The Interledger Community 🌱: Natalie Axton

Web Monetization for the Arts — Grant Report #2

Natalie Axton — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 19:27:33 +0000

Project Update

Web Monetization for the Arts concluded in January 2023 with the successful delivery of our education and outreach materials. We created a course explaining Web Monetization that was specifically tailored to classical musicians, independent performing artists, and small performing arts organizations in the United States.

The course was informed by an audience-specific survey that questioned artists about their digital content strategies, their knowledge of Web Monetization and technical skill level. The survey revealed that there is a lot of interest in monetizing digital content and that artists do not have a lot of experience with technical skills like editing HTML or installing WordPress plugins. We had a very high rate of survey respondents signing up to receive our educational materials.

Our education materials was delivered as a text-based course. It was written to explain Web Monetization in its simplest terms and to demonstrate how artists can get started with Web Monetization using their existing content and known content platforms like YouTube and Free Music Archive. Unfortunately, we did not receive feedback on our educational materials.

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Our project was focused on education and outreach.

The project was two-part. The first part involved listening to performing artists and arts organizations. We built a survey and asked thirty questions about artists' digital content strategies and understanding of Web Monetization. We were very keen to know how many of them maintain their own websites and what channels they use for distributing original content, among other things.

Survey respondents were asked to give their email addresses if they wanted to receive educational materials about Web Monetization. Forty eight percent of survey respondents elected to receive the emails.

These educational materials formed the second part of our project, a series of articles about Web Monetization tailored to the classical music and small performing arts organizations in the United States. It was delivered via email and comprises a text-based course.

The survey responses helped us understand where our audience was on a technical level and what their concerns were regarding digital content. We were not surprised to learn that our audience is non-technical. Sixty eight percent of our respondents stated they have never heard of micropayments. Eighty one percent stated they have never heard of a payment pointer. Only 7 percent stated that they have ever changed HTML code on a web page. Only 5 percent stated they had ever installed a WordPress plugin.

I wrote the course as a series of eleven articles. Seven of them explain Web Monetization and how to get started with it as a creator. One is a glossary of terms. Two of them serve as introductions to the Web Monetization for the Arts project.

As the writer, my job was to provide context and point of view suitable for our audience. My aim was to explain how the component pieces of Web Monetization -- ILP-enabled digital wallet, payment pointer, Coil -- are acquired and how they can be used to easily convert existing content channels into Web Monetized content. Matt Mankins served as fact-checker and editor. His guidance kept the language simple and relatable. Cage Ames served as our copyeditor.

Many of our survey respondents use YouTube. So getting them set up with Web Monetized YouTube channels via Coil was a priority. The Free Music Archive was another platform that our audience understood, and this seemed to be one of the easiest ways for them to get started.

Matt Mankins and I are the co-founders of Monetized, a tool for creators to sell and paywall online content. Monetized allows users to gate content using Web Monetization. I created a page on Monetized for those following our course to test their skills. If they had become Web Monetization members through Coil, they would be allowed to see the page I created on Monetized. If they had not, they would be directed to Coil in order to become members.

The course was delivered by email, using Substack. You can find it archived here. We set up a series of Zoom sessions as Q and As. We had a few signups for the sessions, but unfortunately no one attended.

Since our audience for this course is non-technical, I strove to use simple language and to include screenshots when possible to visually explain the processes of setting up an Uphold account, joining Coil, etc. I included links to the videos made by Artist Rescue Trust in several of the lessons.

Unfortunately we saw a declining open rate for the emails. It's possible that I created too many lessons. The material might simply have been too much to learn.

Communications and marketing

Our aim was to share the published course with media and to distribute it along other publication channels. Given the news that Coil is shutting down, we do not feel that it is helpful to publicize the course at this time.

What’s next?

Our job now is to watch how the Web Monetization ecosystem evolves and to see how a post-Coil Web Mon world can work for this nonprofit arts community. We hope to be able to update our course for the post-Coil Web Monetization world in the future.

Web Monetization for the Arts will continue to communicate informally with nonprofit performing artists and arts organizations about their digital content strategies and monetization plans. We all work in the arts and therefore hear from musicians and artists on a weekly basis. We would like to keep the Web Monetization conversation going, and if possible, to bring in some artists rights advocates working in our space.

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd love to hear from anyone else working with classical musicians and nonprofit artists.

Additional comments

Since the course is archived on Raft Magazine, an arts journalism project I direct, I asked Raft readers if they would be open to paying $5 a month in exchange for access to nonprofit arts content. I received one very thoughtful response that it depended on what kind of arts content the site hosted. I suppose that's a fair question.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Web Monetization for the Arts — Grant Report #1

Natalie Axton — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:31:33 +0000

Artists Respond to Web Monetization

Project Update

Our team is closing the artist survey we created and moving on to the education and outreach phase of our project. Web Monetization for the Arts has been met with interest by those in the media concerned with the intersection of arts and tech.

As for the survey, although we have a large enough sample to understand our audience and move the project forward, the response rate has not been as robust as we think it could have been were our organization more familiar to our community.

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Our key activities are:

Creating and distributing a survey that asks classical musicians and small performing arts groups about their digital content strategies and
Using the results of that survey to write educational materials about Web Monetization for our target audience.

In March we built our survey and began distributing it by email. We created a forwardable email and a survey cover letter.

We spent took a lot of care with the language for these documents. Web Monetization is not a familiar term to our audience. We wanted to make sure that our appeal explained our long-term mission -- to help artists build economically sustainable online content practices -- and didn't come across as "spammy."

Similarly, the survey required a lot of brainstorming. How best to approach artists and arts organizations about an unfamiliar topic? We needed to collect information that would be helpful to us in building the educational materials. We have always sought to meet our audience where they are. The survey has been an opportunity to listen to musicians and performing arts groups.

We decided to craft the survey in three parts.

The first collected demographic and organizational information that could help us understand respondents' resources and missions.
The second section concerned digital content strategies. We asked how, what, where and why about their current content in order to learn what respondents' goals, concerns, and optimization strategies.
The final section asked about familiarity with Web Monetization and technical know-how so that we might best understand where the challenges might be.

The survey we developed was emailed to over 2,000 persons working in the nonprofit arts. We emailed contacts at music organizations across the United States. Many of them were members of the League of American Orchestras.

Some early results:

69% of respondents identify as freelance artists.
Most respondents had less than $25,000 annual income from their artistic work.
80% create original digital content.
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the primary ways respondents are currently distributing digital content.
65% of respondents have not received revenue from their digital content in the past two years.
81% of respondents are familiar with the term 'streaming payment.'
Only 7% of our respondents has ever installed a web browser extension.

We have received over a hundred responses and we're very happy with that number. It is, however, lower than what we anticipated. We suspect that we would have received more responses if our organization were more established and/or familiar to our audience.

Interestingly, Jacob had a lot of success engaging with artists in person. During the daily course of his work in New York City, he showed musicians the survey on his phone. This direct, in-person engagement was the most effective way of getting people talking about Web Monetization and its uses. We see potential for more education outreach with in-person sessions.

Communications and marketing

We created a press release announcing our project. It was shared with and by several arts publications and advocacy groups.

Broadway World picked up the story. So did Musical America.

The Texas Music Office shared our survey on their social channels. They also shared with us their list of Texas concert halls and arts organizations.

Contacts at King FM in Seattle connected us with the Live Music Project. Live Music Project shared our survey via their social channels.

Our team's affiliated publication, Raft Magazine, published a story about the project along with a link to the survey.

We were in touch with reporters at WNYC and National Public Radio. They expressed interest in our project and stated that we were too early in the process for them to do a feature.

What’s next?

In the coming days we will close the survey and run the survey results report. We will be analyzing the data in the coming weeks, as our project now turns to its education and outreach phases. We will be writing a series of articles that cover Web Monetization and its application for our audience.

Natalie will write a series of ten articles, with editorial support from Matt. We will deliver these articles via email to our survey respondents who requested them. We will publish the articles at Raft Magazine and to Medium.

Additionally, we will hold virtual office hours to answer any questions our readers have.

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd love to hear from any performing artists who have implemented Web Monetization, and how it has worked for them. Adding your story to our educational materials would put a human face on what is for many of our audience a tedious conversation about technical matters they don't understand or trust.

Web Monetization for the Arts would also like help distributing our articles. Sharing them via social media channels would be appreciated.

Additional comments

One of the challenges of working within the nonprofit arts is that, historically, the arts and artists have not wanted to talk about money. This sentiment was captured nicely by one of our survey respondents:

One of the major reasons for the dearth of money in the arts is the lack of public funding NOT a lack of resources, knowledge, experience, workshops, surveys, web based monetization schemes or any other individually based money making scheme. Promoting this kind of idea is antithetical to the future of the arts and causing harm in our artistic communities. We are not businesses. We do not make a profit. We do not "monetize" anything. Get off your high horse, start demanding public funding, and fold up this business.

The idea that art is labor and that labor should be paid opens a conversation within the nonprofit arts for artists. Advocacy groups are raising awareness about the impossible economics that creatives face. Artists want help. That sentiment was expressed well by another survey respondent:

Please encourage artists to STOP putting their music on streaming services. Only Apple, Amazon, et al make the money. Even Beyonce has a side hustle because streaming revenue is not the same as old skool album sales. Make it stop.

We think that a big part of getting artists and arts organizations to adopt Web Monetization will include educating their supporters about it. This means educating arts consumers about the economics of online content. It means explaining why people post content for free and what the long-term costs of doing that are.

We see educating the arts audience as reducing the friction inherent in adopting Web Monetization for our artists.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Welcome to Web Monetization for the Arts

Natalie Axton — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:53:59 +0000

We're happy to be starting this project which seeks to survey independent and small performing arts organizations about their digital content strategies and monetization methods.

Who are we? We're a team with decades of experience in arts management, content strategy, and web monetization that came together for this very important project.