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Comment by jeremiahlee | Hacker News Reader

I think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring.

Consumers establish a wallet provider and install a browser extension (for now, until the standard is formally adopted). When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content.

Content creators can then do things like grant access/remove the paywall, not load/remove ads, or offer bonus features.

Today, GQ, Wired, and ~1,000 other sites are experimenting with the Web Monetization API. The only wallet provider right now is Coil, but the protocol is well defined and ready for other players.

References: - https://webmonetization.org/ - https://coil.com/ - https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized

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"the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content."

This sounds bad. Websites will have even more reason to delay you with slow scrolling, filler text, popup windows just to make you stay on the website longer. Kind of like subscription based MMORPGs have slow travel times, long character leveling and a lot of grind to make you play longer.

It sounds really bad, though it's pretty hard to understand. Webmonetization.org/explainer is a 404, but I think I found it at https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/. One thing it says is "It should also be possible to: Tell the browser NOT to pay a particular website any money." We may end up with blocking lists like ad blockers, and getting put on or taken off such a list could be very contentious. Clickbait, introductory waffle, deliberately hard to understand information, bloated articles around tiny snippets of useful information, etc. would all be strongly incentivised. I'd rather just block every payment by default, and manually enable a few.

Coil's website is very vague and light on information, but two things it says are 1) you pay $5 per month [1], and 2) Coil pays websites $0.36 per hour spent [2]. That's ~14 hours of engaging with content per month, or just 30 minutes per day. What happens when it runs out? Payments stop? Access is cut off? Have to top up like a pay-as-you-go phone?

I think if I ever signed up for such a system I would become very practised at quickly judging a site and closing the tab. I visit plenty of sites I wouldn't give money to. Why not just give me a button to click when I want to pay 10c or whatever?

[1] https://coil.com/

[2] https://coil.com/creator

The sensible thing would be to make it opt in. Then the initial interaction is "give us a try" instead of some dark pattern designed to make it hard to leave the page or whatever.

Could still have community managed lists, where adding/enabling the list switched payment on for those sites.

> When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content.

Will it empty my wallet as I attend an emergency?

Will we see an uptick of sleazy tactics?

At least for articles I ask: make it inexpensive for providers and simple for me. I pay them for articles, they show me articles, preferably easy to download as pdf.

I'd probably pay a few tens more pr year for regional or global news as well as quality blog posts. (I already subscribe to the local newspaper and one national newspaper and I'm forced to pay a few hundred for the national broadcasting.)

But like Tim I am not going to add more subscriptions unless they are just like Spotify, - and even then I think that will be a bad deal for both me and the publishers.

I view mobile free-to-play games as the preview of some micropayment-oriented professions. They suck away your time if you don't pay up, and at that point I don't think it's even worth engaging in news reading.

I truly hope they shy away from paying for 'engagement' and at the very least make it a conscious decision for the user to pay for 'access'.

We already have a lot of people and bad techniques dedicated to driving 'engagement' on platforms like facebook and youtube. These are not good for the users. Having many more providers strive to keep our attention for as long as possible is very much not what I want.

Besides, the value I get from an article is quite unrelated to my 'enagement' with the article. At least with facebook / youtube. It makes _sense_ because every second I engage is another possibility to show me an add / pump up their stats. But if I am going to be paying for an article, I kind of want maximum oomph per minute spend reading the article.

Please don't let the newspapers growth-hack their way into getting more monetization payments. Please just let me pay per article or subscribe if that is what I want.

And whatever happens, don't let my browser start spending my money without my explicit consent. If every second my browser is on is gonna cost me money that will give me shittons of anxiety

Oh hey, now my 20 background tabs can cost me money, that's useful. Will they show a ($) icon like they currently show a "playing sound" icon?

Not only that. Am I going to pay twice if I reload the page / close and reopen the browser / reboot the computer / view the same article in another browser or my phone / read it again tomorrow / etc?

Rest assured it will be whatever is most expensive for you.

The idea that an HTML tag can cost someone money without explicit approval every single time is ludicrous.

Given that the implementation seems to be "constant drain of money per time open" then reading it twice costs twice, and the only way to read at your leisure without throwing away money is to paste the text into Notepad.

I expect a browser extension to emerge immediately that transparently clones pages and views them locally.

That won't necessarily help if there's still a "bleed money to XYZ" HTML tag in there.

You mean a piece of text that is easily filtered out?

Talking to a friend of mine a few days ago. He develops with Flutter for Android and iOS. He told me that (almost) the same code can render to the web as pixels in a canvas tag. I didn't investigate the details (copy and paste, etc) but it's another step toward full black boxes that will do whatever they want, without any chances of blocking some parts of them.

As easy to filter out as adverts.

Don't suppose that they won't use all the same tricks to inject it after the fact, or from obfuscation.

It solves the problem only partially: newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only, they need bundling to generate enough volume.

Same thing can be seen with music industry: spotify doesn't pay enough per play, so artists are now told to use spotify as marketing, and make money from performances.

Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.

> Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.

An election? /s

That is excellent

> newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only

Printed newspapers were surviving just fine despite selling for a few bucks despite it being a physical piece of paper that needed to be printed & delivered on very tight schedules.

The same model should be applied for the web - the price point is already proven to be affordable enough for the majority of the market, and the lack of logistics would generate higher profits.

Newspapers were not surviving from few bucks: they had subscriptions (bundling low value content with high value content) & advertisements (lower margins now, moved to other channels like craigslist). And logistics may have been expensive, but IT infrastructure and staff is not cheap either.

A few aggregation sites have tried to bundle news from different publishers for 10$/euro per month (e.g, blendle). But as can be seen from the original prices of a subscription ($250+ / year / publication), this means a much lower revenue per publication than before. For half the price, subscribers get all the publications. This is not going to be enough for the publishers to survive.

> Printed newspapers were surviving just fine

Oh boy, that's so not the case.

My previous job was still in IT but the company had a strong foothold in the news&media sector. Most newsroom are struggling and have been for at least the last ten years.

Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much.

> Digital content has eroded newspapers' income very very much.

This is the concept I don't think people get when they say "clearly newspapers used to be sustain themselves in the past" -- the market has fundamentally changed and now newspapers and magazines aren't the only game in town competing for people's passive entertainment time.

Ads - especially classified ads - paid for newspapers.

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 do hope it gains greater acceptance.

[0] https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/

>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.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011

> 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.

[1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop

>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.

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.

So it trusts the client's browser to determine what they owe? If the payment is relying on goodwill that might be ok, I suppose.

Their Documentation and Explainer links are both broken.

The explainer seems to have moved here: https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/

The Docs link at the top works, so it's supposed to go to https://webmonetization.org/docs, which redirects to https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started

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