100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The only way that would change is if online advertising went away overnight, and instead of companies redirecting that to other forms of advertising, the prices of all consumer goods went down so it stayed in our collective pockets.

It&#x27;s crazy, that we still do not have something like &quot;Cash&quot; on the internet.<p>A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.<p>That would make the world so much better for indie developers.<p>Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don&#x27;t have. If users would pay directly, that would change.

Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a &quot;donate to Mozilla&quot; banner. The case for &quot;reshaping the economics of the web&quot; would have been a bit more compelling without that...<p>(My problem isn&#x27;t about asking for donations. It&#x27;s about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn&#x27;t enough, work it into the text.)

There&#x27;s nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don&#x27;t value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1]<p>Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free content and services they couldn&#x27;t otherwise afford. Also payments just means you work, earn cash, then pay. Ads are on-demand cash generation that uses your attention in real-time to pay exactly when and where you need it.<p>Privacy is also much more nuanced than these extremes. Most people are clearly comfortable sharing a lot about themselves on social media. Transparency and control is a far more important and productive goal than fighting over whether anyone or noone can use data.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19038820" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19038820</a>

Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good).<p>What happens?<p>Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing.<p>Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else&#x27;s original reporting you can wipe off 90 of them and still be fine.<p>Those that have a foot-hold, brand, or better reach survive through affiliate marketing (see WireCutter), donations, or subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, etc.)<p>I&#x27;m not saying there won&#x27;t be casualties in this approach but you lose the alt-right and other reality-bending publishers pretty quickly.

I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.

Here&#x27;s how Coil ended up with $100 million to fund this grant (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;16&#x2F;grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;16&#x2F;grant-for-the-web-mozilla-coi...</a>):<p>&gt; As for the source of the $100 million that will fund the project, Thomas said it came via a grant to Coil from Ripple, and that in some cases, the project will use XRP—the cryptocurrency that is an integral part of Ripple&#x27;s operations—to settle financial transactions.<p>… and here&#x27;s why Ripple made the original (~$265 million USD) grant to Coil (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prnewswire.com&#x2F;news-releases&#x2F;ripples-xpring-makes-1-billion-xrp-grant-to-drive-xrp-adoption-and-advance-coils-monetized-platform-for-creators-300902194.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prnewswire.com&#x2F;news-releases&#x2F;ripples-xpring-make...</a>) in August 2019:<p>&gt; Coil, a platform dedicated to reimagining monetization on the web for creators and their fans, today announced a 1 billion XRP grant from Ripple&#x27;s Xpring. The money will be deployed towards driving adoption of XRP and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) by growing Coil&#x27;s monetization platform through mainstream adoption of Web Monetization, an open web standard built on Interledger that enables streaming micropayments in any currency, including XRP.<p>&gt; …<p>&gt; The platform enables creators to post public and exclusive content on Coil, which is automatically enabled for streaming payments. Creators can web-monetize their own websites by adding a simple tag. Those who want to support creators using Coil can join the community with a $5 monthly subscription. There are no membership fees for creators.<p>In May 2018, the first of several lawsuits was filed that allege XRP is a security: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-guidance-to-argue-xrp-is-a-security" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;investors-suing-ripple-cite-sec-gui...</a>. They&#x27;re seeking class-action status to represent everyone who bought XRP. Matt Levine briefly mentioned Ripple while covering the broader question of how the SEC would classify coins: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-15&#x2F;the-sec-will-leave-good-icos-alone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-06-15&#x2F;the-se...</a>.<p>Obviously Ripple is inherently motivated to see XRP adopted, but also, an active micropayment&#x2F;content payment ecosystem might strengthen their claim that XRP is a utility coin and that their ICO wasn&#x27;t an unregistered securities offering. Some background on this question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;public-statement&#x2F;statement-clayton-2017-12-11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;public-statement&#x2F;statement-clayton-...</a><p>Here&#x27;s what that lawsuit alleges (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.coindesk.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;716bee37-e45e-41d2-a4e1-2d966015a277.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.coindesk.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;716bee...</a>, as amended Aug 2019):<p>&gt; Ripple claims that XRP has utility—like currency—in its use as a “bridge currency” for international payments. But, as discussed above, more than 60 percent of XRP is owned by Ripple and none of that XRP is used for anything at all, other than to be sold in the future to investors. Moreover, as for the XRP that was already sold or otherwise distributed by Defendants, the vast majority of it is not used for bridging international transactions, but for investment purpose. Accordingly, Defendants’ claim that XRP has a utilitarian purpose is nothing but a red herring attempt to avoid the application of securities laws.

I used to use flattr and thought the concept was sound. Until I saw that most of the creators I wanted to sponsor never bothered to sign up and collect their money.<p>Anyone else have experience with flattr or similar alternatives?<p>I figure with all the &quot;block chain&quot; interest we&#x27;d have seen something built on a cryptocurrency allowing &quot;direct&quot; microdonations to a website&#x27;s &quot;wallet&quot;<p>EDIT: looks like coil is kinda of like flattr

I liked Coinhive but despised that 99% used it for malevolent things. I do like the idea of letting my computer do some proof of work for a few seconds to unlock an article. It&#x27;s like doing a micro payment with your electricity bill, anonymously and without any setup.

Here I thought Mozilla had made it possible to do micro transactions in the browser. That Mozilla had started a bank backed by 100 million in Bitcoin, allowing zero-fee off-chain transactions between content creators and consumers.

I don&#x27;t understand why Mozilla doesn&#x27;t implement a native web3 wallet directly in Firefox. This would help onboard people more easily to Ethereum &amp; EVM-compatible decentralized networks. People wouldn&#x27;t have to install MetaMask or download another desktop wallet&#x2F;browser app.

So, if I read this right, they want privacy-focused tech hipsters to vie for $20M a year to create open source fintech startups that will beat global banks and payment companies on transfer fees while simultaneously improving all social classes&#x27; access to the internet.<p>Here&#x27;s my solution: chargebacks. You surf a site, and see a preview of some content. To get the full content, you click &quot;buy&quot;, and the site communicates with your own preferred online payment processor (OPP) to confirm a payment. The OPP checks your balance and replies if you have the balance requested, and the site then serves up your content. At the end of the month the OPP settles up with each site for what&#x27;s owed. If you want to get fancy you can implement a whole rules engine so each site can set up subscriptions for users so users can limit how much each site can charge them. You support multiple subscription models so users can pay by a monthly contract or per-click. If everyone keeps their money in the OPPs (ala Paypal) the OPPs end up making tons of money by investing the balance that hasn&#x27;t been transferred out yet.<p>Once this is implemented, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will become the default OPP, because they still control all the platforms. Hooray open standards.

To all the people saying some variant of &quot;there&#x27;s nothing new here&quot;, I think you are missing it: Tipping has always been an effort. If it all happened behind the scenes, with no action required on your part (beyond just browsing to a site), then &quot;tipping&quot; can viably compete with ads.

They would do better if they spent 100M on ads to promote Firefox downloads.<p>Privacy is a lost cause. Sure, you&#x27;ll probably get anonymity ie. your PII are gonna be scrambled, but all our activities are gonna be streamed to AI engines for commercial and entertainment purpose.<p>And people are generally okay with that because said engines are producing a lot of value in terms of targeted ads, better suggestions etc.<p>What&#x27;s going on at the moment is that governments are feeling left out because they wouldn&#x27;t mind running their own AI engines to shape public discourse and opinions.<p>But the trouble is - they don&#x27;t have data. The big tech has data so I believe fight for data access is underlying reason for anti big tech momentum building up over the past few years.

Having worked in ad-tech for much of the past decade, I don&#x27;t really like the idea of ads, but the reality is that advertising is much too effective to simply &quot;go away.&quot; The article also conflates &quot;advertising&quot; with &quot;data mining&quot; -- the former is relatively benign; the latter not so much. The effectiveness of Facebook and Google ads are mainly due to (for the most part) information that was voluntarily handed over (likes, search history, etc.), not some evil rootkit.<p>And even though it sounds like a lot, 100 million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Consider that the top YouTubers make around ~$20M a year (this money comes largely via advertising). So your fund would barely cover the top 5. Also, the idea of lowering &quot;the administrative costs of receiving payment for web content&quot; seems kind at odds with a bureaucratic &quot;Advisory Council initially made up of representatives from Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons.&quot;<p>I dunno&#x27;, to me it just seems like posturing. No real solution offered, just some wishy-washy &quot;feel good&quot; proposals. At least Brave (which is my daily driver) took a hard stance against ads and blocks just about everything, while Mozilla just <i>talks</i> a good game[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jonathansampson&#x2F;status&#x2F;1165858896176660480?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jonathansampson&#x2F;status&#x2F;11658588961766604...</a>

Instead of having payment systems that seem to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to pay, there should be a small number of very well defined friction points (such as: “maximum daily expenditure”) with literally zero friction <i>anywhere else</i>.<p>By now for instance we should really have a security technology that allows anyone to spend $5 a day <i>any way they want</i>, in any denomination (e.g. literally 2 cents here and 2 cents there), without having to go through ridiculous virtual-cash systems, cards and other hoops. The money should simply be there, and it should be able to go anywhere. If it’s a relatively small amount, it doesn’t require a lot of gate-keeping, e.g. you do <i>not</i> need a customer-refunds infrastructure or fraud protection scheme for pennies. The money can then either reset automatically, e.g. each day, or after some explicit more-secure action, e.g. you log in to something with your face.<p>I know that it would personally make me spend a lot more if a lot of transactions could “just happen”. Once I got a tap-here-and-pay watch, I spent more. Once I could shop online with a fingerprint, I actually did shop online. When I had to type in credit card details though, I hardly ever wanted to. When “fees” would appear as part of seemingly-small transactions, I hardly ever wanted to continue. Some things just sound like scams (don’t get me started on subscriptions), making me more likely to find an exit.

Advertising is opt-out. Every idea centered around tipping, micro-transactions, cryptocurrency are opt-in. I don&#x27;t think most content creators are willing to make that jump.

I know credit card processors are hostile to &quot;adult content&quot;, but as a human being with a sexuality that&#x27;s part of who I am, I&#x27;m saddened that even &quot;literature&quot; related to sexuality is banned.<p>The grant says it&#x27;s seeking &quot;makers of all stripes: webdevs, game developers, bloggers, photographers, musicians, journalists, filmmakers, writers, podcasters, software developers, and more&quot;[1]<p>But Coil forbids &quot;Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicitly sexual acts; sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, adult pay-per view, adult live chat features; sexually oriented items (e.g., adult toys); adult video stores and sexually oriented massage parlors; gentleman’s clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs; and sexually oriented dating services.&quot;[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grantfortheweb.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grantfortheweb.org&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coil.com&#x2F;terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coil.com&#x2F;terms</a>

They could help also to build&#x2F;improve the OpenCollective[1] that is a completely free and open-source[2] alternative to Patreon, aiming mostly for the open-source projects.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;opencollective&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;opencollective&#x2F;</a>

Interesting that Ripple affiliates are sponsoring this.

The FAQ: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grantfortheweb.org&#x2F;faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grantfortheweb.org&#x2F;faq</a>

Is this right?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmonetization.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmonetization.org&#x2F;</a><p>It lists Coil as a provider.

Here&#x27;s an idea that just came to me. Feel free to shoot holes in it. It&#x27;s based on my assumption that users do prefer things without ads, and might want to pay for it.<p>So how about a search engine where, if you pay for it, it ranks sites without ads at the top. And if you click a link to an ad-less site, that site gets some of the money you paid to the search engine.<p>Maybe combine it with a social network that works a similar way, though that&#x27;s harder to do because you don&#x27;t control what people share.<p>The major downside is that there would be a central place (the search engine) where the money gets distributed. It would be better to have something non-centralised. Still, I might use a search engine like that.

I can’t help but think that this is an example of jumping to the wrong solution too quickly. Is the problem that the web doesn’t contain as much high-quality content anymore as before; or that independent content providers are having a hard time making a living. I don’t enjoy the web as much as I used to, but I am pretty sure that in the early days almost nobody was making money off the content they created. So maybe the problem is discoverability rather than compensation. It would be helpful to see a little more of the analysis that Mozilla has done to define the problem.

Want to help publishers? Fund a competitor to google that either doesnt track users, or does it in an ethical way. With monopolistic google disappointing both advertisers and publishers by raising prices and keeping most of the profit, there is an opportunity in the market that wasn&#x27;t there 10 years ago when most of their competitors gave up.<p>Non-ad monetization models are not hindered by lack of investment or ideas, they are hindered by REGULATION. The best ideas are impossible to do with today&#x27;s regulatory and fee structures, and publishers in particular cannot escape that.

I wonder if a Spotify for the Internet would work.<p>Pay a monthly access fee and have micro payments go to the creators based on usage.<p>Mozilla would be in a good position to introduce that type of service and track consumption.

I see the following models of monetizing content on the web:<p>1. Gift economy (you give it away, take likes) 2. Goods and Service economy (you charge for it, sufficiently to make a living) 3. Advertising economy (many people want it but not many willing to pay for it) 4. Tipping (not a viable economic model, unless it&#x27;s made compulsory and a minimum is set in which case it&#x27;s not tipping)<p>1 &amp; 2 have been with us since the dawn of human civilization.<p>3 is a modern invention and to many it is a failed experiment.<p>Just observations, no answers

One good thing about advertising is that it allows the poorest free access to most content. Hopefully these initiatives will keep that.

Trying to divorce publishing from advertising is like trying to divorce brewing from yeast. The only people who don&#x27;t understand this are people who have never been in the publishing business.

If you think about this as a marketing campaign for Coil then it seems to me to be brilliantly enlightened. I mean that sincerely, no sarcasm.

Couldn&#x27;t have they used that money to make Firefox consume less battery on mobile? At least on par with Chrome?

Great program, I hope it will help overcome the huge problems we know the current &quot;centralized&quot; model has.

Teach parents to teach their kids to foster connections across the globe outside official channels like school which are heavily curated.<p>Changing economics for us, in our lifetime is a lost cause. Our limbic systems are wired with the emotional bindings of our childhood. It’s hard to let go.<p>Teach kids to work together directly from as early as possible. Cut out Wall Street middle men and political grifters.

Coil is a company that has raised 269M. And they&#x27;re spending 100M of this on a grant?

This feels like spending a hundred million dollars to recreate Beenz.

Back in the early days of the internet I used to believe that monetization, or micropayments, was one of the key unsolved problems. Now I&#x27;m starting to wonder if it <i>is</i> the problem, that monetization is the root of all evil on the internet, such as advertising and limbic capitalism, social media and surveillance capitalism, the spammers and scammers and cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, the re-intermediation of new monopolies, and so on. Maybe it would be better if people were still working on free content for love not for money, and&#x2F;or working on sites and apps that provide a useful service in return for a simple subscription or fee.

Isn&#x27;t Mozilla already a non-profit to build a better browser? Shouldn&#x27;t they focus on that or reduce in-browser ads if they have too much cash?

Mozilla is master of content marketing, PR and creating buzz. If they just spent their energy into building the best browser.

Some seriously over-engineered solutions being offered in this thread, which I guess is understandable considering the cohort. And I&#x27;m glad that people smarter than me are looking at this from every angle. But here are the things that I know&#x2F;feel to be true:<p>1) Back when advertising subsidised content was a straight up proposition nobody really minded about ads outside of finding them mildly annoying. It&#x27;s how the most popular pre-internet content (privately owned free to air TV and newspapers&#x2F;magazines) survived and flourished.<p>2) What most irks people about the current ad-tech based business model isn&#x27;t the advertising, it&#x27;s the data mining behind it.<p>3) Lots of people don&#x27;t even care about data mining as long as they get what they need instantly, easily and for free.<p>4) The big ad-tech players&#x27; emergence and dominance after the bursting of the early 2000s dotcom bubble is widely attributed to their mastery of ad-tech whereas it seems to be that consolidation and concentration were much larger factors.<p>5) Ad-tech enabled targeted advertising isn&#x27;t that much more effective than traditional- or content-based advertising (I wish I had the source for this but it seemed legit when I read it... Surveillance Capitalism, maybe?)<p>What feeds the ad-tech industry really is advertisers&#x27; FOMO on the algorithms touted by the ad-tech vendors. &quot;Why buy a traditional mass-spray ad when you can have one delivered with surgical precision?&quot; goes the sales pitch. And considering the old saw about 50% of advertising being useless but nobody knows which 50% it is, having numbers and measurable insights dangled in front of you must be compelling.<p>My suggestion is that we try to steer things back to content-based advertising. Of course the web needs to make money. Money is a great incentive for innovation, etc. Of course users aren&#x27;t going to pay for it except in exceptional circumstances. We&#x27;ve been spoiled with too much free content to turn that ship around now. But if I&#x27;m on a site about skiing for example and I see an ad for a ski store that has a sale, that&#x27;s a good and useful piece of advertising. I&#x27;m happy to see that, as long as it doesn&#x27;t follow me around the web for the next 6 months.<p>And how do we steer companies to do the right thing? The only way that has proven to be effective over the years - by naming and shaming, boycotting the bad actors and supporting the good ones. Basically making the costs of behaving badly outweigh the benefits.<p>How do we get there? I haven&#x27;t figured that bit out yet. The big problem is that it&#x27;s kind of axiomatic that the likelihood of change is inversely proportional to the amount of money being generated by the status quo, and hundreds of billions of dollars is a lot of weight to throw behind keeping the current system humming along as is.

Congrats Stefan &amp; team!!!<p>Very curious to see how this will shape up.<p>Would you say this directly competes with Brendan Eich&#x27;s BAT token in Brave? Yes&#x2F;no? How so?<p>I&#x27;ve also been working on figuring out some mathematical models for economically evaluating digital goods (intro here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...</a> ), would love to discuss various web&#x2F;open-source centric economics ideas with people!