The Interledger Community 🌱: Monetizing Philanthropy

Monetizing philanthropy: Our browser extension, interdisciplinary research findings & plans ahead

Catalina Goanta — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 12:59:15 +0000

The road to the project deliverables

It is with quite some disbelief that I am typing this final report. That is because it feels like we started this project yesterday, since our theme has been the gift that keeps on giving. In other words, when we set out to explore the world of philanthropy by social media content creators, we had solid knowledge of business models relating to social media influencers and a keen interest to explore the future of Internet monetization. And yet what we uncovered with a small-scale project running a bit over 6 months is a multi-faceted research agenda for the following years! I read some other final reports and saw we share this experience with other teams as well.

On a personal note, just like I imagine this was the case for many projetcs, our multidisciplinary team that I wrote about here has been at times challenged throughout these crazy pandemic times. However, team members managed to overcome these challenges mostly because they are incredible individuals and researchers, and I am very grateful that we could work together.

We set out goals on three lanes which I will explore, one by one, below, while also showcasing our specific output.

Monetization/altruistic incentives and models

To better understand the landscape of business models and incentives related to digital giving. In 2020, global health and social justice events revealed at scale a new era of online philanthropy. Content creators around the world started using their online platforms to gather money for families hit by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, or for social justice causes such as Black Lives Matter. The options to donate for such causes have reflected a mix of traditional payment affordances on websites advertised through social media, as well as new, more creative and elaborate ways to generate revenue. An example of the latter was the farming of views on Youtube for ’fake’ monetized videos (e.g. videos that display the same image/sound for a duration of minutes/hours and that display considerable amounts of ads). Content creators used these videos to maximize the AdSense monetization opportunities, while making public promises that all the monetization revenue would go to charities supporting Black Lives Matter. This context raises three main issues:

lack of legal certainty
lack of transactional transparency
business model volatility

For this deliverable, to tackle these three issues, we ended up with the following output.

Output 1: Literature review

First, we completed the literature review mentioned in our interim report here. Overall, the main finding is that the literature on monetization in general and philanthropy in particular pertains to a lot of siloz (e.g. computer science, law, social sciences) that do not interact. The increasing amount of interest given to the creator economy is currently leading to a lot of micro knowledge that is not building towards a more comprehensive overview relating to what is happening in practice. Thematically, we see there is increasing attention given to online donation behaviours occuring on platforms that allow for gift-giving (e.g. TikTok tokens, Twitch bits, Youtube Super Chat). This is a result of the fact that a lot of social media platforms have already incorporated donation buttons that allow creators to set up campaigns. For instance, TikTok recently integrated a gift affordance in the comments section.
The paper is now available openly here.

Output 2: Crowdfunding incomes on social media and the law

Second, we looked at some of the legal implications of getting an income out of donations. This is only a small part of the overall legal implications of web monetization, applicable in particular to creators who pursue philanthropy on a more systematic basis, to either fully or partially pursue monetary contributions for themselves. Against this background, we can think about philanthropy in two ways:

Based on the identity of the donee, philanthropy on social media can target the creator or other parties (e.g. people helped by the creator);
Based on the role of philanthropy in the creator's business model, creators can engage in philanthropy ad hoc (e.g. creators who use philanthropy for themselves or someone else sparsely) or systematically (e.g. social justice creators who build their career around philanthropy, or creators who depend on gift-giving). Our analysis considered creators who engage in philanthropy (whether for themselves or others) in a systematic way, to insure an income for themselves via philanthropy.

What is really interesting is that philanthropy in itself is a concept that is currently shifting its meaning, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to define it from a legal perspective. Traditionally, and setting aside jurisdiction-specific requirements, a donation entails a transaction with legal effects whereby a party (the donor) gives something gratuitously to another party (the donee), without the latter having any obligations to give something back. In the markets we explored, while technically it can be claimed that a follower donates bits to a Twitch streamer as a gift, we can also interpret that transaction as a bilateral service (e.g. the streamer provides entertainment and the follower pays for it). From that perspective, philanthropy and service provision may sometimes overlap. Further research is necessary to disentangle the two.

Our paper 'Emerging Business Models and the Crowdfunding Regulation: Income Crowdfunding on Social Media by Content Creators' looks at the practice of content creators asking their followers to support them either by a mix of donations or rewards-based contributions. This contribution tackles the challenges arising out of narrow scope of the new European Union's framework on crowdfunding, which focuses on investment crowdfunding, but which can provide meaningful regulatory inspiration also to practices which define the burgeoning creator economy.

Output 3: Engaging with national law-makers on the topic of the creator economy

We have also taken some of the knowledge we have been generating in the project and:

brought together a network of interdisciplinary researchers from around the world working on content creators; and
submitted evidence to the UK Parliament on the topic of influencer culture and business models.

Output 4: Engaging with creator communities

Our last output under this deliverable section relates to a survey sent out to 300 content creators mapped in our earlier update. This study is still ongoing, and we will update this report once we have a) the final results; and b) the final paper.

Browser extension

The starting point of this project was that current donation solutions/environments have two main problems:

they are centralized (e.g. meaning that creators depend on big platforms who can unilaterally cease their financial activity);
they are opaque (e.g. who makes how much money out of philanthropy?)

We tried to tackle these two issues by focusing on two outputs.

Output 5: Browser extension for donation campaigns

Our team developed a browser extension that seeks to provide creators with the possibility to ask for donations from their followers for specific causes. One of the most challenging architecture issues we faced was the ability of the donor to control how much money to donate and towards what purpose. From this perspective, we believe the web monetization community might benefit from additional solutions relating to how such control may be offered.

For instance, a creator may have 5 campaigns, but a follower may not resonate with all, meaning that the donor should have the option to not contribute to all the creator's content indiscriminately. Below are a few snaps of how the extension looks like.

Here's the browser extension repo (output 5)

Output 6: Donating transparently using the LUCE platform

To track the donation transactions in a privacy-preserving way that can still give users and researchers insights into the donation market for compliance and brand transparency purposes, we relied on LUCE. LUCE is a blockchain platform solution designed to stimulate data sharing and reuse, by facilitating compliance with licensing terms. The platform enables data accountability by recording the use of data and their purpose on a blockchain-supported platform. LUCE allows for individual data to be rectified and erased. In doing so LUCE can ensure subjects' General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) rights to access, rectification and erasure.

LUCE has also been integrated with Interledger. All the repos resulting from this work can be found below:

Consumer preferences regarding monetization and philanthropy

Output 7: Consumer behavior

To complement the viewpoints raised by literature and contact with content creators, we also set to understand how consumers perceive monetization and how they engage with that on social media. To this end, we are still pursuing an online experiment on Prolific, to determine donation behaviours on social media for a paper which will be published later this year. The report will be updated when we have a) the final results; and b) the final paper.

Output 8: Platform governance - Monetizing controversy

The last viewpoint we explored in this project to offer a holistic view of the issues involved has been the angle of platform governance. While it is true that dependance on big centralized platforms is an issue for content creators, what is equally true is that some form of content moderation needs to exist if we aim to have a safe Internet. From this perspective, any type of illegal content that normally can be taken down by social media platforms as a form of legal compliance, might be more difficult to tackle in decentralized environments. We explored this tension in a paper already published in the journal Morals & Machines on the monetization of controversy, which we covered extensively in an earlier post.

This topic needs further elaboration, especially in connection to the work done by the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (COALA), which has recently launched a taskforce on decentralized governance legitimacy, and to which our group also participates. COALA brings together renowned researchers and practitioners dealing with decentralization and law, and could be a great resource for this community.

Bonus stuff - Dissemination

Output 9: Project event in September

To disseminate the activities we have been busy with in the past months, we will be hosting an event where we will demo the browser extension and engage in discussions with content creators. The event will either be online or hybrid, and we will announce it in a separate post.

Output 10: Web monetization at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum

The Glossary of Platform Law and Policy Terms was developed as a result of the customary meeting of the Coalition on Platform Responsibility, taking place after the annual session of the 2019 Internet Governance Forum, to provide a common language for academics, regulators and policy-makers when discussing issues of platform responsibility. The Glossary has been developed in the past year, and we have proposed and written an entry on Web Monetization, to enhance the visibility of the protocol and its underlying phylosophy also in policy circles. The Glossary will be published freely soon, but until then the entires can be consulted here.

Output 11: Web Monetization in the Glossary on Decentralization (Internet Policy Review)

The last dissemination activity focusing on the workings and governance of decentralized web monetization will be featured as an entry in the Internet Policy Review's Glossary on Decentralization, which will be published later this year. We believe that an outlet that lies once more at the intersection of science and policy-making will be a good platform for more audiences to engage with the concepts behind Web Monetization. We will update this post when that happens.

Future research

To go back to what I started this post with, the work we have been doing was supposed to have three main pitstops. However, we are happy to report that we were able to have a three-fold productivity for our output due to the fact that we stumbled upon a lot of fascinating implications for philanthropy and social media. So much so, that we uncovered a lot of questions that still need answers, such as:

How could we pilot the browser extension with content creators, to make them more aware of the applications relating to COIL/Interledger/Web Monetization?
What are the legal frameworks for donations in various countries?
What is the legal nature of micro-transactions?
What should be the legal definition of philanthropy?
How can non-technical knowledge (e.g. social science/law) benefit technical projects?
What are the regulatory issues arising out of decentralization?

... and so on and so forth.

We hope to be able to pursue such further research within and also with the amazing community that has been rallying around web monetization!

Greetings from our team <3

Clout chasing on social media: The role of controversy in content monetization

Catalina Goanta — Tue, 11 May 2021 10:18:21 +0000

Monetizing controversy

If you spent some time on YouTube, you're likely to recognize the photo above: Logal Paul in a so-called Japanese suicide forest, filming dead bodies for his vlogs. This incident, dating from 2017, is generally cited not only by news outlets but also by academic researchers such as Sophie Bishop, as an example of the dangers associated with the chase for evermore virality and online popularity.

As content monetization is booming on about every single social media platform, and new tools emerge regularly (e.g. Instagram's expansion of Storefront for more affiliate marketing; Twitter's Tip Jar), creators have new incentives to build their online brands and followings.

One of the popular ways in which exposure to online attention can be won is 'clout chasing', which basically entails engaging into something shocking or controversial in order to have increased visibility on the Internet in general or social media in particular. And since engagement, impressions, follower numbers, comments, etc. are part of the pervasive equations calculating creator income, this visibility is essential for creators. With some members of our project team, we wrote a short paper for the first issue of a social science publication called 'Morals & Machines' to map definitions of clout chasing and to understand how it works in the context of content monetization:

This short discussion paper addresses how controversy is monetized online by reflecting on a new iteration of the shock value in media production, identified on social media as the ‘clout chasing’ phenomenon. We first exemplify controversial behavior, and subsequently proceed to defining clout chasing, which we discuss this concept in relation to existing frameworks for the understanding of controversy on social media. We then outline what clout chasing entails as a content monetization strategy, and address the risks associated with this approach. In doing so, we introduce the concept of ‘content self-moderation’, which encompasses how creators use content moderation as a way to hedge monetization risks arising out of their reliance on controversy for economic growth. This concept is discussed in the context of the automated content governance entailed by algorithmic platform architectures, to contribute to existing scholarship on platform governance.

The full paper, 'Clout Chasing for the Sake of Content Monetization: Gaming Algorithmic Architectures with Self-moderation Strategies' is available here.

Implications for the monetization of philanthropy

On the one hand, more virality and exposure leading to more attention can be a good thing when honing that attention to a good cause. However, clout chasing brings a cloud of suspicion over the intentions behind certain actions. A good example in this respect is the recent development around the case of Lil' Tay. Self-styled as 'the youngest flexer in history', Lil' Tay is the online persona of a nine year old girl who shocked the world with her content (including smoking, cursing and showing off her alleged wealth). After getting involved in physical altercations, and having raised a lot of concerns from her more mature audience, Lil' Tay took a long hiatus from her online presence. Her brother has since launched a GoFundMe campaign aimed at raising money for 'her fight against her abusive father'. Legally speaking, the text released with the campaign makes no sense. As minors, children will be in the custody of their legal guardians. Indeed, custody battles can be complex, but nothing that is achieved in the court of public opinion can replace the need for courts (whenever conflicts arise with respect to custody) to solve such conflicts according to applicable family laws. Moreover, the link between the brother raising funds and the mother most likely paying litigation fees is questionable.

In this context, a lot of questions emerge relating to the transparency of the fundraiser, which so far managed to gather around $16k out of a goal of $150k. Corroborating this sum with the Instagram posts made by the brother on his sister's account, it seems the fundraiser is not meeting the expectations of their initiator:

However, it is noteworthy to mention that for the initiators of fundraisers on GoFundMe, it is not necessary to reach the goal in order to have access to the funds. So far no statements have been released about how the $16k have been or will be used, and judging by the practices around similar fundraisers, no additional information is likely to follow.

Questions for the governance of web monetization

This example highlights the need for more transparency in philanthropy that is connected to content monetization. In addition to technical implementations which ought to allow access to a payment architecture that identifies the needs of its users, other aspects need to be taken into account as well. One of these aspects is legal accountability. In the GoFundMe example above, a person is raising funds allegedly on behalf of a sibling, but with absolutely no legal mandate to do so. If the money is misused, this can potentially result in a violation of criminal law, contract law, donation law, even tax law, to name a few examples. These laws are rarely harmonized, so different standards apply to different jurisdictions. For a fully transparent ecosystem, these laws need further mapping, as well as implementing into existing technical frameworks.

Ludwig’s subathon - when an idea snowballs unexpectedly

Alexandru Amariei — Mon, 03 May 2021 20:40:13 +0000

Ludwig and Twitch

The Twitch community has seen impressive growth over the years, starting from around 100.000 viewers on average in 2012 and having around 3 million concurrent viewers nowadays. Besides well-known streamers, like Pokimane, Ninja, or moistcr1tikal, one of the biggest creators on Twitch is Ludwig Ahgren. Ludwig started streaming full-time on February 16, 2019. Usually, he is streaming games, like Among Us and Valorant, plays Chess (even together with Magnus Carlsen), or just chats and engages with his community. In March 2021, he started a subathon on his channel, the short for subscription marathon, a non-stop stream where each Twitch subscription added another 10 extra seconds of streaming. However, the whole situation went out of control, in arguably the best way possible. Why? Because a stream that was expected to last a maximum of 48 hours became a one-month phenomenon, which in the end made Ludwig the biggest streamer on Twitch.

The subathon

Nobody, not even Ludwig, expected that the subathon would get so much traction. However, people started donating, and donating, and donating even more, just to keep the stream up. For Ludwig, this meant that he had to keep going, streaming almost everything he was doing, from his regular game streams to himself sleeping. As Charlie, another Twitch streamer, jokingly pointed out, Ludwig was being held hostage by the people on his stream. After 31 days, on April 13, he had to stop the subathon, regardless of the subscriptions still rolling in. Probably the biggest achievement of this subathon is that Ludwig and his community managed to break Ninja’s record for the most number of subscribers, peaking at 283.066 active subscriptions.

Numbers and charity

This whole event is really interesting, from several points of view, including crowdfunding. The tracking tools for Twitch, like TwitchTracker, do not really provide details about the money Ludwig earned during his subathon. However, some people in his Twitch community were dedicated enough to put their effort into tracking the amount of money Ludwig made during the month he streamed. The amount of money spent by people on chat for subscriptions, bits (the “currency” used on Twitch) together with the media share is around $1.4 million. However, this was not the amount Ludwig received. First, Twitch took a cut of the money, then the moderators in the chat were paid, and the amount of self-gifted subscriptions had to be covered. Furthermore, Ludwig said that he would donate to charity $1 for each subscription and $5 for each subscription at the end of the stream. The amount to be donated for charity reached more than $360.000. Finally, after taxes, it is estimated that Ludwig made almost $210.000 throughout the subathon.

Cover image source: twitter.com/LudwigAhgren

Monetizing philanthropy: First findings

Catalina Goanta — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 21:51:35 +0000

In our project, we set out to understand how creators monetize philanthropy on social media. In this quest, our first project deliverable was supposed to be a journal article reporting on how creators perceive monetization and philanthropic initiatives on a handful of selected platforms. This question mushroomed into a series of needs our team identified in the process.

Study #1: A systematic literature review on content monetization and philanthropy

We set out to first systematically collect literature so we can define some basic terms but also cluster reported content monetization models. Our review focused on the following questions:

What is the place of content monetization in the broader landscapeof Internet monetization?
What are the business models used by content creators to monetizecontent?
How is philanthropy monetized by content creators? These questions are relevant for the centralization of scientific knowledge produced across various disciplines, and they are a starting point in the process of proposing an academic agenda to further explore the research gaps identified in the review.

We interrogated literature across law, social science and computer science, by retrieving literature from four databases: HeinOnline, Web of Science, Scopus and the ACM Digital Library.

The search resulted in 90 papers. The list of all papers is available for download and reuse here. The final literature review details the exact search string used, as well as the process of further filtering the results, using the PRISMA model.

One of the most distinct issues in the overviewed literature is terminological inconsistency. As an example, terms such as content creator and influencer are generally used interchangeably, and there does not seem to be any agreement in literature relating to how to refer to the different business models. We'll post an update on the Community as soon as we have the complete lit review.

Content creators dataset for study #2: Surveying + interviewing content creators about monetization and philanthropy

The months we spent on the literature review, trying to disentangle the knowledge generated across different disciplines, was necessary. But browsing after content creators is where it gets really interesting.

The second study planned for our deliverables, which we recently started, focuses on the original goal of understanding creator perspectives on philanthropy. In social media studies, academic methodologies rarely go into great detail when it comes to how creators are selected, what makes the perspectives of the selected ones so important to report on, etc. Our selection process for content creators is supposed to be weary of current gaps in methodological reporting. We wanted to make sure we would include in our dataset three main categories of content creators:

creators who generally engage in philanthropy for themselves as a monetization model (e.g. asking for donations);
creators who occassionaly engage in philanthropy for others based on various public (e.g. #blacklivesmatter; #stopasianhate) or individual causes (e.g. donations for a particular incident);
creators who generally engage in philanthropy for others as a monetization model (e.g. social justice creators).

This taxonomy of engagement with philanthropy was our starting point in collecting the data, which we have done by combining a series of approaches, which are specifically labelled in the dataset:

manual Google searches based on causes, platforms and different languages (English, Romanian and Portuguese) ensuring the retrieval of content creator names from news items, which would help us retrieve names of creators from categories 2 and 3;
systematic list searches on platforms such as Social Blade or Twitch Tracker, useful to discover creators from category 1;
manual additions on the basis of over 50 hours of browsing various social media platforms, useful for categories 2 and 3.

We wanted to make sure that our list would not reflect only the practices of creators from the global North, who dominate news narratives. For this reason, we have chosen to focus specifically on countries and languages represented in our research group (e.g. Brazil and Romania).

For each creator included on the list, we have mapped all the platforms used in the process of content monetization. In the dataset, the social media platforms on which the creators are active have been marked with the number of followers. In addition, the dataset reveals what platforms are used by these creators. This will be further detailed in a separate post.

We curated a list of 300 content creators, which we published here, in the hope that it can be further used by researchers. We obviously had to remove personal data in order to share this list publicly, but if you are an academic researcher and are interested in further data points for this list, do contact us.

Study #3: Browser extension facilitating micropayments for philanthropy on social media

Pietro's update on the work of Team 2:

In the beginning of January we started with literature review to research state-of-the-art models for blockchain based philanthropy applications. Towards the end of January we began with the development of our own smart contracts which will be used to moderate funds transactions in a transparent and automated way. In parallel we also researched Interledger technology and how it can be integrated in our application to enable payments across different networks. During March we started with the development of a first prototype which includes a backend system written in Django and the browser plug-in client. We also looked for digital wallet providers such as Uphold or Gatehub that we could integrate with the system. We recently enabled our back end to interact with the smart contracts and going forward, we will implement the remaining functionalities.

Spotlight

We were happy to briefly present the project, as well as discuss the Grant for the Web research framework, at the first annual conference of the Platform Governance Research Network, in the company of brilliant researchers from around the world dealing with social media and platform governance.

More to come!

Monetizing philanthropy on social media

Catalina Goanta — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 19:45:20 +0000

Project background: Social media content monetization

How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?

This question was addressed by US Senator Orrin Hatch to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his April 2018 Senate hearings relating to the Cambridge Analytica incident. Zuckerberg’s answer accurately depicts the Internet’s most common business model: “We run ads”. Brands around the worldpay social media platforms for digital space where they compete for user attention and engagement. The resulting platform ad ecosystems are the reason why the current business models used on the Internet are fundamentally flawed. Companies register theirads in databases called 'ad archives', from where they can target selected de-mographics on the basis of the platform’s own user profiling practices. Advertising as a digital monetization model has been around sincethe early days of the Internet, as Internet users kept their wallets away from online services. The founders of Google themselves acknowledged the bias introduced by the commercial interests behind advertising in the architecture of search engines.

Until recently, the main stakeholders in Internet monetization were companies. Digital platforms sell ad space and companies buy it. Yet in the past decade this paradigm has been shifting. Based on an increase in social media consumption, content monetization makes it possible for any Internet user to not only engage with advertising, but become a vessel of advertising. As an illustration, some of the most popular advertising methods in content monetization include influencer and affiliate marketing. Both approaches consist in brandscontracting genuine, relatable influencers (also called content creators) to increase brand awareness or sales. These individuals create advertising contenton their social media profiles and channel their armies of followers to the brand partner. In turn, they receive money, goods or services. In 2021, influencermarketing is projected to reach a global market size of$13.8 billion (700% increase since 2016), and affiliate marketing is estimated to grow to$7 billion inthe US alone. However, monetization models do not necessarily involve advertising, but can also entail payable transactions. In this space, new models are generated at a skyrocketing pace. SignalFire, a data company working on social media, has recently made the first map of the creator economy, which shows the popularity of monetization on social media.

Creators can ask their fans to subscribe to their content, donate money to them, or even engage in gamified version of a’human stock market’, where creators can sell their decision-making power overday-to-day decisions.

This figure shows some of the most used content monetization models as we've identified in academic literature so far:

Monetizing philanthropy

With more platforms adopting own monetization models, the dangers of platforms monopolizing advertising infrastructure and creator revenue increase exponentially. This is particularly troublesome when content creators claim to gather funding not only as income, but also for specific causes, whether personal, such as adoption costs or vet costs, or philanthropy by raising or giving away cash in times of crisis. The Web Monetization standard can make a two-fold contribution to this transparency and operability issue: first, it can offer audiences a more direct way of making payments, and it allows for payment systems to be developed in a more traceable way. Still, for the Web Monetization standard to make a significant difference, it needs to align the commercial interests of users who monetize fundraisers to the behavior of audiences who are willing contribute financially to the creators’ call for funding. This research aims to create and test a more transparent system for spontaneous microtransactions between creators and audiences, based on insights from both groups. While the dangers of opaque calls-to-action are gradually being exposed, the relationship between reputation, monetization and philanthropy, as well as their impact on the expectations of audiences and their willingness to financially support creators is in dire need of further exploration.

To tackle this issue, we've put together an interdisciplinary team from three institutes: the Maastricht Law & Tech Lab (Maastricht University), the Institute of Data Science (Maastricht University), and the Department of Computer Science from the University of York. The team currently consists of two main teams, one dealing with web development (led by the wonderful Visara Urovi) and one using qualitative empirical research (led my me) to better understand how we can help creators monetize their philanthropic initiatives.

The goals of our project are threefold:

First, we aim to map existing monetization/altruistic incentives and models vis-à-vis crowdfunding, through interviews with content creators to understand the pro’s and con’s of existing platforms (e.g. Go Fund Me, Patreon, etc) and approaches, as well as the general legal risks involved in these activities. Engaging with communities of content creators in order to understand their monetization behaviors and needs is underrepresented in interdisciplinary scientific research, but vital in understanding the socio-economic ecosystem driven, among others, by monetization.
Second, we will use this insight to shape our own proposal for a transparent and traceable solution for micropayments between users and content creators.
Third, to test this solution on consumers and determine its desirability using an online experiment, in order to obtain more behavioral insights into consumer preferences in terms of monetization and crowdfunding. Overall, we believe that as an interdisciplinary team with an academic background, it is useful to base new tools on scientific evidence. For this reason, our project combines different methodologies in order to obtain insights from content creators and audiences alike.

After months of aligning disciplines and approaches, we're finally ready to share some insights and (unsurprisingly) even more questions that need to be addressed by future research, as a confirmation of the complexity of the monetization space. So if you're interested in the topic, follow our updates, and get in touch!