sabine

Take me straight to the demo!

Most of us scroll through content every day. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram – you name it. People spend time and sometimes even money to produce that content. However, when creators upload their content to these platforms, they sign a perpetual and exclusive license which allows only the platforms to monetize that content. In return, all of us enjoy social media for free. But is it really free? Social media platforms use our content to sell targeted advertisement space, hence generating revenue from content that users created. That is their business model.

Web monetization allows for an alternative business model for the web. Instead of platforms being the only players benefiting from content, consumers stream micro-payments to content creators, for example with the help of a Coil membership and extension. Social media platforms could offer their services without selling advertisement space by introducing a revenue sharing scheme, for example probabilistic revenue sharing.

To demonstrate how a minimalistic Instagram alternative could look like, I implemented the Intersection Observer Demo on Glitch.

https://www.cinnamon.video/watch?v=277189404924053004

While you scroll through the gallery, different images come into focus. As soon as 75% of an image are in focus, the Intersection Observer picks up the payment pointer that is included in the HTML

<div class="pic" name="$twitter.xrptipbot.com/sabinebertram_">

<img src="https://cdn.glitch.com/8289....">

</div>

and changes the content of the monetization meta-tag. While a Coil user visits the gallery, a counter shows how much money has been streamed to the content creator. For the demo, I took most pictures from unsplash and hence the payment pointers of those images belong to the non-profit Internet Archive (@internetarchive) and the charity Good Souls Group (@GoodXrp). One picture was taken by me (the South African Protea) so I included my payment pointer. You can find the source code here.

This is just a demo but if one added user management and upload functionality, we end up with a web monetized Instagram alternative (yes, without stories and all that stuff; but how would I know, I'm not on Instagram).

Stay tuned for more demos to come. You can already find a small selection on Coil's Glitch Team site.