The other nice thing about Web Monetization is that you can use it to divide earnings to content providers on your site through probabilistic revenue sharing [0].
I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard.
The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance.
Awarding the length of visit also isn't aligned with the goal of all types of websites. My site is a web search engine, and the goal is for people to spend as little time on the site as possible because it means I sent them to where they needed to go by giving them the right result quickly.
>I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard.
>The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance.
Please post the name of your site so I can make sure to never visit it.
Not because you're bad or evil. Not because your content is bad or doesn't match my "biases."
But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users.
Hey. I get it. We all need to make money to pay for the things we need to survive.
But creating an environment where the decision to visit a site (not even to access content, if I understand the spec properly) requires a calculation as to whether or not I first want to pay is so far from being reasonable (think being automatically charged, say, $10 as a minimum purchase when you enter an Amazon Go[0] store).
Please don't consider this a personal attack. It is not. Rather, I'm using strong language to express my point and encourage you to back off that road.
That's an interesting perspective, and I don't feel attacked at all but rather appreciate the feedback.
I do think there is a misunderstanding of how Web Monetization currently works though.
You won't be charged anything to visit the website UNLESS you subscribe to a Web Monetization provider and wish to contribute to websites that you visit in this way. Right now, the only Web Monetization provider is Coil. Coil charges members $5 a month and handles the distribution of payments to sites that the user visits.
So unless you subscribe to Coil you wouldn't be charged anything, and even then it is capped at a pre-paid $5/month that get's distributed to all the website that you visit who participate in Web Monetization.
> But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users.
I'm not sure your vitriol is called for here, it seems very easy to selectively enable and disable monetization [1]. I'm not OP, but if I were to monetize a search engine I'd have the <meta> tag on the results page but _not_ on the home page. Likewise if I were a content provider, I wouldn't monetize the index page. I imagine and hope that this would be standard practice, but perhaps I'm being overly optimistic.
>I'm not sure your vitriol is called for here, it seems very easy to selectively enable and disable monetization [1].
Easy for who? And for what purpose?
Implementing an HTML tag that will attempt to charge you money is wrong on so many levels.
If I walk into a store (click on a link), even though I know there's stuff to buy there, the store (website) doesn't have the right to charge me just for walking into the store (hitting the landing page) -- unless they clearly let me know that (perhaps a big sign on the door?) before I enter the store.
And as for what you would or wouldn't do, that's great! You're a stand up guy[0].
Sadly, there are way too many people who would abuse this in a hot minute. Especially since many folks wouldn't even find out about it until they get some sort of transaction notification (with a credit/debit card, that could be weeks).
[0] N.B.: That's not snark or sarcasm. It's good to know that there are still other people who will do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Thank you.
> Implementing an HTML tag that will attempt to charge you money is wrong on so many levels.
Just a quick clarification. The HTML tag doesn't charge you anything. It just indicates that the website participates in WM and provides a location on where the website can accept a payment.
You still need to subscribe to a Web Monetization provider that actually makes the payment and calculates the amount.
You have 100% control over whether you want to participate in Web Monetization or not.
Can't say that I disagree with your sentiment, but it's funny that getting automatically charged each time someone wishes to browse your content is the norm and no one bats the eye.
I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard.
The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance.
Awarding the length of visit also isn't aligned with the goal of all types of websites. My site is a web search engine, and the goal is for people to spend as little time on the site as possible because it means I sent them to where they needed to go by giving them the right result quickly.
I do hope it gains greater acceptance.
[0] https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/