The Interledger Community 🌱: Tadej Štrok

New Day — Grant Report #2

Tadej Štrok — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 16:31:23 +0000

Project Update

We have successfully launched the New day platform that has attracted over 30 monthly subscribers in its first three months. Relative to the size of Slovenia (population 2 million) and a modest reach that the 5 media outlets participating in the project have, we consider having over 30 recurring paying subscribers (5 € monthly) that have also installed and are using our browser extension, a success and a good proof of concept of using WMS in practice.

The development and the launch of the platform was quite straightforward, but in the first half of the project, we experienced some setbacks with 2 bigger media outlets declining participation, due to concerns the New day platform would cannibalize their existing donor base (as outlined in our Interim report). We also had to deal with promoting the platform during a time of an extremely heated parliamentary election campaign, during which the public discourse tensions were high and hyper focused and therefore our message was harder to get across.

However, we are happy with the final outcome and with the groundwork now completed, we now plan on focusing more on quality of life platform improvements, new features and additional promotional activities, as well as the slow expansion of the media outlets participating in the project.

Progress on objectives

Objective 1
For our technical objective, as planned, we have successfully developed and implemented the following:

A private ledger backend supporting WMS, following (most of the) WMS/SPSP specification (see our whitepaper for details)
Payment system with a financial model that utilizes automated calculation of donation distribution ratios
New day dashboard for subscribers with an overview of your time spent proportions along with payment and account settings
New day browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox
White paper outlining our experience, lessons learned and our plans and recommendations for the future of WMS
Implementation of WMS tags in all 5 participating media project websites

Please use the links to view.

Objective 2
For our communication objective, we have successfully produced and launched:

New day website
New day Twitter channel
Promotional banners for participating websites
Promo ad video
PR activities

As planned, we have been exploring different promotional tactics and activities that would increase the subscriber base. We have been regularly posting on Twitter and promoting the platform via participating websites, on social media and newsletters. We have unfortunately not been too successful in gathering wider media attention using PR activities. Our press release was published by the Slovenian National Press Agency (STA), however the mainstream media has ignored the story. We attribute this to the fact that the platform and the participating media outlets can be seen as direct competitors to the mainstream media hegemony.

Key activities

Main activities in this phase included:

Development
Copywriting
Design
Partner management
Financial and legal work (donor contracts, payout handling)
PR outreach and activities
Social media management
Motion graphic animation

Communications and marketing

All 5 participating media partners have published announcements of the New day platform launch on their websites and social media channels. They are promoting the platform on their websites via banners.

We have presented the platform on 2 international conferences:

Point conference, 2-3th June, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Panel “Fight for media credibility”
Solutions and innovations in media conference, 19-20th May, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Lightning talk "Mentorship program for young journalists in the Western Balkans"

Platform is regularly mentioned in the podcast In Media Res that is focused on critical anaysis of slovenian media landscape and political discourse.

A proportion of our marketing budget was dedicated to motion graphic animation design for the promotional ads. Another part was dedicated to the media buy on Twitter, which had to be done through the advertising agency Httpool, because buying ads directly on Twitter is for some reason not available in Slovenia.

What’s next?

Moving forward we plan on expanding the New day platform dashboard in order to make it more usable and valuable for the users. We plan on adding an overview with links to all the articles published in participating media outlets as well as possibly exclusive content for subscribers.

One of the key challenges we plan on tackling is how to provide tangible value to the subscribers and how to convey at least symbolic gratitude and an easy way to “brag” about their support.

Several would-be users complained that the platform doesn’t make sense if there is no mobile support, so we’ll be investing resources into developing an extension that users will be able to install in their Firefox on Android browsers. We will monitor if this will result in any usage growth or if it becomes one of the features users say they want but which in the end makes no difference to sign-up rates.

Last but not least we want to expand the number and range of media outlets participating in the project. Based on our interviews with current and would-be subscribers, the range of media supported by the platform is one of the biggest blockers when it comes to generating new subscriptions.

What community support would benefit your project?

No community support necessary at this time, but always happy to hear feedback and potential partnership opportunities.

Additional comments

Great experience working with ILP and GFTW team!

Relevant links/resources (optional)

New Day — Grant Report #1

Tadej Štrok — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 13:00:09 +0000

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Project Update

Our project is progressing fairly well. We have been doing a lot of research and planning in order to set up everything needed for the second phase that will focus on launching and marketing the New Day platform. We experienced some challenges regarding the plan and method of technical implementation of the ILP and the decision as to which ledger to use for keeping track of transactions as well as some communication hurdles when it comes to onboarding the publishers and explaining the intricacies of the web monetization standard and its benefits. Therefore we are experiencing slight delays when it comes to our proposed timeline, but still remain confident that execution of the project will remain within the planned deadlines. We are happy to report that we are quite close to a functional prototype as well as plans and designs for the user facing parts of the platform.

Progress on objectives

The goal of our project is to find the best way that WMS can work for independent media outlets and how its value and potential should be communicated to a broad audience in the most effective way.

Objective 1

During the first phase of the project, we have been brainstorming, researching and playing out scenarios related to two areas: technological implementation and financial viability. We want to set up the New Day platform in a way that is scalable, secure and privacy driven but also sustainable, affordable and easy to use for end-users.

Regarding the tech implementation model we have been exploring different ledgers. We have some specific requirements as to how the value of the tokens spent by users should be determined which prevents us from using XRP or similar “fixed-value” tokens (we want to avoid “wasting” tokens similar to how Coil keeps the unspent XRP at the end of the month). At first we planned on using the Ethereum network to issue our own tokens but after testing our technical requirements we realized it would be prohibitively expensive to use the mainnet to mint the necessary tokens. In order to preserve user’s privacy and allow for different users’ tokens to have different values we would effectively need to mint tokens for each individual user. This turns out to be extremely expensive under current gas prices. Hence we decided to prepare a proof of concept based on a private ledger (minting tokens with proof of authority) which allows us to avoid prohibitive financial costs. It’s a trade-off we eventually decided to take since there’s a substantial amount of trust involved in our users’ transactions already when they give us their credit card numbers in order for us to charge them for the service. In the future we’d of course prefer the ledger to be public and distributed, but we decided against that since we are currently unable to find an economically viable solution based on a public, distributed, live ledger.

Regarding the financial model we have been exploring various methods of handling payment transactions, usage tracking and distribution of funds that would meet our economic and legal requirements as well as the overall vision of our organization. We have analyzed the model that Coil uses but decided we would make changes to it - specifically regarding the distribution of “leftover” funds.

The first draft version of our technical design document can be found on our wiki. This draft is subject to change and is already outdated at the time of writing this report, since we will not be using ETH for our proof of concept (see above).

Objective 2

The second main objective that entails the exploration of effective communication practices will come into play in the second phase of the project when we launch the platform and try to raise its awareness via PR and social media marketing practices.

We have, however, started work on the webpage of the project. Attached is a wireframe and logo of the project.

After numerous discussions, focus group sessions and brainstorming, we have identified 3 main unique value propositions around which we want to organize our communication efforts to onboard users and keep them subscribed to our platform. These are:

Technological novelty appeal
We will communicate the benefits of the WMS, why it is different, unique and beneficial to the way the web functions.

Support for independent media
We will highlight the need for funding independent media in Slovenia, which is especially important during the reign of an autocratic regime that constantly attacks the media.

Ideological novelty appeal
We will communicate the benefits of the WMS related to how it can help with the shift of power from large, centralized tech giants, back to the content creators.

Key activities

Main activities in this phase included:

Research and brainstorming
Developer research and experimentation with ILP (you can see some of our efforts here, however most of our work went into understanding how ILP works so we can now begin implementing our required features: Github
Writing of the technical design document
Website wireframing and sketching (see here)
Visual design of the platform brand guide
Publisher outreach, project presentation and interviews

Also see here for a concise overview of our thinking/plans.

Communications and marketing

We have not yet started with the dissemination of the project and the platform. So far we have only had private conversations with relevant stakeholders (media) and local technology/crypto enthusiasts/experts to help us map the landscape we are about to enter.

At the beginning of the project however, we have made a project announcement on our social media pages:

What’s next?

Second phase of the project will focus on production and launch of the platform (website + browser extension).

Website
The user-facing website will be built with Django since it’s what we use most commonly on our other projects. The database associated with it will house user data (PII and payment data). For our first version it will also simulate (serve as) the main ledger to keep track of tokens spent. It will store data on the news sites participating in the pilot project, the tokens they received from the users reading the news. Those tokens will then be exchanged for EUR (we will periodically, at the end of each month “buy” the tokens from the news sites and pay them with the money we charged to users’ credit cards. It will also allow users to cancel their subscription and issue GDPR data requests. The website will be the main public-facing digital property where we will do most of our user onboarding efforts.

Browser extension(s)
These will have to polyfill the WMS api and allow users to spend tokens while reading the news. We have already read through a sizable chunk of Coil’s extension code, but we are still unsure whether we will be able to properly fork the extension or write something simpler based on Coil’s code. We aim to produce extensions for Chrome and Firefox, but it’s possible we will have to contend with just one of them.

The ledger
We will need to set up the ledger where we mint the token and keep track of the transactions. We want this to be very loosely coupled with the website, but the first version probably won’t achieve that goal.

The ILP node
The ILP node is already in the works. The extension will communicate with it and the node will in turn settle transactions with our (at least for now) private ledger.

Technical integration with the publishers will be done with our guidance either by physically meeting the their dev teams or via video conference.

The launch of the project will be accompanied by a PR push. We will organize a press conference, invite the press and communicate the benefits of the platform and the approach we are taking. We will also produce several visually appealing graphics that will help push our USPs to the relevant audience.

At the end of the project we expect to have a fully functional platform and representative group of monthly subscribers through which we will be able to measure our success and progress.

What community support would benefit your project?

At this point, we are not clear how to leverage the international community since this is going to be a local project. Once our code reaches a certain level of maturity we would like to present it to other technically minded grantees in order to gather feedback and ideas for improvements. We are new to this so we expect a lot of our code to be suboptimal. While we would like to prioritize a working MVP, once that is done we would like to nurture the code into something reusable for other projects.