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Chris Lawrence
Chris Lawrence

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How much money have you made through Web Monetization?

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We are kicking off weekly discussions, here is our first thread!

We want to know how much you have made via Web Monetization since you installed the technology. Different people will have different ways to calculate this so add a note about how you came to that number. Goal here is to get a sense of your experience and the amounts! Respond below in comments.

Header Icon is "money tree" by Andrei Yushchenko from the Noun Project

Top comments (24)

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gfam profile image
gFam

We go through exactly this in our monthly reports latest one here... but we've made $292 USD in the last year which is 280XRP. The caveat with this though is that most of the web-monetization flowing through gfam.live is collected by the creators themselves... we only earn micropayments on the main home page.

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

Do you have a creator who would be willing to share on this thread?

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gfam profile image
gFam

I can definitely ask. I know one creator that enabled web-monetization and was only posting to gFam. All the other web-monetization savvy creators on the site were also posting on MG.Social, Cinnamon and Coil... which makes it hard to work out because Cinnamon and Coil also do creators boosts (which are amazing) but make it hard to quantify just the web-monetization earnings.

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

Would be interested in both perspectives

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mateoxrp profile image
Mathew Safford • Edited

We've had 581 XRP generated to our payment pointers since last May. That figure includes everything generated to MG.Social, our Coil blog, Cinnamon channel (including a couple Cinnamon boosts) and postings to this community.

Our MG.Social dashboard currently shows 461.585221623 XRP paid out to MG.Social creators since we started tracking, which is less than a year ago.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

That is quite a lot compared to others. If cross referencing to your published stats the ratio of earning and subscribers is quite encouraging, to be honest.

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mateoxrp profile image
Mathew Safford

We don't cover our costs yet but it is a start!

A difference for us compared to some others may be that we require a web monetization subscription (Coil) to access our platform and have specifically marketed to people who are already web monetization subscribers. This constrains our growth but ensures our revenue will scale with our usage and likely costs.

As we grow we plan to spend more time and effort growing the entire tent to bring new people into the ecosystem.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

Hope you're successful in acquiring new users. Godspeed 🤟🤟🤟

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jeremiah profile image
Jeremiah Lee • Edited

From 437k page views / 289k unique visitors on JeremiahLee.com, I have earned a depressing 131.75 SEK, which is ~$16 USD.

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

@jeremiah I am curious, do you have your payment pointer attached to your posts/account on this forum?

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jeremiah profile image
Jeremiah Lee • Edited

Yes, I do have my payment pointer attached my account here, but (most of) my content is not about Web Monetization, so I don't post it here.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

I'm curious if your reader base is Web Monetization-savvy @jeremiah ? Do you often put efforts to provide better experience for your Coil subscribers to nudge more subscription? Almost half a million page views for ~$16 USD indeed quite small for that number, considering here in community space non-profits payment pointers seem to earn more with less visitors (according to post made by Erika posted a while ago)

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jeremiah profile image
Jeremiah Lee • Edited

My website audience is tech savvy, but probably not Web Monetization savvy. Most people, even in the tech industry, don't seem to know about Coil.

I promote Coil in the footer of all my posts. I don't have advertising on my site at all.

I recently published a digital zine about remote asynchronous work that took over 100 hours to make. I wrote 2 bonus articles for Coil subscribers in attempt of the 100+20 rule for premium content. 1 person has told me they signed up for Coil as a result, but the pages have gotten less than 20 conversions (monetizationstart events tracked), so most people simply bounced off the paywall.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy • Edited

Pretty good info there, thanks for sharing that!

It does seem to me that making people aware of Web Monetization first is more valuable than employing premium premium contents to drive subscribers up. If that is really the case, then Web Monetization subscription will be more of community endeavors than one site effort. Even if only 10% of your unique users already have Coil subscription, I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing different numbers here.

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

@jeremiah The zine is awesome. You should do a post on here about it and talk about your thoughts on WMizing it. What is interesting about this Community Space is you actually have a critical mass of WM users so its an opportunity to see if you notice a difference.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

This community space will never have enough real life use cases for the members to use as cross reference 👍

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jamiellaurence profile image
Jamiel Laurence

So I have mainly been operating through Cinnamon Video, where I made a total last year of just under 3 USD.

At this early stage, I have to be honest that the low financial incentive would prevent me from moving over all of my content and commit to creating for that platform full time.

I am however still very enthusiastic and will continue to spread my content across to cinnamon and upload full versions of my films.

I am now going to be exploring using the pointer thanks to Designah & Team and look forward to seeking if I can generate a more stable income this way.

Jamiel

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onemathematicalcat profile image
Dr. Carol JVF Burns

I have over 400 math lessons; when school is in session, I get about 80,000 users per month. Lots of users---but none web-monetized. Most of my COIL income is from me and my husband. Since COIL-monetizing my site in January 2021, I suspect that only a few dollars (at most) is "real" third-party income. In April I started random blocking of my lessons to try and encourage people to subscribe to COIL, but I don't think this has resulted in even one subscriber. (A COIL membership opens up all my lessons.) Sorry to report such dismal stats!
My site: onemathematicalcat.org
My income details: onemathematicalcat.org/webSiteInco...

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

We are at the beginning of something and it does feel like tough sledding sometimes. Thanks for being a willing experimenter. Keep your eye out for a Call for Proposals that will come out this Summer.

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

With a payment pointer connected to my GftW posts and my profile only I have made $2.70 since June 1st. This is basically our Weekly Round-Ups. We tweet it and push to Linked In. But thats a decent return. Basically its because almost everyone who uses this forum is Web Monetized. It shows what might be possible if their are enough users. Also how do we build other community projects where peer Web Monetization is the norm.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

I haven't check all grantees' projects yet, but do we have projects that focus on transitioning a community to adopt peer Web Monetization norm, Chris?

I think this is a human problem and probably the more difficult aspect of Web Monetization to solve than the tech related problems. Outside WM community I do think non-crypto savvy communities would be hard to convince in adopting Web Monetization. I would be interested if there are in-depth grant reports that focus on tackling this issue.

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ericahargreave profile image
Erica Hargreave

Just did our calculations, between January 25th - June 22nd, 2021, if I exclude our Cinnamon boosts (which are the majority of our earnings and would make this amount significantly higher), followed by our XUMM tips from mg.social and @gfam , our earnings through our Coil payment pointers have been 17.2347595 XRP + 2.46 CA + 0.08 US = 12.83 US.

This is from my payment pointers on:

  • Roamancing.com
  • StoryToGo.ca
  • StoryToGo.ca/Classroom
  • EmmeRogers.com
  • EricaHargreave.com
  • here
  • mg.social
  • gfam
  • StoryToGo’s Cinnamon
  • Roamancing’s Cinnamon
  • StoryToGo’s YouTube
  • Roamancing’s YouTube
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nicol profile image
Nic

I created a pointer for each site I tested on to get more of a sense where the WM was coming from. So far the tally is, using my current Uphold balances (which I guess reflects that the xrp transactions were turned into £ at different exchange rates):

  • screen.is - 8.7245 xrp / £6.86 / 30 transactions (this site has some long videos - back in February I got two large single transactions of £0.75 and £0.76 - which must have meant people were watching full videos, as that's several hours of WM income each.)
  • netribution.co.uk - 4.07567 xrp / £3.78 / 17 transactions
  • Coil.com/YouTube - 0.86612 xrp / £0.84 / 3 transactions
  • This community - 1.29602 xrp / £0.75 / 14 transactions
  • openvideo.tech - 0.10612 xrp / £0.06 / 5 transactions
  • fundyourfilm.com - 0.37126 xrp / £0.13 / 4 transactions

So altogether around £12.42 or $17.14 with today's exchange rate. I'm not sure how many of these transactions will have been from me - I don't think there's an easy way to check (?) but a lot definitely aren't.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy • Edited

My KYC submit was rejected by Gatehub and Uphold still is not available in my country, so currently I can only wait for better supports here, while in the meantime using public non-profit payment pointers to my posts here in community space. I myself am interested in knowing how much exactly my posts earned through Web Monetization API, but there's no exact analytics for third-party payment pointers.