The Interledger Community 🌱: Oliver Sauter

Update: Raised 100k and Hiring Software Engineer

Oliver Sauter — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 17:04:44 +0000

For Memex, we just raised another $100k from 2 Angel investors so we can hire another Software Engineer (React/TS) and are looking for a suitable next team member.

Together we are going to push for the feature priorities we uncovered from the last months of intense user research. Multi-device sync (incl. iPad Annotation support) is already almost there. To optimise for use cases of collaborative literature review for (semi)academic workflows, we'll then work on local PDF (collaborative) annotation support an improved editor (with Backlink support & QuoteBlocks).

Learn More about the Role

Memex - Project Update #8 # July 2021

Oliver Sauter — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:54:38 +0000

About the Project

Memex.Social enables people to better collaborate in doing online research and get paid for curating quality content.
In one product you have:

Reddit's collaborative curation of web content
Google Doc's (collaborative) highlights on every website & PDF
Pocket's ease of saving and highlighting content

Download: getmemex.com
10min Speed run of all features: Watch >>

Project Update

Launch of Research Report

We compiled our insights about our near term priorities from over 60 user onboarding calls and over 1000 survey data responses into a research report.

Launch of Pioneer Presale

Our users can now support us with a $150 Pioneer plan that gives them $240 in credits as soon as the multi-device sync and our new pricing model of $6 and $10 launch to all our users.

Sync Prototype

We've built the first internal prototype of the sync.
Watch Demo

A video about Oliver does his weekly and daily review with RoamResearch, Readwise and Memex

https://twitter.com/BlackForestBoi/status/1410175427168047104

Video about Collaborative PDF annotation workflow:

You can now collaboratively annotate and discuss web-based PDFs
Watch Demo

Raising another 40k from Peter Wang, CEO of Anaconda

Peter has been one of our first investors and now put more money into Memex. We're happy to have him as a partner and advisor on this journey.

In Progress

Moving Memex to the cloud

We started working on making Memex a cloud-first product with offline-support. This will enable automated backups and multi-device sync, our most requested feature and key to becoming a scalable and profitable product.
First prototype expected within the next month.

Launching a new pricing model

Historically Memex was way too inexpensive with only $3.5 per month. By developing our research report it became clear that our initial target group is people that spend between $50-200 on their knowledge tools and are power users. With the launch of the cloud-first infrastructure and further improvements on the collaboration workflows, we will increase the price to $10/month.

Support Needed

Need for researchers in the Effective Altruism community

We've been in touch with the EA infrastructure fund and they expressed interest in funding the collaborative online research tool we are developing, Memex (more below).

Before we apply we would like to talk to researchers in the EA community about their top priorities for such a tool, so that EAIF funds developments that have the most impact on the community's work.

If you are one, or know someone, we'd love to have a 20min chat with you. You can find a time here

Memex — Update #7 - June '21

Oliver Sauter — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:06:53 +0000

About the Project

Memex.Social enables people to better collaborate in doing online research and get paid for curating quality content.
In one product you have:

Reddit's collaborative curation of web content
Google Doc's (collaborative) highlights on every website & PDF
Pocket's ease of saving and highlighting content

Download: getmemex.com
10min Speed run of all features: Watch >>

Project Update

New Features:

In-page annotations and replies Watch Demo Video

You can now have conversations about websites & PDFs while reading, without switching contexts.
Doing so by viewing and replying the annotations of collections you follow while reading the associated content.
This is a big step towards our vision of collaborative online research.

Operational Updates

We are almost ready to launch our research report together with our $150 2-year plan presale. Our goal is to raise 100k from our users by converting ~700 users to pay us 2 years in advance.
Launch is next Monday.

In Progress

Moving Memex to the cloud

Launching a new pricing model

Next Steps

Collaborative Annotation workflow on Offline PDFs

Our user research has shown that one of the most important workflows that is currently unserved by the entire market is co-curating and collaboratively annotating PDFs.
More so, the support for location independent identification of those PDFs is crucial, because mostly people download PDFs to their computer and read in the browser where identification by url is not possible anymore.
It opens a huge opportunity for us to onboard people using Memex for academic research or business R&D.

Open Collaboration

One of the biggest blockers users identified for using Memex's Collaboration Features is the inability to collaborate with people not using Memex.
Therefore it is crucial to develop ways of having a Figma/Google Docs-like experience for Memex users to co-curate and annotate content in a web based interface.
This could be done by developing a bookmarklet or a Via-Service (similar to Hypothes.is) to view, create and reply to annotations made on pages without having Memex installed

Enabling Collection subscriptions, like Substack.

From our interviews with our creator community in the personal knowledge management space, Substack newsletter authors and bloggers (with about 500k followers), we've seen a big demand for having monetizable collections.
Once we have honed our cloud and collaboration experience we'd like to develop a first prototype of people being able to monetize their collections.

Learnings from integrating WebMonetizations in Memex

Oliver Sauter — Tue, 11 May 2021 14:22:12 +0000

Why WebMonetizations

"A lie can travel half-way around the world before the truth has its pants on" - Mark Twain (Source)

For us, scaling WebMonetizations means that there is finally a way for online creators and curators to be paid for their contributions to the global knowledge pool.
It's a critical instrument in creating economic incentives for the production and distribution of quality content.
Without these incentives there is no chance to counter the sheer amount of low quality information currently polluting global discourse.

For Memex, a (social) bookmarking and annotation software, adding WebMonetization is a great match because our users are content creators like bloggers, youtubers, students and academics, and consumers that value high quality information and already pay for many services and publications.

With the help of GftW we were able to build our MVP for sharing, following, co-curating and discussing collections of pages and annotations, and enable curators to be paid through the WebMonetization standard.
Here you can see how this integration looks like in the wild: https://memex.social/c/oiLz5UIXw9JXermqZmXW

The innovation of WebMonetization

In my understanding, the reason why content micropayments never scaled was at its heart a UX problem:

Consumers needed to sign up and pay for different newspaper subscriptions even if content is consumed irregularly
Niche websites, blogs or social profiles couldn't be supported because the costs of them integrating and maintaining a payment system was too high
(Semi)proprietary micropayment tipping services like Flattr or Satoshipay brought some improvement because it enabled consumers to tip even niche blogs but introduced new UX hurdles due to decision paralysis: "Who do you pay? How do you decide? Do I have to press everytime I want to support someone? I forget it way too often."

In a previous post I dove a bit deeper into the different types of online payment models and their pro's and cons.

WebMonetizations is a leap forward to previous experiments, because its streaming approach significantly reduces the amount of work a user needs to do in order to pay their favourite creators, and it's very easy to implement as a creator. Interledger's decentralised technology underpinning the payment infrastructure makes the service and creator landscape accessible to new players in a permissionless way.

(Current) drawbacks of WebMonetization

1. Limited Revenue Models

As of now there is only one revenue model that can be implemented with WebMonetizations and the flag-ship wallet Coil: Time-based automatic tipping/streaming. This enables consumers to pay creators based on how long they are exposed to their content with a fixed rate of $0.36c/hour.
It's a great start because it does not require user action to pay for content but limits the capabilities to implement more diverse revenue models for creators, like subscriptions, one-time purchases & tipping. Not being able to implement subscriptions or tipping is our biggest blocker to make more use of WM in Memex.
Also Coil's $5/mo fixed subscription price does not leave the flexibility for consumers to pay more to more people with loading more funds into their wallet. The $0.36c/hour fixed streaming rate also doesn't allow creators to decide on how much to charge for their services. Taken together, it does not allow for a necessary democratic and decentralised price discovery mechanism.

2. Technical limitations

Right now WebMonetization only allows to monetize an entire URL, not sub content or on-demand tipping via UI elements, like tipping tweets or great responses in forums. In the context of Memex we would like to enable to tip individual people's contributions to collections like added page, annotation or replies, like you can see in this mockup:

Ideas for projects to fund and build next for the WM community

These are ideas for high-leverage contributions to the WM community that GftW could focus on funding, and the community on building.

1. Developing easy to use APIs to implement (recurring) tipping and one-time payments to certain payment pointers.

In a basic version it would already enable three use cases for platforms to implement revenue models for creators:

A proto-subscription feature that allows the creator backend to check if a tip for this period has happened
On demand tipping (of granular content or individual contributors of content within a page e.g. forum posts, tweets, replies). With Memex we could for example implement the ability to tip individual annotation creators.
Product sales of various (information) products or courses

2. Extending Coil to on-demand support paying for granular content within a page.

By adding the ability to tip granular content to Coil, it would offer a wider ability to support granular content without the service or website natively supporting WM, like a tweet, forum post, reply. A bit like Brave does it. Ideally this part of the Coil software is open source so that those injections becomes part of the shared payment infrastructure. Sharing this part also has the advantage of sharing responsibility within the community to update the injection approaches to different services that are expected to change (like the Twitter UI)

3. A way to pay creators that are not in the network yet.

There is the classic chicken-egg problem to be solved. Who comes first: The creator implementing WM or the consumer paying with WM?
If there was a (centralised in the beginning?) database that logs and arbitrates the payments to creators, urls, domains or social accounts that haven't set up the payment pointers yet, it may create an economic incentive for those creators to claim their savings at a later point in time and start using WM from then on. The assumption is that this may also lead to those creators pulling in their communities, adding a lot more people to pay with WM.
A prototype could start with making it easy to onboard with accounts from Twitter, Facebook, Discourse, GitHub, Discord and DNS verification of website owners. Potentially it could also be a revenue model for Coil to take a share of the income in exchange for holding it.

The future of WebMonetization + Memex

We hoped on being able to use WebMonetizations to a bigger capacity in our Memex product at this point because we see so much potential for synergies between the visions and the products themselves. However we also acknowledge that this is all very early and just a first step towards a long-term collaboration and a deeper integration with the WebMonatization standard and Memex.
If we're successful with our core product, it will expose WM to a lot of online content creators and consumers willing to pay for content because both personas are part of our main audience.

As mentioned above, not being able to implement subscriptions or tipping is our biggest blocker for enabling such a deeper integration and offering the kind of revenue models (our audience's) creators need and want.

Until for WM's/Coil's features begin to offer these payment modalities we can however prepare the steps in that direction with the following work:

Help designing the subscription and tipping flows for Coil through feedback or active design participation. If help is appreciated, feel free to reach out: oli@worldbrain.io.
Improve the UX for engaging with the existing WM+Memex integration. (e.g. by enabling curators to create WM-powered paywalls or improved onboarding to installing the Coil extension or setting up a payment pointer as a creator)
Further develop the sharing and collaboration features of Memex, and the towards scalable product maturity and increased exposure to WebMonetizations.
Implement a Memex-specific subscription mechanism for creators, similar to Substack.com, and enable an interoperable use of WM to pay for creator subscriptions once WM's features have advanced.

Memex — Grant Report #6 - May '21

Oliver Sauter — Wed, 05 May 2021 17:43:31 +0000

About the Project

Memex.Social enables people to better collaborate in doing online research and get paid for curating quality content.
In one product you have:

Reddit's collaborative curation of web content
Google Doc's (collaborative) highlights on every website & PDF
Pocket's ease of saving and highlighting content

Download: getmemex.com
10min Speed run of all features: Watch >>

Project Update

We now launched all of our expected features for the grant period and more. We are ourselves amazed what we were able to put on the road with just $100.000. We raised almost double the money the year before and were not nearly as efficient in deploying these funds. Our efforts to improve our user research and product development processes and skills have paid off.
Happy also to share our learnings with anyone who struggles.
If you like to hop on a 30min call, you can check for a time here: calendly.com/worldbrain

This last month was also a very productive month.
We launched 3 new features:

Co-curating and co-annotating collections.

People can share invite links to collections so that other people can contribute by adding pages, annotations and replies.

Improvements to the sharing annotations UX.

Before, sharing was quite laborious. You needed to add pages to a collection and then share the annotations for each page.
Now you can bulk share all annotations on a page or all annotations on all pages in a collection. You can also set the annotation status as "protected", so their privacy status never changes in a bulk activity.

Dashboard Refactor

Our work to make the collaboration features fit into the current UI, and make the dashboard ready for faster iterations in the future.

Before:

After

Original Objectives

Sharing Collections with pages and annotations: Launched
- Example Collection: https://memex.social/c/oiLz5UIXw9JXermqZmXW
Paying curators with the Web Monetisation standard: Launched
- Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/view/gdQo69Ghd3C
Refactoring the Dashboard: Launched
Annotating PDFs: Launched
Research document outlining further integration potential with the Web Monetisation Standard
- 6 Strategies to Monetize Content
Learnings from integrating WM into Memex
Stretch Goal: Collaborative Collections: Launched

Apart from that we launched several smaller features that were clear user needs coming from the interviews we had:

TextExporter to copy-paste search results, page items and annotations in custom formats
Readwise integration to be able to automatically send highlights to Readwise and from there to apps like Roam, Notion or Evernote. Made it a premium feature. Gave us a sizeable bump in our revenue.
Inbox of saved items to implement "Getting-Things-Done" workflows and get people to "Bookmarks-Zero"

Key Activities Last Month (March)

We raised another 25k.
We had our highest grossing month in April, earning 1200€ in pure sales, growing by 30%. Also we grew our user base from 15k to 18k free users.
40 Personal User Onboardings/Interviews in the past 3 weeks
- Main insight: Focus on making Memex cloud-first and enabling Memex users to collaborate with non-Memex users.
- Secondary insight: Our approach to run the user interviews as productivity consulting worked super well. We had a response rate for our interviews of almost 50% and got very qualitative results and almost all people become new really enthusiastic users that we can further engage with user research and our upcoming supporter plan (similar to Roam's believer plan that charges $500 for 5 years in advance).
We have set up our first collaboration through integration into another product, CultureHack.io. Memex powers their data collection efforts and the ability to use curated content in their editing tools, allowing them to easily reference Memex annotations, and collection pages.

Communications and marketing

As we developed new features we have continuously posted Tweets about this to our larger community. The latest work on the collaboration features we have not yet discussed in public.
We are right now in the phase of doing 1-1 onboarding calls with our existing user base to the collaboration features.
Our approach is to invite them to a "Productivity Consulting Call" going through their research problems in-and-outside of what Memex can provide and through that introduce Memex, discover bugs and new feature requests.
This phase will last for the next 3 months until we have built up enough product maturity and enthusiasm/momentum in our user base to launch Memex.Social publicly.

Next Steps

Moving Memex to the cloud

Because of (bad) legacy feature decisions, Memex was an offline first product, creating immense hurdles for a multi-device experience and good development speed. It's our main blockers to become a scalable and profitable product. Our top priority now is to create a cloud-native experience with eventual offline-support.

Viewing and replying to followed collection's annotations in the context of a page

With this, users can see the annotations of the collections and people they follow in live websites and PDFs, and reply to the threads there.

Developing a bookmarklet or a Via-Service (similar to Hypothes.is) to view, create and reply to annotations made on pages without having Memex installed

With this, non-Memex users can view and reply with annotations of other people

Enabling Collection subscriptions, like Substack.

From our interviews with a dozen creators in the personal knowledge management space, Substack newsletter authors and bloggers (with about 500k followers), we've seen a big demand for having monetizable collections.
We'd love to do that with the WebMonetizations, but Coil is missing critical features to make that possible. See next section for more info.

What community support would benefit your project?

Unfortunately Coil's payment options are currently very limited, allowing little flexibility in implementing different business models for creators. What is needed is the ability to make one-time or recurring donations to enable both tipping creators and subscription models.

A more extensive summary or our experiences in working with WebMonetizations you can find in the post "Learnings from integrating WM into Memex"

Memex — Grant Report #5: April '21

Oliver Sauter — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 09:38:45 +0000

About the Project

Memex.Social enables people to better collaborate in doing online research and get paid for curating quality content.
In one product you('ll) have:

Reddit's collaborative curation of web content
Google Doc's (collaborative) highlights on every website & PDF
Pocket's ease of saving and highlighting content

Download: getmemex.com

Project Update

We are short before releasing our MVP for

Co-curating and co-annotating collections.

People can share invite links to collections so that other people can contribute by adding pages, annotations and replies.

Dashboard Refactor

Our work to make the collaboration features fit into the current UI, and make the dashboard ready for faster iterations in the future.

Original Objectives

Sharing Collections with pages and annotations: Launched
- Example Collection: https://memex.social/c/oiLz5UIXw9JXermqZmXW
Paying curators with the Web Monetisation standard: Launched
- Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/view/gdQo69Ghd3C
Refactoring the Dashboard: About to launch
- Was delayed bc we wanted to focus on the collaborative collections features first and launch them together.
Annotating PDFs: Launched
Research document outlining further integration potential with the Web Monetisation Standard
- Report 1: 6 Strategies to Monetize Content
- Report 2: Oustanding
Stretch Goal: Collaborative Collections: About to launch

Key Activities Last Month (March)

User Interviews
- Wins: Could onboard 5 new 'True fans' really excited to test the new collab features. Together they have about 100k followers.
Improvements to our product prioritisation and speccing process
- Adopted a variant of the Demand-Impact-Effort method to better prioritise
- Improvements to how we spec technical vs feature requirements

Next Steps

Improvements for the sharing annotations UX.

Right now quite laborious. You need to add pages to a collection and then share the annotations for each page.
We want to introduce a bulk sharing mode on a collection level (it already exists on pages level) and a annotation status "protected", which allows users to mark very private annotations.

Viewing and replying to annotations in the context of a page

With this, users can see the annotations of other people when browsing around, and reply to the threads there.

Memex — Grant Report #4: Interim Report March '21

Oliver Sauter — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 11:22:35 +0000

About the Project

Memex.Social enables people to better collaborate in doing online research and get paid for curating quality content.
In one product you('ll) have:

Reddit's collaborative curation of web content
Google Doc's (collaborative) highlights on every website & PDF
Pocket's ease of saving and highlighting content

It's extending the open-source bookmarking and annotation browser extension Memex.

Project Update

At this point we have fulfilled the basic specs we set out to launch until the end of the funding period:
Enabling people to share & follow collections of pages and annotations and pay curators with the WebMonetization standard.

We are now continuing to work on our stretch goal:
Enabling co-curating and co-annotating collections.

Original Objectives & Progress

1) The ability to share & discuss lists of pages & annotations

Demo: https://memex.social/c/oiLz5UIXw9JXermqZmXW
Status: Launched in Beta
Changes: No changes

2) The ability to follow curators with their lists and a basic feed

Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/embed/YjmcKMYRduP
Status: Launched in Beta
Changes: We re-scoped this deliverable slightly because we underestimated the complexity of building the follow-collections & annotation system, and got user feedback on the importance of collaborative collections before being able to follow users.

a) You can for now only follow individual collection updates, not a user and all of their updates.
b) We made the update feed more central and allow for direct interaction (like responding to annotations) instead of needing to go to a collection

3) The ability to pay curators with the Web Monetisation standard

Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/view/gdQo69Ghd3C
Status: Launched in Beta
Changes: No changes

4) Refactoring the Dashboard to be ready for faster iterations and updating the general UI .

Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/view/Kc7OC9KqGgd
Status: Launch next week

5) Extending the content type PDFs

You can now also annotate PDFs with Memex, extending an important content type that opens a range of new uses cases from academic or entrepreneurial
Demo Video: https://share.descript.com/view/9SVd69EhmY3
Status: Launching in Beta next week
EDIT 04. March '21: Released in Beta

6) A research document outlining the next roadmap and further integration potential with the Web Monetisation Standard

Status:

Report 1: 6 Strategies to Monetize Content
Report 2: ~Oustanding~

Key activities

Our key activities are as planned doing user research and product development for Memex.Social. In the past 4 months we had about 50 one-on-one user interviews to go through the mockups and detailed requirements for the sharing/following features.

In the process we also improved our product management workflows. For example, we removed our 2 week sprint cadence in favour of defining smaller, agile deliverables. We got very inspired by Sahil Lavingia's posts about their work at Gumroad.

Communications and marketing

Our marketing activity so far is to:

engage with thought leaders in the personal knowledge management space, interview them for product needs and then onboard them when the time is right.
Learning in Public by sharing insights into our design process, mainly on Twitter:

This approach resulted in us gaining back the users we lost after cutting the full-text history search. Influencer growth and peer-introduction growth is also how virtually every PKM tool in the last 20 years gained initial traction. We're planning to continue on that path.

As a next step we will onboard communities and research groups to using Memex.Social's collaboration features. To the most active users we offer a discounted 200€ 5-year believer plan that kicks in once Memex.Social is out of Beta, like Roam did and raised over 5million USD in 2 months. We don't expect that kind of hype but if we only get 2000 people to do that we have 400.000€ in extra funding.

What’s next?

We delivered on our base goals for the grant period and now work on our stretch goals:

1) Co-Curating collections

Enabling users to create shared spaces for curating and annotating content. This will be key for use cases of collaborative work in teams and communities.
View of collaborative collection

Generate invite link

2) Viewing and replying to annotations of collections you follow or co-curate

With this, users can see the annotations of other people when browsing around, and reply to the threads there.

What community support would benefit your project?

We're looking for people who collect and discuss content with teams, friends and communities.
If your current best tool is Google Docs or Slack to do so, happy to jump on a 15min call to onboard you and ask you a couple of questions.

Memex.Social — Grant Report #3, February 2021

Oliver Sauter — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:52:16 +0000

Project Update

We expect that within the next 2 weeks we are able to ship the promised base deliverables for the grant.
Until the grant deadline we focus on delivering the feature to view followed annotations while browsing, planning the co-editing features for collection and onboarding our 1400 beta testers on the wait list.

Original Objectives & Progress

1) The ability to share & discuss lists of pages & annotations

Status: Launched in Beta

Changes: No changes
As a beta user you can now share collections with pages and annotations, and viewers can respond to those annotations. Here you can view and interact with a live collection: https://memex.social/c/oiLz5UIXw9JXermqZmXW

2) The ability to follow curators profiles with their lists and a basic feed

Status: About to launch in Beta

Changes: We re-scoped this deliverable slightly because we underestimated the complexity of building the follow-collections & annotation system.
a) You can for now only follow individual collection updates, not a user and all of their updates.
b) We made the update feed more central and allow for direct interaction (like responding to annotations) instead of needing to go to a collection

Screenshots:
a) The view on a followed collection, sidebar with all followed collections.

b) The collaboration feed. Allows you to respond to threads via the feed instead of the need to go to the collection itself:

3) The ability to pay curators with the Web Monetisation standard

Status: About to launch in Beta
Changes: No changes
Just like when hovering over a Twitter username you'll see a profile preview and tip them right there. This way you can easily tip anyone that provides good annotations, replies or collections.

4) A research document outlining the next roadmap and further integration potential with the Web Monetisation Standard

Status:
Wrote a post in the community forum about different ways we see to use Monetization strategies on platforms. It'll be the foundation for this deliverable: A future roadmap for our project to use the WebMonetization standard.

Key activities

Communications and marketing

Our marketing activity so far is to engage with thought leaders in the personal knowledge management space, interview them for product needs and then onboard them when the time is right.
This approach resulted in us gaining back the users we lost after cutting the full-text history search. Influencer growth and peer-introduction growth is also how virtually every PKM tool in the last 20 years gained initial traction. We're planning to continue on that path.

We have also allocated a piece of our budget to go through our yearly facilitated process of clarifying our core vision and mission. This time we'll also work through how to design the Steward Ownership profit contracts for investors and teams.

What’s next?

Enabling users to see and respond to annotations of followed collections in the in-page sidebar

For now, followed annotations are only viewable via the collection view, not when browsing. But obviously this needs to change!

Co-editing collections

Our user interviews made clear that following collections is a great first step, but does not allow for some of the most powerful use cases of collaborative curation and annotation (e.g. academic teams, peer review, journalistic teams, think tanks, students)
This task may not be finished before the grant period, but was also not strictly within the deliverables. Adding this as a next step was a result from user research and the natural continuation of the work we started with this grant.

What community support would benefit your project?

We are still struggling with clarity around how we can trigger WebMonetization payments via UI elements - if it's not possible (yet) we can for now only enable paying for entire collections, not single users.
https://github.com/coilhq/web-monetization-projects/issues/1525#issuecomment-771433310

6 strategies for using content monetization in your platform.

Oliver Sauter — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:02:30 +0000

Web commerce is a huge, varied space, with creators offering a wide range of solutions. Our biggest challenge is finding a solution that helps the widest range of creators.

I worked together with @scottjenson to list the current options for content monetization that people could apply in their product, and lay out the pros and cons of each. The goal is for you to find a better, more flexible approach that can appeal to not only streamers, but 3d printers, musicians, Etsy sellers, creators on Patreon, and we hope, many many more.

This document meant to kickstart a conversation, not finish it, so we’re looking forward to your ideas so that the larger WebMonetization community can pick the most suitable model for their products. Do you see other pros and cons to the listed options, or other options overall?

Without further ado....

Network subscription

Consumers are charged a fixed price per month for accessing a range of all creators' content available to the network.

Example: Spotify

Upside:

Simple for the consumer. A single fixed price per month is clear and safe for the consumer, which creates the calmest most predictable UX.
Consumers have no decisions to make over payout.

Downside:

Every creator competes around the same pot of money (e.g. 3€ per consumer) which creates incentives for click-bait
No ability for consumers to pay more if they like and can
No ability for creator to set their price
No free market dynamics for price discovery
Minimal payout for most creators
Knowledge distribution is hindered and only accessible to those who can pay - but not as strongly as with 'Subscriptions' or 'Pay-per-Access' models.
Negative PR as there is a A 'gatekeeper’ role for the distributor of the funds. Likely frequent frustration, discussion, criticism of how the funds are distributed.

Creator Subscriptions

Creators can set an individual price to access all or some of their content

Examples: Substack.com, news paywall (Nytimes.com), or Patreon

Upside:

Creator has control over how much they are worth and want to charge
Reduced decision for subscriber (once every few weeks/months)
Chance to build long-term relationship between Creator and Consumer

Downside:

Consumers have to pay a long-term subscription even if just a few articles helpful/wanted
Consumers may forget they are subscribed and continue paying after they stop consuming.
Need to enter a contractual relationship with every creator individually.
Knowledge distribution is hindered and only accessible to those who can pay

Pay-per-access

Creators can set price for accessing individual content

Example: Academic paper paywalls, News articles, videos

Upside:

Creator has control over how much they are worth and want to charge
Even though decisions may be frequent, paying flows into the natural desire for access. People are likely to pay if they really see the value of getting access.

Downside:

No ability to try-and-buy
High frequency interaction needed, like with microdonations. Payment friction causes potential loss of engagement/long-term relationship between creator and consumer
Knowledge distribution is hindered and only accessible to those who can pay

Microdonations

Consumers can set a budget of what they want to allocate per month to donate and then donate to each content or creator individually
Example: Flattr, Satoshipay

Upside:

Consumers can pay what they want/can
High flexibility of who to pay, even small blogs

Downside:

Causes decision fatigue because of need to click for each contribution
No need to pay, causing a lot of people to forget or avoid paying.

Auto-distributed microdonations based on engagement

Advanced version of micro-donations where payout happens automatically based on consumer's engagement with content.
Example: Brave's Basic Attention Token, Spotify's network subscription (but without a max amount)

Upside:

Consumer decision reduced to: How much do I want to pay each month?
High flexibility of who to pay, even small blogs or curators (e.g. Twitter profiles)

Downside:

Potentially needs a lot of review on who to pay automatically in order to train algorithms.
Current solutions have low-fidelity of data to draw from (Brave: reading time, frequency)
No need to pay, causing people to avoid paying.

Not seen yet. Future?

These are ideas on how to get around the downsides of some of the current approaches to content monetization.

Staking-based access

Creators don't charge consumers a 'Subscription' or 'Pay-Per-Access'. Instead they require Consumers who want to access their content to have 'Auto-distributed Microdonations' enabled and having staked at least X amount into the payout pool per month. This means consumers can freely access creators’ content and won't be charged if it's not useful, but it's ensured that consumers have set aside budget for the content that they actually find useful and contribute to the health and wealth of the creator economy.

Upside:

Solves problem that consumers are not required NEED to pay, like with microdonations
Leaving openness for knowledge being freely accessible to the majority of people, while at the same time rewarding useful creators
Useful to consumers who just want to skim and see if the content is valuable. Potentially also very suitable as an alternative model to pay for access to non-state-funded academic papers (which otherwise should be open source).
Potentially an elegant way of creating non-oppressive social incentives to pay for content.

Downside:

If the required staked amount is too diverse, it may reduce consumer convenience (e.g. Consumer stakes 6€/month but some of the creators want you to stake 7€, others 8€ and others 9€.
Could cause frustrations by needing to adapt budget too often. Could be worked around by offering tier suggestions to creators (e.g. 5€ / 10€ / 15€)

Time-limited freemium

Allow someone to try out a stream/content for X seconds for free and if they like it, then start charging them. This allows people to try something out risk free.
Potentially more suitable for music, podcast and video content, than for news articles. Could apply to news articles as well in a frequency limited freemium variety where consumers get X articles to read for free, like on Medium or NYtimes.

Upside:

Enables a try-and-buy option

Downside:

Not equally suitable for all content (e.g. article vs audio/video)

Multi-tiered network subscriptions

Platforms with Network Subscriptions (e.g. Spotify) could introduce a second tier or enable creators to offer exclusive access with separate subscriptions.

Upside:

Creators have the ability to grow in popularity in a network and capitalise on true-fans.

Downside:

If creators can’t set their own price on exclusive access to some of their content and it's just another network tier, it does not solve the problem that they all compete around a fixed pot

Memex.Social - Grant Report #2 January 4th 2021

Oliver Sauter — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:43:51 +0000

Done in December:

Increased Subscriptions from 550 to 600 paying 2-3€/month.
80% Conversion Rate from free trial to subscriptions.
1200 Beta testers, up from 800 in November!
Finalised mockups for user profile and integration with WebMonetization standard. I think the upload downscales the image slightly. Better opening it in a new tab with this link.
Did a goal setting workshop. Prime goal:
- WorldBrain is profitable by July 2021, requiring us to cross 35k in MRR
- User Research has shown these features to be critical (in order of execution)
  - Following Collections
  - In-page annotation based discussions
  - 3+ Device Sync
  - PDF Annotations
  - API
  - Nested Collections
  - Bulk Edit
Finished, but not launched yet: Notifications for received replies and updates to followed collections

In Progress

Following other people's collections

Up next:

Finishing features to deliver base grant requirements (leaving still 1-2 months left on the timeline 🎉):
- follow other people's collections
- User profiles including WebMonetization integration
- view and respond to annotations from followed collections in web sidebar
Preparing beta rollout of above features to key influencers in our network and beta community
Raising another 200k to support our development team so we can improve speed to build features necessary for profitability.

Using Coil within a WebExtension

Oliver Sauter — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 12:47:47 +0000

Currently planning up the workflows for integrating the WebMonetization endpoints in the shared collections (like this one).

It gets exciting :)

Question:
Currently users would pay via another extension, e.g. Coil.
How does that work with pages that are inside the Memex extensions? The situation will be that users can follow those collections inside their Memex extension (getmemex.com) and so they may wanna pay from there, instead of going to the web view.
Are there any known blockers to such a UX?

Here some sneak peak on the v1 of the mockups. Feedback for better payment UX welcome!
I think the upload downscales the image slightly. Better opening it in a new tab with this link.

Slow Payment Process with Coil. UX Improvement possible?

Oliver Sauter — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:01:01 +0000

When using the coil extension to pay for pages I am on, it takes a minute or 2 for the dialogue to confirm successful payment.

Of course its a no-brainer that this is not an ideal UX and will be annoying to many users.
Admittedly after already the 2nd payment I made my desire to pay for pages dropped rapidly, in the prospect that I have to wait so long on each page.

I wonder how much of this process can be done in the background, while the user already gets a confirmation of his request being processed?

The ideal experience would be for me: I click and get instant confirmation. Even if the actual payment process takes a bit more time, it should just happen in the background.

If there are any errors, I may wanna get an email, or a monthly summary with all my payments, including the failed ones so i can potentially retry.