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Monetizing Your Hacker Noon Stories and Own Website with Coil [A How-To Guide]

by RichardJohnnJune 17th, 2020

Too Long; Didn't Read

Adding one line of HTML to your website can start making you money. No one will see anything different on your site, no one will be tracked because of it.

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featured image - Monetizing Your Hacker Noon Stories and Own Website with Coil [A How-To Guide]

⚠️UPDATE: Coil is no more. This article no longer applicable! ⚠️

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Adding one line of HTML to your website can start making you money. No one will see anything different on your site, no one will be tracked because of it.

This one-liner is a meta tag that goes in your site header and looks something like this:

<meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/LMQDwYFW6rA!">

Now, with this added, visitors of the site have the ability to indirectly fund whomever is running the website, without opening their wallets again. Their paid membership along with the browser extension will make payments on their behalf, just by spending time on your site.

This is How We Do It

Coil is providing a means to seamlessly distribute money to content providers on the internet. The idea is to provide content creators with a free account with Coil, which they can connect to a wallet to receive money either via fiat or cryptocurrency.

The source of money fueling this comes from another sort of Coil account. A Coil member account, which for $5 dollars a month, provides exclusive access and perks to websites partnering with Coil. Imgur Emerald comes with Coil member accounts, for example.

To sign up for a free creator account go to https://coil.com/signup and fill out your email address. You'll be redirected to a verification page and receive an email with the code to use. Afterwards, you will be asked to enter your credit card information, but you can simply go to https://coil.com/blogs/creator-setup to continue filling out your profile, where you will need to set a user name.

Finally, https://coil.com/blogs/creator-payout is where you can place your payment pointer if you have one already or sign up for an account with the different wallets supported by Coil. I recommend Uphold because it supports the most currencies and has no fees.

If you have an account already, the link at the top gives you a spot to enter your address. There is a helpful link to each organization's help docs for location your payment pointer ("Get a payment pointer")

After this, you can visit https://coil.com/settings/monetize where Coil conveniently displays the meta tag with your payment pointer filled in for you. This tag just goes into the <head> of your website. That's all there is to it.

How Do They Do It?

The magic that links consumers and creators is in the meta tag and either a Coil browser extension or the Puma Browser. The contents of the

content

attribute, in this example shown here, is an address to an Uphold wallet. This is where the money goes, regardless of who is actually serving up the website with this tag. The browser extension will pickup on the meta tag and react to let you know you are supporting the content provider. So, if you create a free Coil account and install the extension, then next time you enjoy some stream on Twitch.tv for example, Coil will begin streaming money via micro-transactions to whomever is streaming to your browser at the rate of 36 cents an hour. Pretty simple way to help people you are a fan of, no?

Under the hood and via the tubes, Coil makes use of a proposed JavaScript browser API called Web Monetization and an open protocol for sending payments to ledgers named Interledger to make this work. All of this without ads popping up or any other shady practices going on (psst- maybe you'd like to learn about Privacy Badger?).

This is a nice summary of Coil with pretty pictures.

So, it makes no difference what the content is, you could put this on a site with recipes for kkakdugi, a Unity game or a Firefox Reality VR experience, if visitors are spending time on the site, these same visitors will be funding the creators of said content. You just need to have this little meta tag with your wallet address and if visitors are using the Coil extensions or Puma browser, creators will get paid for having visitors merely viewing their content.

As more perks for paid members of Coil emerge, we can hope to see more people adopting this platform to support your corner of the internet.

I'll close with this aphorism: