The Future of Web Advertisement: Web Monetization

This article has been previously published on my main blog.

Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano sul mio blog principale.

There's a new (proposed) web standard about advertising on the web. It's called Web Monetization, let's see what's all about.

Photo by Wendong Yao on Unsplash

What is Web Monetization

Web Monetization is a

proposed browser API that uses ILP (Interledger Protocol) micropayments to monetize a site. It can be provided through a polyfill or an extension, but the goal is to eventually implement it directly into the user's browser.

Motivation

The ability to transfer money has been a long-standing omission from the web platform. As a result, the web suffers from a flood of advertising and corrupt business models. Web Monetization provides an open, native, efficient, and automatic way to compensate creators, pay for API calls, and support crucial web infrastructure.

How Web Monetization can improve users satisfaction

Web Monetization can improve the user overall satisfaction with your web content because he won't be persecuted by your ads, and you still will make money from him.

In fact, Web Monetization offers the user to choose where its web monetization funds should go when navigating the web.

Web Monetization Wallets

At the moment these are the Web Monetization Wallets (wallets that accepts ILP Payments):

XRP Tipbot

GateHub

Stronghold

Web Monetization Providers

At the moment of writing this article, the only known Web Monetization Provider is Coil.

Coil, like Medium, is a platform when a person can share articles (or web monetized links) and offers a monthly fee for viewing a sort of pro members' articles only and for paying those web monetized links that you visit.

How do I web monetize my own content? 💰

Implementing Web Monetization is quite easy, in fact, this consists in adding only a line to your html files. This new line is called Web Monetization Meta Tag.

Setup a Web Monetization Wallet

In order to receive payments you need to set up a Web Monetization Wallet, you can use one of the above.

Get your payment pointer

When you finish to set up your new account you'll receive a Payment Pointer. A Payment Pointer looks like this:

$coil.xrptipbot.com/C3adA1B9Q5qMu4Z3i4Bfhw

Generate your Meta Tag

The Meta tag is the tag we're going to add to our web monetized web pages. This looks like this:

<meta
  name="monetization"
  content="$coil.xrptipbot.com/C3adA1B9Q5qMu4Z3i4Bfhw">

The tag's name have to be monetization

Add your new Meta Tag to your pages

Copy your Meta Tag and add it to your websites' <head> section. It should look like the example below:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Web Monetized Site</title>
    <meta
        name="monetization"
        content="$coil.xrptipbot.com/C3adA1B9Q5qMu4Z3i4Bfhw">
  </head>
  <!-- Other content -->
</html>

Congratulations! Your website is now Web Monetized. 😎😎😎

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