The Interledger Community 🌱: Micrio: ultra resolution storytelling

Micrio: Ultra resolution Storytelling— Grant Report #2

Roelf-Jan — Wed, 19 May 2021 09:06:41 +0000

Project Update

Since we started quite early in de GftW-program, we had most of the work done in the beginning of January, also see our last Grant report.

Since our team works at a project agency, Grant for the Web was also set up as a project with a dedicated team for an amount of time. We found it hard to keep up with the Grant for the Web community while we were already working on other projects. Although we just found out that there are highlight posts in this community, which is quite helpful!

Progress on objectives

We had 3 goals for this project,

1.

Giving content creators a risk-free platform to publish ultra-resolution storytelling and monetize it;

Progress:
This is almost done. We've done research into this and found out that the current state of Web Monetization does not fully align with the monetization vision for Micrio. Although it still could work in the future at a more mature state.

Still to do is to find out if there is a client of Micrio that likes to experiment with adding Web Monetization to their project.

2.

Providing the development community with an open source library to provide risk-free publishing and monetization in other domains;

Progress:
This is done. We deviated somewhat from this goal while learning & playing around with Web Monetization, see our last report.

3.

Improve Web Monetization technology by actively joining the discussion and development with a real-world case.

Progress:
This is done. The research into this is mainly summarised in our post about API spec suggestions

Key activities

See our last report. Nothing to add into this since then.

Communications and marketing

We gave a talk about monetizing content and Grant for the Web on a remote meetup, organized by a front-end agency in the Netherlands. It can be seen here: https://www.voorhoede.nl/nl/blog/the-new-native-web/.

What’s next?

We are going to talk with the product manager of the platform Micrio if there is a client that likes to try out monetizing their project.

Also we are planning to write a blogpost on our engineering blog about monetizing content & Grant for the Web. Mainly based on the talk given on the meetup.

Ultra resolution storytelling - with Micrio

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 09:15:50 +0000

Project overview

Our project is called Micrio: a solution for telling interactive stories with ultra resolution images or video. Publishers can create interactive stories on the platform and incorporate them in their website.
As the saying goes: "A picture can say more than a 1000 words", so we think it is best you experience Micrio for yourself. A really great example of what can be achieved with Micrio is this one: Explore The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch.

Project team

Micrio is a venture of software company Q42 in the Netherlands. The team for this project consists of three members: Anton (developer), Roelf-Jan (developer) and Jeroen (project manager).

What we are doing

Micrio's business model currently is subscription driven. We investigated how we could renew the business model for Micrio with Web Monetization. Want to know more?

What community support would benefit your project?

There are still some challenges to solve before Web Monetization could work for Micrio. We tried out a possible API spec change, although this also has side effects (see discussion below the post).
Ideas are welcome here!

Link Round Up!

Grant report january

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:24:53 +0000

Hi there! Here is an update on our Grant for the Web project.

Our goal is to empower artists to publish and monetize their art without worrying about hosting costs or upfront investments. We have created a platform (Micrio) which is a platform for creating interactive stories from ultra-resolution images. It is currently used by artists,
photographers, museums, and broadcasters alike. More background information can be found here.

We started in October with our team consisting of 3 people by finding out how the Web Monetization API works and implemented this in several prototypes. Soon we found out that the current Web Monetization tag functionality was limited for our purpose and we dived into the Interledger protocol to see if ILP could give us the flexibility we needed.

It took us quite some time to get the right documentation and sample repos, but in the end we managed to make peer-to-peer payments. We thought we would be more flexible in the way we could monetize the content.

When comparing both functionalities we ultimately decided that we preferred the easy-to-use “monetization” tag, but that it just lacked the features we need. We therefore decided that we would stick with the first approach, but mock the functionality to see if we could come up with a proof of concept that would work.

In the last month we had a call with Chris (Lawrence) to get some background information on the Grant project and some general questions we had about the Web Monetization API and Payment Providers (like Coil).

Overall we are pretty happy with the progress we made so far. As you also may have experienced, there are a lot of unknowns and the technology is in the really early stages but we are seeing the potential and we feel privileged to contribute (in a minor way) to this project.

Progress on objectives

We have 3 goals for this project,

1.

Giving content creators a risk-free platform to publish ultra-resolution storytelling and monetize it;

Progress:
We’ve done extensive research on how we think this would work inside the Micrio ecosystem and compared this with the current state of Web Monetization.

We do still intend to work towards this goal, but there is a growing doubt that the current state of Web Monetization does not fully match the vision we have in mind for its implementation within Micrio.

We are still looking into the possibilities of how we would do this.

2.

Providing the development community with an open source library to provide risk-free publishing and monetization in other domains;

Progress:
We deviated somewhat from this goal, as we think that the
current meta tag approach is easy to understand and does
not need a library to use it. We do think that this approach is lacking in features, so we are currently working on an open-source github repository with our working samples and documentation on how to use them. This is not the deliverable we had in mind, but we feel that this is also valuable for the Web Monetization community.

3.

Improve Web Monetization technology by actively joining the discussion and development with a real-world case.

Progress:
Based on our current experience with using the technology and the barriers we ran into we have some thoughts how the web monetization API could be improved. Planning to share that in our final report.

Key activities

We made an analysis of the possible ways to monetize the content in the micrio platform. We’ve documented this.
We created a business model sheet to see what was the best way to monetize the content in the platform and what was a feasible amount. Unfortunately this sheet contains data about our organization revenue which are private. We have however written a community post about our research into the business model.
Based on that analysis we created several prototypes within the Micrio platform both with web monetization API and the interledger protocol.
The results are bundled in two github repositories including extensive documentation in the readme:
Q42/GrantForTheWeb.MicrioConcepts
Q42/GrantForTheWeb.ChromeExtension
We have tested our result with consumers to see if they are willing to pay for the content using one of the prototyped monetization streams and how they feel about it. We have written a community post about this.

Communications and marketing

After receiving the grant for our project, we have written about our grant project and Web Monetization on our company blog. The post can be found on our blog (written in dutch).

Next to the company blog we have created a series of posts on the Web Monetization community, explaining the different steps and hurdles we have taken in the last few weeks.

What’s next?

Most of the work we wanted to do is done. Although we just shared a serie of posts with some of our work, including our proposal for changes in the Web Monetization API specification. So based on the feedback we will receive or ideas that might pop up, changes are possible in our work in the next few weeks.

The platform Micrio might implement the current version of Web Monetization API. But that decision is mainly in the hands of the product manager of Micrio.

Next to the work we are planning to write a blogpost on our engineering blog and maybe on our ‘default’ blog as well.

And finally we are planning to give a talk on an upcoming Front-end Forward meetup in Amsterdam, organised by de Voorhoede.

You can follow our plans & progress on our Trello board.

The final result of our journey

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:20:58 +0000

In this post we wrap up our findings and learnings of our journey into Web Monetization. In the previous posts we have explained our different views on the concept and how this relates to our goals with Micrio and its business model.

We have developed a proof of concept that aligns with our vision of a general direction of the API specification.

The proof of concept

The prototype consists of 3 parts:

Two admin webpages for determining the price & Web Monetization statistics
The webpage with Micrio on it
A Chrome Extension to mock our suggested Web Monetization API changes

And of course Coil should be running.

It all comes together in our main GitHub repository. The code of the prototype can be found here.

See it in action below:

Some notes

Since Coil uses a flat rate and has a monthly (?) payout to the payment pointers we mocked some things. The amount per minute, which is set in monetization:asset:amount is used to calculate a multiplier. With the multiplier we can mock higher rates. The earnings on the payment pointer are stored in localStorage. In this way the revenue per project could be directly shown on the statistics page.
At the time of writing, the value of XRP is quite volatile. We have decided to not use a conversion API in any of the prototypes as this would involve using API keys and running into limits. We advise anyone trying the prototypes to edit the RIPPLE2EUR values to the most recent values.

If something is not clear, let us know. We are curious about your thoughts!

Web Monetization API spec suggestions

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:20:39 +0000

The currently drafted Web Monetization Spec is certainly a good first step into the right direction. However, if we want to use it as a viable addition to the Micrio business model some changes need to be made to fit our vision of the product. We like to share our thoughts & ideas with you. Hopefully sharing this helps to strengthen the spec.

The problem of a fixed payment stream rate

The current Coil implementation features a fixed payment stream that can not be influenced by the user of a website. While this might be a secure implementation (the stream can not be tampered with), it also has some implications.

First it implies that every type of content has the same value. It doesn’t matter if it’s a video, a game or a large research blogpost. Although the costs for the content creator might differ a lot, they receive the same amount of money. We think that this is not a healthy situation for the content creator.

Second, the Web Monetization API can be used worldwide. A content creator in the USA will have the same stream rate compared to a content creator in for example Cambodia. Although the same rate will give you way more purchasing power in Cambodia. So globally seen, we think this is not sustainable.

We feel like that the API should have more options to customize the payment behavior, like setting an amount per time-unit, the currency and maybe a maximum amount. By adding more tags, the customization of payment options would be possible and the API is suited for more scenarios.

Suggested API changes

In the process of making up suggestions for the API, we looked as much to the underlying Interledger protocol as possible.

monetization:asset

<meta name="monetization:asset:amount" content="125" />

The amount tag defines the price per minute in the currency calculated by the code and scale tag. This replaces the fixed rate set in the current implementation.

<meta name="monetization:asset:scale" content="4" />

The scale tag defines the scale of the payment. The scale divides the amount and max_amount by 10 to the power of the value (e.g. amount / 10 ^ scale).

<meta name="monetization:asset:code" content="EUR" />

The code tag defines the currency following the ISO 4217 spec in which the payment should be done.

<meta name="monetization:asset:max_amount" content="250" />

One of the most important changes would be to add an extra monetization:asset:max_amount or "price" meta-tag that hooks into the monetizationprogress event. The value of the content attribute should be a numeric value which corresponds with the price of that web-page. When that specific value is reached, the monetization stream should stop automatically.

Suggested supportive browser changes

By unlocking the payment stream, we also expose the user to more risk. What if someone is asking 100 dollars per minute, without users’ explicit consent? Regardless of whether this is possible within the concept / regulations of ‘micro payments’. Therefore we suggest a feature in the browser where you can set a rate limit for the maximum amount per minute without consent. If the user navigates to a website where the asked rate is above the threshold, you will first have to give your consent for a one-time exception for the rate limit.

We are curious about what you think of our suggestions and hope this (and the discussion) will strengthen Web Monetization as a concept.

In the next post is serie you can see it in action and play with it yourself.

Business model: subscriptions & Web Monetization

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:19:55 +0000

For our grant we did research in how we could renew the business model for Micrio with Web Monetization. We like to share our results with all of you!

The product: Micrio

Before we start talking about business models, first a short introduction about what Micrio is. Micrio is a solution for telling interactive stories with ultra resolution images or video. Publishers can create interactive stories with Micrio and incorporate them in their website. So technically Micrio is a CMS & private library. The publisher creates an interactive story in the CMS & includes it with the library on a webpage. For example: the Dutch Rijksmuseum created an interactive story about their painting Nighwatch.

The current business model

Micrio’s customers, the publishers, buy a subscription. The monthly fee is mainly depending on the amount of visitors and therefore higher bandwidth usage (there is an average usage of 12 MB per visitor). An extra fee is paid when the subscription limit is exceeded.
In the current business model visitors have free access to make use of the interactive story.

The problem with the current business model

The current business model works for Micrio itself, but it can have an unwanted side effect for the publisher. The more visitors are attracted to the publisher’s Micrio project, the higher the monthly fee becomes. This means that the subscription costs can be unpredictable for the publisher.

If a project unexpectedly goes ‘viral’, this can even cause extra costs on top of the subscription fee. You could say that the publisher is ‘punished’ for creating awesome content!
But… Web Monetization could solve this problem!

The updated business model

During our research we looked into some possible business models with Web Monetization for Micrio, for example let users pay for their bandwidth usage. The summary of the research can be read here. This resulted in an updated business model.

In the updated version, publishers earn money with Web Monetization. The publisher receives a share of this revenue stream, for example 90%. This can be an extra incentive for the publisher to create high quality content & put effort into attracting visitors.

While flexible income based on visitors is an improvement for the content creator, it introduces uncertainty for the Micrio business model. Especially because Micrio is not responsible for marketing the content itself. Therefore we have chosen to add web monetization on top of the existing subscription model The combination of subscription and Web Monetization creates the situation that publishers first have to invest (the subscription costs) and possibly earn money after the break-even point. And this is also a win for Micrio, because it will receive a small share for the attracted visitors.
In our prototype we created a calculator for getting a rough estimation about those break-even points.

The price of Web Monetization

We talked about uncertainty for Micrio in the previous paragraph. We also see another one in the current version of the Web Monetization landscape. At the moment Coil, as the only provider, determines the price to be paid. This means that a 3rd party has a huge influence on Micro’s business model. We think this is far from ideal.

In the research we did, we saw that the average visit is 2 minutes on Micrio projects. In that time we like to be paid €0.025 for example. Currently Coil’s rate is about €0,30 per hour, which is only €0.01 in 2 minutes. Therefore we like to set the Web Monetization rate ourself.

We have some ideas about how this could work in the Web Monetization API, more about that in the next post in this serie.

User Interviews: First contact with WM

Anton Hogewoning — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:57:43 +0000

For our Grant Project Micrio: ultra resolution storytelling, we are doing research to determine if Web Monetization would be a viable addition to the current business model. One of the greatest concerns we had when starting this project was paying without consent and the effect that would have on users.

At Q42 we strive to make websites that users actually want to use, so we regularly test our websites with professional testers. Next to testing we also organise something we call Real User Mornings, or RUM for short. In these mornings we test some or our applications with real users with predefined scenarios to see if our assumptions of the UI and UX live up to expectations in the real world. We’ve written about this on our company blog (in dutch), but if you are really interested: we based these sessions on this post by the Dropbox design team.

Doing User Interviews remotely

In non-pandemic times we do the RUMs in person in one of our offices. Naturally this was out the question and after some figuring out we came up with a way that we can do the RUM remotely.

Normally multiple of our people would be part of a user test, with each person having their own task. As we still believe that this approach works for our testing, we needed a way to replicate this remotely. After some preliminary testing with Google Meet, we decided that we needed specific tooling for this and we decided to go for Lookback. Without going too much in depth about this app, it allows us to do user tests with each user on their own device.

Remote Interviews x Grant for the Web

As we do not focus on UI or UX for our grant project, we had a different approach to the user test. We had a small user scenario, but we primarily focused on an interview with users that asked about their online habits and if they would be willing to pay for specific content.

Our goals for this session were to find out what users think about online payments, whether they would be willing to pay for online content and what they think about paying without consent. Our user pool existed out of 5 people, ranging from relatively young (<35) to elderly (60+), both employed and unemployed. We acknowledge that the number of users is not large enough to base a real result on, but it is a good first step to see what people think of the concept of Web Monetization.

Assumptions

Before doing the interview we discussed what each of us thought would be the outcome of the interviews. Our primary concerns were that users were unwilling to pay for what can be seen as “browsing the internet”, due to people already paying for internet access and possible subscriptions to newspapers or video-on-demand services and that users would not agree with paying without giving explicit consent.

The test

We assumed that the concept of Web Monetization and Micro Payments in general, would be fairly or totally new to the users we would interview. Therefore we did not introduce the concept of Web Monetization right at the start of the interview. We decided on running 3 primary questions which we changed slightly based on the answers users would give before running the user scenario.

Would you like to tell us something about your online habits? Notes/Follow-ups:
- Mention that there is a lot of free content; ask if the user knows how money is made for those websites.
- Ask what they think of those payment models.
Do you ever pay for reading articles or watching videos online? Notes/Follow-ups:
- If yes; for what?
- If no; why not AND when would they think about paying.
Do you think there should be a difference between items or videos that are free and need to be paid for?

Next we would show the user a number of websites that make use of Micrio and let them choose one that they were most interested in (See this website for the options). We did not have any UX or UI goals for this scenario. The goal was to make them familiar with the unique content that the websites had to offer.

After a few minutes of consuming the content we picked up the interview again . We asked what they thought of the website they just visited and introduced the concept of micro payments as drafted in the Monetization API specification. We explained that this concept would revolve around a “wallet” in your browser that would pay small amounts (1ct per minute) as you browse.

Some observations and notes

3 of the 5 people were very enthusiastic about the concept of Web Monetization.
4 of the 5 users understood that not all content is free.
Users were willing to pay without explicit consent, but it should be very clearly indicated (implied consent) and really small payments.
For some users it mattered who owned the website. They argued that they would allow small businesses or artists, but did not agree with paying large corporations.

Some remarks can also be made that we have projected our biased view of web monetization on the users. In our ideal view on the project, we suggested that web monetization could in theory be a substitute for advertising, paywalls and/or subscriptions. In that scope, users are extremely happy with web monetization.

Conclusion

Based on our user interviews we can see that the concept of web monetization can be promising. Our users seem to be willing to pay (extremely) small amounts for content they consume on the internet. There still are some questions about transparency, where the threshold is for micro payments and how web monetization fits into the current ecosystem of web payments.

In the end we were surprised and delighted to see that for this small user test, our assumptions were incorrect. Users are open to the concept of streaming payments without consent and micro payments for consuming content. So even though our test was limited in its scope and test users, it was still a promising start of exciting new technology for the web.

We are curious to know the results of other user tests on this topic!

Intro: A healthy future for ultra resolution storytelling

Roelf-Jan — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:48:15 +0000

Hi all,

We are Anton, Jeroen & Roelf-Jan, working for Q42 in the Netherlands and are excited to work with Web Monetization for our Grant!

Our Grant is for a venture of Q42: Micrio. This is a solution for telling interactive stories with ultra resolution images or video. Publishers can create interactive stories on the platform and incorporate them in their website.
As the saying goes: "A picture can say more than a 1000 words", so we think it is best you experience Micrio for yourself! If you are interested we think this is a really great example of what can be achieved with Micrio. Explore The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch.

The current business model for Micrio is as follows: Publishers that use Micrio pay a monthly fee depending on their usage and monthly visits. If they exceed their limit they need to pay a fee to cover the extra bandwidth costs. This means that viral posts can cost publishers a lot of money...
We think that this can be better! So we are investigating what impact Web Monetization can have on this business model. Our aim is to make viral posts profitable instead of costly!

We are already working for 4 weeks on this and will share the results in the upcoming weeks.
Also if you have questions or ideas, let us know!