INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Getting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse, pretty much everyone is looking
One problem: While the web is great at moving images and audio and files around, it has a real problem with money
Coil, Mozilla and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100 million to get it off the ground.“Web
monetization” is the name of the game here, not just generally but also the specific new web protocol being proposed
It’s meant to be an open, interoperable standard that will let anyone send money to anyone else on the web.That doesn’t mean it sprang
fully formed out of nowhere, though
It’s based on a protocol called Interledger pursued by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas in his new company Coil.“We were basically
applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas told TechCrunch, though he was quick to
add that it’s not blockchain-powered
Those systems, he said, are useful in their place, but end up bogged down in upkeep and administration
And services like Flattr are great, he said, but limited by the fact that they’re essentially run by a single company.Interledger, he
explained, is a protocol for securely and universally connecting existing payment systems in a totally agnostic way
“It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or Wi-Fi, it
We were working on it for a long time, since like 2015, and last year were like, well, how do we get this out into the real world?”The
answer was a new company, for one thing, but also partnering with open web advocates at Mozilla and Creative Commons on Grant for the Web,
a $100 million fund to disburse with their input
Both have a seat at the table in selecting grant recipients, and the latter is a recipient itself.“This is an opportunity for CC to
experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green
“If users want to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these
options with our global community.”“An open-source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be good for creators and users,” he
“Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a good thing.”The $100 million fund is all Coil money, which
makes sense, as Coil was founded to promote and develop the Interledger and Web Monetization protocols
Huge funding pushes don’t seem like the ordinary way to establish new web standards, but Thomas explained that payments are a unique
case.“The underlying business model for the web is kind of broken,” he said
And that’s partly by design: Enormous companies with vested interests in existing payment and monetization structures are always working
to maintain the status quo or shift it in a favorable direction — companies like Google that rely on advertising, or Visa and others that
power traditional payment methods.“From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with
billions in funding,” Thomas said.The $100 million fund will be spread out over five years or so, and will be awarded both to companies
and people that use or plan to use the Web Monetization standard in an interesting way, and to content creators who are poorly served by
existing monetization methods.Long-tail content that’s nevertheless important, like investigative journalism or documentaries from and by
marginalized communities, is one of the targets for the fund
Grants could come in the form of direct funding, or matching subscribers’ contributions
There’s no quid pro quo, Thomas said, except for a hard minimum of half the content being released under an open license like Creative
Commons — which that organization is likely excited about.Right now a subscription-based browser extension that allows easy payments to
sites that have implemented the standard is the only way to get in the door
Admittedly that’s not a very sexy onboarding experience
But part of the fund is intended to juice the development and adoption of the standard much more widely.It’s a way — though an expensive
one, sure — to show that an alternative model exists to the traditional ad-based or subscription-based methods of supporting content.You
can sign up now to be notified when they start accepting grant applications at grantfortheweb.org.
