The only way to start this post is to thank our amazing community for all of the encouragement, feedback, and support that we’ve received during the last seven months of testing. Clearly, there are a lot of you out there who want to see a more open, fair, and inclusive way of earning a living on the Web and we want to say thanks for believing in us.
We believe that the business model of the Web is broken. Both ads and site-by-site subscriptions work best at scale which has contributed to an overall trend of consolidation into a few, huge platforms. The Web that many of us love and grew up with - a Web of millions of sites run by millions of independent operators - is dying.
We also believe that we have a solution in front of us. Web Monetization is a new way for websites to make money. It’s an open standard and isn’t tied to any one service or crypto-token. It’s user-friendly: users can get Web Monetization access from any provider and enjoy Web Monetization-enabled content from all over the Web. It’s also creator-friendly: It’s easy to make your site Web Monetization-enabled and money simply streams into your account (or any other account you designate) when Web Monetization enabled users access your content.
One day, we hope that most of the Web will support Web Monetization and we will no longer have to worry about subscribing to an increasing number of individual services. Looking at you, Disney+! The average American already subscribes to 3.4 on-demand video services and that’s not even counting other media such as music, podcasts, books, or subscriptions to individual creators.
To get there will take time but today we are taking another step forward by launching Coil’s open beta and a host of new features to go along with it.
The fact that Coil is built on an open web standard has been a major selling point and it’s what makes our technology truly unique. But a lot of creators these days use existing social media and content platforms and don’t have their own website yet. We wanted to create an easier way for them to get started.
That’s why today, we are launching the new Coil.com - a platform for publishing your own articles and links.
The twist is that you can have “split posts” which are part free and part subscriber-only. If you’re unsure what ratio to use, please check out our guide on the subject!
This makes Coil.com the first website that allows you to author exclusive content for Web Monetization enabled browsers. This is new territory and we’re excited to go on this journey together with all of you!
Over the coming months, we look forward to partnering with creators to explore this new medium of split posts and new ways to monetize content. Please share with us your feedback and experiences using Coil.com via [email protected].
We are also going to start creating more tutorials and guides on how to use Web Monetization on your own site, so stay tuned for that as well.
For now, claim your creator page and start writing! We are excited to read what you come up with and we’ll feature the best articles on our Explore page. Also, follow @Coil on Coil and on Twitter.
