all our discoveries and research about the WordPress community's interaction with the web monetization technology doing a community call.

What community support would benefit your project?

We’re excited to make connections across the GFTW community because we believe that there is a lot of knowledge to be acquired and a lot of friend projects to support.