Monetizing the Web

Gabriel Simmer is the founder, editor, and developer at Git Galaxy, where he writes about open source projects and dreams of electric sheep.

Monetizing content on the internet is difficult, and can make or break a website, determining if it loses money and goes out of business or survives and becomes self-sufficient. It seems simple on paper — websites want to make money, and visitors want to read their content without interuption.

Visitors don’t want traditional monetization strategies. They despise ads, opting to use an adblocker for a clean and fast experience. They dislike having to pay fees to read content that they “should be able to read for free”, because after all, this is the internet, and everything should be open and free. A Patreon is a good idea, but it’s unreliable, and you can’t monetize to the same scale, coming up with incentives is also very difficult. And we won’t even touch JavaScript bitcoin miners, which communities like Hacker News and reddit have raised hell about, despite it actually being a pretty solid idea for monetizing content. Regardless, what is the right solution in this case?

The answer is, in the end, paying a small fee to block ads but also contribute a small amount directly to the author or developers of a website. This solves our problems — it blocks advertising, removes the need for paywalls, and doesn’t need to rely on outside platforms like Patreon. The way to implement this universally, allowing any publisher to add it to their website, is through DNS, which websites would be able to opt-in to the “tip jar”.

When Datajoy’s FUPM program appeared on Hacker News, I immediately jumped on it for my publication Git Galaxy — we do also monetize with ads and a Patreon, but neither avenue works very well. A tip jar seemed like a neat idea, and I fully wanted to support the project. Essentially, it’s a custom DNS that blocks ads and also implements a sort of tip jar, in the sense that when you visit a website that has enabled the very simple opt-in, it throws a bit of money into the jar. While the service is currently free, they have confirmed they do want to monetize it, and currently pay out of pocket to fufill tip jar payouts. I have huge hope for the project, because it makes it easy to support creators online, and removes the annoyances of traditional monetization.

It’s still hard to earn money by creating and posting content online, and traditional methods like Google Adsense or paywalls can be annoying for the readers. New ways of monetizing websites through DNS, coupling together adblocking and a “universal tip jar”, is a thrilling development, especailly for smaller websites like my own.

(As an early adopter of FUPM, we invited Gabriel to talk about his ideas on where the web needs to go to get out from underneath the ad-supported, you-are-the-product model we find ourselves in — Ed.)

(We are currently talking to the powers that be about FUPM so we aren’t linking to it directly but if you want to know more about it, here’s an earlier post on monetization and FUPM— Ed.)