$100M Grant for the Web fund aims to jump-start a new way to pay online

$100M Grant for the Web fund aims to jump-start a new way to pay online

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Getting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse, Beautiful much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is Fantastic at moving images and audio and files around, it has a Genuine/ True problem with money. Coil, Mozilla and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100 million to Receive it off the ground.“Web monetization” is the name of the game here, not just Usually but also the Particular new web protocol being proposed. It’s meant to be an open, interoperable standard that will let anyone send money to anyone else on the web.That doesn’t mean it sprang fully formed out of nowhere, though. It’s based on a protocol called Interledger pursued by Previous Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas in his new company Coil.“We were basically applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas told TechCrunch, though he was Fast to add that it’s not blockchain-powered. Those systems, he said, are useful in their place, but Finish/ Conclude up bogged Below in upkeep and administration. And services Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer Flattr are great, he said, but limited by the fact that they’re essentially Sprint by a Unmarried company.Interledger, he explained, is a protocol for securely and universally connecting existing payment systems in a totally agnostic way. “It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or Wi-Fi, it doesn’t care. We were working on it for a Endless time, since Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer 2015, and Final/ Ultimate year were like, well, how do we Receive this out into the Genuine/ True world?”300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creatorsThe answer was a new company, for one thing, but also partnering with open web advocates at Mozilla and Creative Commons on Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund to disburse with their input. Both Own/ Possess a seat at the table in selecting grant recipients, and the latter is a recipient itself.“This is an Chance for CC to experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green. “If users Desire to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these options with our global community.”“An open-source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be Excellent for creators and users,” he continued. “Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a Excellent thing.”The $100 million fund is Every Coil money, which makes sense, as Coil was founded to promote and develop the Interledger and Web Monetization protocols. Enormous funding pushes don’t seem Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer the ordinary way to establish new web standards, but Thomas explained that payments are a unique case.“The underlying Trade model for the web is Helpful of broken,” he said. And that’s partly by design: Huge companies with vested interests in existing payment and monetization structures are always working to maintain the status quo or shift it in a favorable direction — companies Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer Google that rely on advertising, or Visa and others that power traditional payment methods.Payments giant Stripe debuts a credit card in its latest step into the financing fray“From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with billions in funding,” Thomas said.The $100 million fund will be spread out over five years or so, and will be awarded both to companies and people that use or plan to use the Web Monetization standard in an Exciting way, and to content creators who are poorly served by existing monetization methods.Long-tail content that’s nevertheless important, Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer investigative journalism or documentaries from and by marginalized communities, is one of the targets for the fund. Grants could come in the form of direct funding, or matching subscribers’ contributions. There’s no quid pro quo, Thomas said, except for a Difficult minimum of half the content being released Below an open license Love/ Enjoy/ Prefer Creative Commons — which that organization is likely excited about.Right now a subscription-based browser extension that allows Simple payments to sites that Own/ Possess implemented the standard is the only way to Receive in the door. Admittedly that’s not a Extremely sexy onboarding experience. But part of the fund is intended to juice the development and adoption of the standard much more widely.It’s a way — though an Dear one, Certain — to show that an alternative model exists to the traditional ad-based or subscription-based methods of supporting content.You can sign up now to be notified when they Begin accepting grant applications at grantfortheweb.org.Image Credits: CoilGetting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse Beautiful much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is great...
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