Web Bucks
Back in September 2024 I wrote a piece about the history of attempts at standardizing some kind of Micropayments going back to the late 90s. Like a lot of things I write, it's the outcome of looking at history and background for things that I'm actively thinking about. An announcement the other day made me think that perhaps now is a good time for a follow up post.
As you probably already know if you're reading this, I write and think a lot about the health of the web ecosystem. We've even got a whole playlist of videos (lots of podcast episodes) on the topic on YouTube. Today, that's nearly all paid for, on all sides, by advertising. In several important respects, it's safe to say that the status quo is under many threats. In several ways it's also worth questioning if the status quo is even good.
When Ted Nelson first imagined Micropayments in the 1960s, he was imaging a fair economic model for digital publishing. We've had many ideas and proposals since then. Web Monetization is one idea which isn't dead yet. Its main ideas involve embedding a declarative link to a "payment pointer" (like a wallet address) where payments can be sent via Interledger. I say "sent", but "streamed" might be more accurate. Interledger is a novel idea which treats money as "packets" and routes small amounts around. Full disclosure: Igalia has been working on some prototype work in Chromium to help see what a native implementation would look like, what its architecture would be and what options this opens (or closes). Our work has been funded by the Interledger Foundation. It does not amount to an endorsement, and it does not mean something will ship. That said, it doesn't mean the opposite either.
You might know that Brave, another Chromium-based browser, has system for creators too. In their model, publishers/creators sign up and verify their domain (or social accounts!), and people browsing those with Brave browsers sort of keep track of that locally, and at the end of the month Brave can batch up and settle accounts of Basic Attention Tokens ("BAT") which they can then pay out to creators in lump sums. As of the time of this writing, Brave has 88 million monthly active users (source) who could be paying its 1.67 million plus content creators and publishers (source).
Finally, in India, UPI offers most transactions free of charge and can also be used for micro payments - it's being used in $240 billion USD / month worth of transactions!
But there's also some "adjacent" stuff that doesn't claim to be micro transactions but somehow are similar:
If you've ever used Microsoft's Bing search engine, they also give you "points" (I like to call them "Bing Bucks") which you can trade in for other stuff (the payment is going in a different direction!). There was also Scroll, years ago, which was aimed to be a kind of universal service you could pay into to remove ads on many properties (it was bought by Twitter and shut down.)
Enter: Offerwall
Just the other day, Google Ad Manager gave a new idea a potentially really signficant boost. I think it's worth looking at: Offerwall. Offerwall lets sites provide potentially a few ways to monetize content, and for users to choose the one that they prefer. For example, a publisher can set up to allow reading their site in exchange for watching an ad (similar to YouTube's model). That's pretty interesting, but far more interesting to me, is that it integrates with a third-party service called Supertab. Supertab lets people provide their own subscriptions - including a tiny fee for this page, or access to the site for some timed pass - 4 hours, 24 hours, a week, etc. It does this with pretty friction-less wallet integration and by 'pooling' the funds until it makes sense to do a real, regular transaction. Perhaps the easiest thing is to look at some of their own examples.
Offerwall also allows other integrations, so maybe we'll see some of these begin to come together somehow too.
It's a very interesting way to split the difference and address a few complaints of micro transaction critics and generally people skeptical that something could gain significant traction. More than that even, it seems to me that by integrating with Google Ad manager it's got about as much advantage as anyone could get (the vast majority of ads are already served with Google Ad manager and this actually tries to expand that).
I'm very keen to see how this all plays out! What do you think will happen? Share your thoughts with me on social media.