The Interledger Community 🌱: James Vasile

Web Monetization Isn't Just Content

James Vasile — Thu, 13 May 2021 22:13:12 +0000

Web Monetization and COIL are very focused on a specific model of paying for content. They do a very good job of replicating a familiar, specific, revenue-generating interaction between users and websites. In order for web monetization to take off, it needs to support other models, other interactions. At Permanent.org, our expertise is storage. We store things on long time scales for fixed, up-front payments. Pay once, keep it forever. Your great-great-great grandkids will thank you!

When we looked at web monetized content creation, we instantly saw possibilities beyond content, beyond creation, and beyond the web. The COIL approach of charging end-user consumers to pay creators serves an important function. It replaces the advertising economic model with something more equitable and privacy-respecting. We believe web monetization can pay for other things too: services, for example. And because storage is our thing, we looked at how the current web monetization infrastructure handles storage as a service.

We also looked beyond what most end-users think of as “the web”. Web monetization doesn’t have to be confined to end-user websites. It can apply anywhere you can do http, which these days is pretty much everywhere except embedded IOT devices. And even those smaller edge computing devices increasingly speak web.

In our project, we took a web application, Etherpad Lite. We added some hooks to Permanent’s web API, and are using web monetization as the payment mechanism to allow users to permanently store the contents of Etherpad documents. There’s a lot to do before our current proof-of-concept work is ready to deploy across the web, but we validated some basic ideas:

Web monetization can do micropayments for services on the backend, not just for content on the front end.
We can pay third parties instead of the content-hosting site-- the micropayments don’t go to the etherpad host. They go to pay for storage at a place the user chooses.
We can integrate Permanent storage as a service in other apps. We can introduce permanence and user control of their own data to whole chunks of the web that are currently ephemeral or out of users’ hands.

Our next steps are to make some API changes on the Permanent side, improve the plugin so anybody can use it in any etherpad installation, and perhaps even make the integration work with another GFTW project, docs.plus.

Of course, we didn’t do all this work just to make a nifty etherpad plugin. We wanted to explore the possibilities. We’ll cover what we learned in our next blog post. The challenges we faced point to gaps in Web Monetization infrastructure, and a lot of our next steps will involve trying to figure out which gaps to fill next. COIL was never supposed to serve every possible need. Designing the next piece to sit next to COIL in the ecosystem will enable web monetization to take some big steps forward in adoption and application.

Web Monetization Back In The Day

James Vasile — Thu, 06 May 2021 21:20:17 +0000

Over at Permanent.org we're thinking a lot about what types of infrastructure we need beyond COIL. There are services that don't match up well with COIL. Of all the revenue models for delivering content and services on the web, COIL focuses on a specific slice. It is quite good at replacing pages with ads on them. It is less good at fee-for-service.

In my research through prior efforts to meet those other usage scenarios, I came across some old and informative and inspiring patents that proposes processes for setting prices on content, paying for them, and splitting that payment among several parties. Those patents are the result of a lot of research and is a good starting point for thinking about content providers who will not be satisfied taking whatever unpredictable amount COIL sends them.

COIL does one thing well. If that one thing isn't you're thing, drop me a line. Maybe we can work together to fill that gap in the ecosystem infrastructure!

Web Monetization For Data

James Vasile — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 22:20:32 +0000

Much of the web is ephemeral. Your digital social life streams by, and every time you look, it's changed again. So much of our online selves disappears, even the parts we want to preserve. This is especially true on a multi-generational timeframe. Without your active participation, your online self slowly fades. Permanent.org's mission is to stem the tide, to help preserve your online self for future generations. We are excited to be working on a project to use web monetization to pay for storage of temporary text documents from Etherpad Lite. As part of that project, we are considering ways web monetization could extend beyond replacing ads.

We come at this with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Permanent is a non-profit focused on helping people preserve their digital legacies across generations. We steward permanent storage of your documents, media, and data, and are working on a set of tools to help you manage digital archives for posterity.

Our web monetization project explores new ways to integrate Permanent storage into services on a micropayments basis. We're starting with Etherpad Lite, an ephemeral service that hosts temporary text documents ("pads") and enables collaborative editing. By integrating web monetization and Permanent, we can make pads endure. Your work ends up safely in your Permanent archive, and eventually you will be able to take it to other Permanent-enabled Etherpad instances. Our work will thus enable some short-term data resilience that leads to long-term preservation.

Etherpad Lite is just the start. In the longer term we will look for more ways to improve temporary services by adding portable, permanent storage.

What's more important than what we're building is why we proposed this project. We're having a lot of fun adding Permanent, portable storage to Etherpad Lite documents. It's so much fun, in fact, that we have to keep reminding ourselves we're not actually here to just build nifty features into Etherpad Lite. This is a research project. The real goal is to better understand how web monetization works with new types of online services.

We don't quite fit the typical use for web monetization described on the Coil website. We're not monetizing content. We're not replacing an ad-supported business. The dominant web monetization infrastructure offered by Coil does not quite match up with our needs. Identifying all those gaps is why we're here. By the time we're done, we hope to have a good idea of what the missing ecosystem pieces are, and that is the deliverable we're most excited about. It's a roadmap to expanding web monetization to new types of offerings. Once we have that, the real work (and the real fun) begins.

If you want to follow along or jump in and play, the work lives on github. Come join us!