Pay the Web forward

• quirksmode
• Interledger Foundation
• Web Monetization

Because I worked on my site quirksmode for 15 years, the problem was that I wasn't getting paid.

And that is the topic I would like to talk to you about today.

I loved doing what I did.

It was really fun to me to do all these tests and to figure out new tests and to just get to know a lot of people.

You know, at a certain point browser vendors started to mail me.

I mean, I remember, oh, I got a mail from somebody at Microsoft who said, "Yeah, we're working on the new IE version and we want your input."
I thought, oh, wow, that's just like really cool.

Oh, and IE7 then?

So we can't comment on the name yet, marketing still has to decide on that, which became a running gag between me and Microsoft of the next few years because they could never tell me that IE10 was going to be called IE10.

Doesn't matter, ancient history.

In any case, around 2013, 2014, I pretty much stopped working on this site.

I would like to briefly go into the reasons of me doing that.

It's basically I didn't make a lot of money with it, some, but not a lot, and it was wearing me out.

And this leads me to a fairly fundamental question that I would like to ask you.

Why?

Why is it that we think all websites should be free?

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and in certain cases it makes total sense, you know, if it's just the website of your company and you want to sell stuff, the website itself is for free, you hope that people buy stuff.

But there is, to my mind, an unthinking idea of, oh, all websites should be free.

We shouldn't even discuss it.

It's just the way we live.

And I'm starting to doubt that, to be honest.

I mean, we started doing this in the late '90s for some reason, and then it carried over into each next generation of web developers who thought, oh, yeah, of course my site should be free.

If all websites are free, ads are the best solution to getting at least some money for your work.

And personally, I don't think that advertisements are a really good solution.

To be honest, I've never found anybody who thinks, oh, yeah, I love ads.

I want to see them more as a use-as-a-solution on the web.

No, it's more like, OK, well, you'll use ads.

And they're easy for site owners, right?

I just add a little bit of JavaScript to my site, and magically I get money.

It's also, in a way, easy for the visitors of my site, because then they don't have to think about the whole monetization problem.

It's more like, oh, yeah, this guy has a great site, and pity about the ads, but I kind of see why he does that.

He needs to make some money as well.

This is an easy way-- it's an easy cop-out for, OK, I don't really have to think about the whole money situation.

And this idea was slowly ripening in my mind until one day I talked to Paul Backhouse, who used to work at Google, and he really opened my eyes.

He said, if you use my articles to cut down your development time-- and I wrote a lot of articles that cut down a lot of development time for a lot of web developers.

Ask anyone over 35 who's a web developer.

If you do that, then you're in a B2B relationship with me, because I make sure that you earn a little bit more money, because it can work more efficiently.

And that's fine by me.

I mean, back in the day, I hardly thought about it.

I remember once-- this was before Google Maps existed-- but some Swiss government agency had made a complete interactive map of Switzerland.

Fairly primitive.

It was like in 2005.

And of course, we all said, oh yeah, this is so cool.

They made something really new here.

And I looked into the source code and saw five or six of my standard functions that I had published on my site ages ago, and they just used them.

And you know, that's cool.

But in the end, it's not enough.

In the end, especially, it's not enough for the ecosystem as a whole, because if-- I don't know-- if you don't even think about paying for something, you only see what the people who do pay for content want you to see.

VC capital and what they want you to see right now is AI.

You know that, right?

So I am proposing that we critically revisit the idea of paying or not paying for websites.

Because if we don't go there, I know what will happen.

And you do as well.

I don't have to spell it out for you.

I mean, back in the late '90s, there were some consultants who made a ton of money by telling the newspapers, oh, you should put all your content online for free.

Why?

Beats me.

You know where that brought us, right?

This was the start of it all.

If from the outset, the newspapers had said, OK, you can view our content online, but you have to pay, we would actually live in a slightly different world today.

But here we saw an upsurge of interesting ideas about taking back the web.

A lot of important people took up the discussion and wrote a lot of interesting articles that I mostly agreed with.

It was a good idea.

Even Corey Doctorow himself started about a dis-inshitified internet, which I like as a term.

But there was one thing these people did not talk about at all, money.

If I have a good website that draws a fair amount of visitors, that is very useful to those visitors, why shouldn't I be allowed to make some money?

You can also turn it around and say and ask yourself, do we, as web developers, have an obligation to pay a little bit - I'm not talking about you, Sanz, here - just a little bit of money to the websites that we know and love?

I mean, there must have been an article or a comment or maybe a video that saved you a lot of work recently, in the last month, right?

You must have read something that explained something to you that you said, okay, this is cool, I can use this in my work right now, and it saves me a lot of trouble figuring it out for myself.

How much would that be worth to you?

Think about it.

And I'm not saying you must pay.

I mean, that would be the next logical step.

I don't dare to make that step yet because there are some reasons why you are not able to pay and also I don't like telling other people what to do.

But it is something to think about, something to think about very, very much.

Because if nobody ever pays for anything, the kind of advice we will get online will become worse and worse because fewer and fewer people will find it a good use of their time to write articles for free.

Unless of course you work for one of the big technology companies, well, it's your job to write those articles.

There's all kinds of implications here that I would like people to think about.

I do know that if back in, say, 2011, 2012, there had been a simple way for me to get paid for my work on quirksmode, I would still do some of that work today.

Because I really liked it.

It was just that I had to do this extra job of testing browsers in addition to my regular job as a web developer.

And in the end that became too much.

So what is it that we want?

And now by we I mean the Interledger Foundation, which I haven't mentioned at all yet.

I am here as our developer relations manager for the Interledger Foundation.

And I'm here specifically to talk about web monetization because web monetization I think is a way forward out of this dilemma.

I myself heard about web monetization the first time in I think it was 2019 or something.

And I immediately thought, yeah, this is the solution.

So that's why I'm standing here right now.

Not only because I'm getting paid to do this, I am, but also because I really, really believe in what we are doing.

So what do we, as in do web monetization people want?

We want you as a visitor of a site to say, hey, I really like your site.

Here's a little bit of money.

We want you to give that site more money if you like the site better.

How do we know if you like a certain site better than another site?

By measuring the amount of time you spent on that site, which also serves to negate the ad farms, right?

If you go to one of those clickbait articles, you go in, all the ads are getting served and the site owner is getting paid immediately and after that they don't pay.

You know, it all happens in the first, I don't know, 500 milliseconds or something.

What we do, however, is say I come to your site, I have web monetization enabled, I will explain that later, I give you a little bit of money and then I give you a little bit of money and then I give you a little bit of money.

And I continue doing that as long as I am on your site.

And it could be only a short visit.

It could be that I read your entire article.

It gives us an easy measurement for how interesting I think your site is.

By the way, we're not really logging how much time you spent on that site.

It's more we're giving out a little bit of money every, well, it depends on the rate that you, as a user, set.

So now it's every second.

But that depends on what you do.

And that briefly is what web monetization is.

And I think it's a really good idea.

So we stream money from users to site owners.

Of course there will be websites that will start to abuse this.

So we will also give you a blog list.

Oh, I do not want to pay these sites.

We will also give you the opportunity to give a site a tip, an extra bit of money over on top of the usual rate that you pay because you really, really love this article.

Before I get into the weeds, though, there is some stuff that we need to talk about because it sounds great.

We are actually not that far removed from having a working system that actually does what I described just now.

But there's a few issues.

And in order to truly understand these issues, I have to tell you a little bit of the stuff I myself had to learn about FinTech, about the financial industry working online.

And that little bit that I have to teach you is KYC, also known as the tricky bits.

KYC means know your customer.

What does that mean?

I will get to that in a moment.

I'm kind of guessing everybody has paid something online here, right?

And it seems that that is a fairly straightforward process.

You go to a website, you see something you like, you put it in your shopping cart or whatever and you pay.

And in itself it's not that difficult, but that is secretly because you have already gone through the friction that paying online brings with it.

Because paying online, even more than paying somebody in person, you know, in the olden days you would go to the butcher or to the baker and pay them actual money in exchange for their products.

But even more than in the real world, the virtual world requires us to trust one another if we make payments.

And what we have done in practice in the last 25 years is to outsource that trust management to primarily the credit card companies and to a lesser extent the banks.

I'm not saying that's wrong.

I am saying that this is something we usually do not realize because you did go through the friction of establishing online trust at the moment that you apply for a credit card.

In any case, what I'm trying to say here is that we have to comply to a lot of rules and regulations.

I said I first heard about web monetization in 2019.

The proposal back then was roughly what I described just now.

In the intervening time we have been working with regulatory authorities because what web monetization eventually does is if you give a tip of five quid to a site, it goes to your bank account and takes five quid from your bank account, which means that we all have to trust one another.

And it's this trust that we need in order to pay stuff online that is mostly served by Know Your Customer, KYC, which basically means if you - how many of you have - I mean you all have a bank account.

Do you remember how it was to create that bank account, to go to the bank?

They needed all kinds of stuff from you, very serious, you know, with IDs and proofs of residence and this and that.

That is all because they are legally required to ask you for this because they have to establish your identity.

If you make a payment to someone and the bank is the intermediary, then everybody in that whole chain of payment has to be able to trust one another.

And this is one of the reasons people do trust each other because the banks in particular here in Europe say, "OK, we have verified that you are who you are and you can actually pay for the charge of £25 that you just put in your credit cards."

The disadvantage is that you have to go through this process and in the case of web monetization you have to go through this process again because you have to apply for what I call a wallet.

I will get back to that in a minute.

The advantage of the process as we are trying to get it established now around the world is that many people have a credit card but many other people do not because the bank thinks they don't have enough money on the bank account or it's really, really difficult to apply for one or a number of reasons.

And right now if you don't have a credit card you can interact with the financial world online.

You can buy stuff but it's more difficult.

And at the Interledger Foundation we want to also get a little bit of financial inclusion.

People have to be able to make money online and to send money to each other even if they don't have a credit card.

That stuff is getting even more complicated if you want to get paid.

All kinds of trust issues involved.

And even if you do get paid there are certain intermediaries who take 30%.

And even if you do that and you are getting paid the model right now for payments online - I'm not sure if you ever realised this - but the whole model of paying online is now you go to a website, you say I want this, the website tells you okay pay me this much.

Which is a perfectly fine model for a lot of things but it's not what we as the Interledger Foundation want to achieve.

We on the other hand want to say to you how much do you think that the web development content, the whatever content you're consuming is worth to you.

We could do the same as those websites are doing.

Technically it's possible but we have deliberately decided not to because we already have the payment request API and the payment request API works perfectly fine.

If you go to a website and you order stuff and the website wants you to pay it can use the payment request API and that opens up all those dialogues with the credit cards in Chrome.

I don't know if you know that.

You've probably seen that.

And that works.

We don't want to compete with that right now.

So let's go down to practicalities.

How does it actually work?

As a user of web monetization you need three things - a wallet, an extension and a rate.

The wallet is the thing I have been talking about during the entire KYC part.

In order to get a wallet which is really like a bank account you have to go through screening basically - oh are you who you say you are and can you actually pay?

So getting the extension and setting a rate is really easy.

Getting a wallet unfortunately is not.

This is a problem for me personally because I am supposed to go to conferences and tell people oh sign up for web monetization.

You know give them the talk I'm giving you now and then you have to sign up for web monetization and you can do so and you know yes this that that etc.

Oh now I suddenly need my passport or another form of ID.

Oh why do I need that?

Now I have to wait for a day before I get approved.

What is this?

This is a problem and this is something that makes web monetization harder to sell than it otherwise would be.

By any case you need a wallet which is sort of your bank account.

When you go to a website that you want to pay what web monetization does under the hood is it sends a little bit of money from your wallet to their wallet and then a second later again for two seconds or whatever and again you set the rate.

You need an extension in order to do all this for now and basically what you're having here is the control panel of your monetization.

You are saying oh I want to pay this much and I want to pay from this a wallet and so on and so forth.

Also if you decide to give a site a tip you go to the extension say I want to tip this site how much, this much, are you sure, yes, OK go.

We are, no sorry, there is a third thing if you want to get paid by someone you put a link tag on your site that points to your wallet.

That's the only thing you have to do in order to get paid.

Well you have to get a wallet which is not that easy but still this is the only thing you have to do.

This is also something that pulls me in.

I like it.

You know it's simple, it's webby.

Oh how shall I pay you?

Oh like this, here, here, here's basically my bank account and you can send money to it.

Oh thank you I will, great.

In the end of course we want to become a native function in the browser and the first steps are being set, being taken right now because we have found a few Chromium engineers interested enough in this proposal to maybe implement it behind a flag in Chrome.

Not the entirety of web monetization but a few things that like recognizing that link tag I showed you just now.

So that's cool.

We're talking to other browser vendors as well.

Samsung, Microsoft and of course Firefox.

It's sometimes hard to figure out who to talk to at Firefox.

I'm not sure how many people have experience talking to Firefox but it's really hard.

And of course another browser vendor that shall remain unnamed for now.

Maybe we'll figure it out.

What we have done already is paid a company to actually create the source code that Chromium needs in order to do web monetization.

Of course that's now being reviewed and to be honest I'm not totally sure in which part of the process is.

I cannot say like it, oh it will be implemented tomorrow, it will not.

But we are getting somewhere.

The problem that we're having right now is to connect all the wallets because back on to bad news, we don't have a wallet in the UK yet and you are not allowed to use any other wallet because it has to be a wallet that complies with the rules and regulations of your country of residence.

We do have EU wallets and US wallets and they cannot talk to one another.

They can only talk to other EU and other US wallets.

Why?

Again, rules and regulations.

When I first heard this I thought this is ridiculous.

I mean how can a system like that ever work?

How can I ever convince anyone to use it?

Turns out there is no technical issue.

Technically it could work fine but certain autographs have to be set on certain very important documentation.

And you know when you're working with financial regulators it's more like okay yeah you've done a really good job here.

Yeah we have these comments and you have covered all those comments.

I really like what you're doing.

I think we're going to, I think you're going to get your permission there to bring this onto the market.

Anyway see you in 18 months.

Bye.

And then we'll have to wait again.

I do not envy the poor guy who has to do all this talking.

So that is our problem.

We are hoping to connect at least the US and the EU later this year.

I cannot say with absolute certainty that it will work.

So eventually the browser will contain a web monetization agent.

And it has essentially three tasks.

First it has to find the link tag that I showed you earlier.

Oh this website can be paid.

Okay I should initialize a web monetization.

Secondly it has to order the payments.

That is it has to go to the wallet and say pay now in order to be able to give these orders.

It has to of course have established trust with the wallet and vice versa.

And thirdly it fires the monetization event.

And that is the last little thing that I want to show you here.

We want you as a web developer to know if you're getting paid or not.

So every time a little bit of money comes in we fire a monetization event.

If you get a little bit of money every second then it means a monetization event fires every second.

And of course you can read out how much money you've been sent.

And you can start doing stuff.

And this is where I need you.

Something we don't really know yet is how a website should react to the presence or absence of web monetization.

Some people say I will do nothing I will just happily cash the money and that's it.

Others may say I will probably remove the ads or something.

Still others will say OK I will show you extra content, extra maybe my latest articles or something.

I don't know if you do pay me.

This is something we have to figure out over the next few years what works best.

And we at the intellectual foundation just plain don't know.

So we're trying to give you the tools to figure that out for yourself.

And at a certain point in time somebody will come up with something brilliant that turns out to work for many websites.

So that is the story of web monetization and streaming money.

I would like to mention one final point before we end this talk because it can be that your web monetization doesn't work.

Here I give you a little bit of money.

Here I give you a little bit of money.

Here I give you a little bit of money.

It doesn't work if you're offline.

And that is a big issue for us.

So we have been thinking, we have been debating this internally and we are thinking of maybe in the future enabling a second model in addition to the streaming model that I just described,

the post-paid model where the extension or the browser, we're not sure which one yet,

is going to keep track of which websites you visit and pay them out at the end of the month.

The advantage of course is that you can continue keeping track when the user is offline.

One of the disadvantages is if in the streaming model I give you money, you get the money.

You know immediately I have been paid.

The post-paid model, however, will say, "Oh yeah, I'll pay you later."

Trust.

People trust one another enough to allow the post-paid model to work.

We don't know.

We do know that there are certain pros and cons for each model so we decide, in the end we decided, "Okay, we're going to first do the streaming model because we have already been working on that and we will implement the post-paid model later."

And then you yourself can decide what's going to work for you.

So that is what repurposition is.

Coming to a browser near you soon, I guess.

Thank you.

Do we have time for questions?

Oh wow.

Yes.

In regard of accounting, what do you pay?

Excuse me?

In terms of accounting, have you any plans to do accounting?

Yeah, we do.

By the sender/receiver you get the VAT and all of those things.

We don't because we have deliberately decided that right now we don't do business payments, only private ones.

That is mostly to sidestep exactly this issue because...

Why is a private person not allowed to make more than $1,000 a year?

We don't know.

I think, but this is a personal opinion, I'm not speaking to the next foundation right

now, I think we should see it as a donation.

This is what we ran an experiment a few years ago.

The company Coil, anyone ever heard of that?

Basically what we're doing now is we are recreating Coil except with real money.

Coil did the streaming stuff but did it with donations exactly in order to sidestep all these issues.

For us right now getting all the jurisdictions to connect to one another and pay to one another is an even more important thing so that's what we're going to do first.

Eventually we will have to answer your question but we don't have an answer right now.

Yes.

So I'm old enough to remember when there was a lot of fuss about micro-payments.

The comics of Scott McCloud and his people understanding comics, back in 2000 it sort of posited like a little click button with 5 cents on it or something like that.

You would pay 5 cents for this comic and...

How did you pay?

In which way?

Well, so I'm curious as to why that fell.

Was it the friction of people not willing to pay that much or was it technical in that way?

Was it the credit card business or was it charged to us for fees?

Or did the technology just not exist?

I do not know.

It's an interesting question because I remember micro-payments as well.

This was something that was discussed in the late 90s.

Oh yeah, eventually we will be able, you know, how many people have this problem?

You go, you read about an interesting article in some newspaper that you don't have a subscription to.

It's not going to take an entire subscription just to read that newspaper.

But if the newspaper said, "Yeah, this cost you 12 cents," what would you do?

"Yeah, sure, why not?"

That's micro-payments, basically.

We can sort of enable this.

It's technically possible that web monetization can do this, except that we are now seeing a website telling the user what to pay.

It's not that we're fundamentally opposed to that or anything.

It's just that we decided not to do that for the moment.

Coming back to the micro-payments of the late 90s, it was pretty hard to figure out how to do the actual payment because I don't think credit card companies will be very happy if you pay five cents 20 times a day.

So because most online payment systems also have a fixed surcharge like 40p or something on a payment, doesn't matter how much it is.

So the infrastructure wasn't there.

The idea was great, but we need different infrastructure.

Is web monetization the infrastructure?

Maybe it's possible.

Yes.

I can see this is great news for users and great news for publishers.

It's not great news for advertising networks like AdSense, Google.

Correct.

Are you expecting pushback on this from those people?

Probably.

Probably, yes.

I mean, right now I'm not really seeing what shape this pushback will be.

It will probably be something about security and privacy, I'm guessing, but that's a total guess on my part.

The other thing is as long as this remains a niche product that web developers use for one or the other side, you will think, "Ah, no, that's okay."

There's a strategy behind this.

We want to start with getting web developers on board for three reasons.

First, they kind of see the argument "thou shalt pay."

You may not agree with it, but you at least see the argument.

Second, you understand at least some of the technical issues we are working with.

And third, if somebody wants a website, they talk to a web developer, always, by definition,

because you cannot get a website without talking to a web developer.

So once all the web developers are on board, they will spread the word to the people who own the websites and who want to know more about this whole web modernization thing.

I'm not saying it will succeed, but ideally, and I'm making arguments out of a completely ideal situation, is we build it up amongst ourselves, it will become a niche thing.

There's one or two articles being written out, "Oh, look, there's web developers doing something weird again," and then all of a sudden this explodes, I hope.

I can't promise you that, unfortunately.

It may all fail.

It might also succeed.

That's all the three problems.

You had a question too, Hugh?

Last one.

Curious on the enablement of features by listening to the event when you receive monetization.

What is stopping me writing an extension that just dispatches those events to pretend that I've paid but don't actually pay any money or do anything else?

In the short run, nothing.

But we have been, this has been discussed.

To be honest, I forgot what a proposed solution was.

It is possible to do something about this.

You know, try it.

No, seriously.

I mean, this is another reason why we want web developers specifically on board because you think of weird stuff.

You think, "Oh, if I do this, aha, then it doesn't work, aha, it doesn't work.

Your system, here, solve it."

And we think, "Okay, yeah, that's a fair point."

So the system can be gamed, yes.

We're hoping it can't be gamed enough.

Besides, what are you really getting?

You're getting access to content, which is great.

Don't get me wrong.

But it's not like, it's not taking your money, if you understand what I mean.

If there was a way where a malicious actor would actually make money, would somehow convince all the web monetization users to give them money for some reason, that would be a really serious issue and hundreds of thousands of people from around the world would jump on it.

What you are sketching here, it can be done, certainly right now, but it doesn't take you any money.

Right now, we have more urgent priorities, but that is not to say that you're wrong.

Thank you.