Tag: cyberdees

1 month of trying web monetization

Web montization

I wrote last month how I was giving web monetization a try.

I decided to go with the option where people with the coil extension would pay a small fee but its still available to the public. There was a consideration that I could make certain posts such as my publicserviceinternet notes.

Its been surprising to see the money come through on uphold. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to stop uphold emailing me each time I got new money (seems to be an option which could be useful)

£3.48 for a month Over a month and a bit. I made £3.48 from having installed the coil extension. Not bad for a month, and its more than I was expecting. its certainly more than the changetip I had originally (I wouldn’t mind if it went straight into uphold as a cryptocurrancy rather than currency actually – Sure there is a way to do this but not found it yet).

Enough to buy a expensive pour over coffee in one of my favourite northern quarter coffee places. Not quite enough to cover the domain name but if things stay as they are, it will easily cover a few of my domain names renewals for a year.

So where do we go from here? Well I’ll leave it as it as it currently is set for now but I might give the option of coil only members a try on a post or two in the future.

Thanks to Cyberdees for connecting me with this, I like the non-tracking and if I was running other sites I would add coil to it. I may end up doing another post in 6 months to see what happens in the future. There is something good here.

I’m giving web monetization a try

Recently I gave the web monetization a try thanks to the amazing CyberDees.

I was aware of the web monetisation project after reading about the amazing grant for the web. But generally I don’t really think about monetizing my blog because its generally a hassle, I can’t stand the ad tracking and I worry about random stuff which I don’t agree with in my space.

Currently I get about 8-10 emails a day asking to replace links with their own. I generally ignore them now but they never stop and they always ask if they could guest write a blog for me. So I’ve been thinking maybe I should find a way where I stay in control of everything?

Hence the interest in web monetisation and tipjars. Actually one of the first things I looked at was flattr a while ago. Theres a good comparison of the two here.

Setting it up was quite easy with some direction from Cyberdees.

The process involving signing up to Coil, installing a wordpress extension and then somewhere to store/exchange money (ILP-enabled digital wallet) which was Upheld.

Once its all setup, I just need to turn it on. This is where I am…

I could turn it on and block all access to my blog unless you have a web monetisation plugin. But thats not what I want to do. I noticed in the editor theres the options per post or page.

Web monitization

  • Monetized and Public (default) – Allow all visitors to see the content, get paid when your visitor is a Coil Member
  • Coil Members Only – Only allow Coil Members to see the content
  • No Monetization – Allow all visitors to see the content, don’t get paid when your visitor is a Coil Member

So I was considering maybe making certain posts monetised, for example I could make all the public service internet notes pay to read? Maybe I could write some exclusive posts even?

But right now, I’m going to turn on monetized and public for my blog as a kind of tip jar type of thing. I’ll do it for a bit and see how things turn out. I’m not looking to make a boat of money, if its enough to cover a year of a domain name that would be cool.

Think of it as a beta test… I’ll review in a couple of months if I don’t forget that its turned on. Do let me know if theres any problems accessing the site. I also guess the RSS will stay as it is right now, but there is people looking at how to add web monetization to rss/xml/atom feeds. One thing I’d like to see is something of a timer on the montisation, so it could switch on or off after a certain amount of hours/days/weeks.