CityJS Singapore 2024 - Web Monetization extension demo booth

On July 26th 2024, we (@ioana, @devcer and @sid) attended CityJS Singapore. This post summarizes our activities and booth presence for Web Monetization. I’ll recap our attendance from the technical perspective (not marketing), specifically the live demo of the extension.

One important note is that the audience there was primarily JS developers. From my understanding, most of them (if not all) weren't aware of the existence of Web Monetization prior.

The Demo

We demonstrated the extension over the Web Monetization playground (as of that date) using wallet addresses from the Rafiki test net. The live demo of the extension ran smoothly for the most part.

However, towards the second half of the day, https://rafiki.money started running into performance issues, causing the payments to not go through within the extension's request timeout period (10s). These issues hindered the ability to demonstrate the extension further, but over the entire duration, there was at least one visible MonetizationEvent on the page as a demo.

Note: This post was originally written on Aug 13. The performance of rafiki.money has improved a lot since then, so we don't expect our next such demo to have a slow down.

Despite this setback, attendees were keenly interested in our booth (I suspect our t-shirts attracted them a lot).

We also mentioned that we're working on a native browser implementation, which will make the extension redundant in the future.

Audience Perception of the Extension + WM

The attendees perceived the Web Monetization interface as simple and intuitive, noting that the implementation (adding a link tag to HTML) was straightforward.

People also asked how they knew if the payments went through, which is when we demonstrated the JS API.

Notably, people were more curious about the backend - Open Payments, rather than the extension or WM. The extension got very little attention.

The audience expressed disappointment over limited support for wallets in their regions/currencies, given only Fynbos and Gatehub exist. We encouraged them to play using the test wallet to help promote WM until we've more wallets.

Concerns

Several attendees had concerns about legal compliance and potential abuse of the system. Explaining that wallet addresses are synonymous with banks, which follow their due diligence when connecting with other wallets, eased their doubts. But then they were asking if this is an alternative to tech like SWIFT transfers (it’s an abstraction over all those things).

Additionally, a pair of individuals inquired about the security of the extension, particularly the origin and safety of the private/public keys.

Key Takeaways

Despite the primary focus on open payments, the concept of Web Monetization resonated with developers. Several expressed enthusiasm for the potential of WM to support content creators, particularly those operating blogs or art websites.

• The core technology (open payments) is a more prominent interest area than the extension/WM itself!
• The extension's UI is considered user-friendly enough, but there are not enough data points to claim it as is.
• Expanded wallet support is crucial for adoption.
• Addressing legal and security concerns is essential for building trust.
• Developer interest in Web Monetization is promising.

Recommendations

• For future demonstrations about Web Monetization and the extension, we need a way to explain the extension and WM-specific features and benefits while avoiding people getting distracted by the Open Payments side.
• Clarify communication to address legal and security concerns:
  • Show how their money is safe (the security keys).
  • Clarify they can avoid supporting something they don't wish to support (via the continuous payments toggle)
  • Show users that the website won’t know “who is paying” (privacy)
• Engage with the non-developer community to foster adoption, as it's mostly "simple and clear" from the dev side.
• Instead of a live demo as the main screen, use prettier slides, videos, and promotional banners. We used a QR code for the challenge and more-info links, which was very useful.