DEV is now Web Monetized

Earlier this month, we announced the Grant For The Web x DEV Hackathon to help drive community experimentation around Web Monetization.

While hackathon participants have been building away this past month, we here at DEV have also been hard at work in implementing the Web Monetization standard. If you'd like more of the technical details, here are links to two of the relevant PRs in our open-source repo: PR1 and PR2.

Today, we are happy to share that DEV itself is Web Monetized.
Additionally, DEV authors can now enable their own payment pointer to receive micro-payments when Web Monetized browsers visit their profile and posts.

Check out Ben's post for some additional thoughts:

Web Monetization + Grant for the Web

Web Monetization is a standard that provides content creators with an alternative solution to get paid for the content they share on the web. When a user visits a monetized web page, their browser (if it supports Web Monetization) may send micropayments to the site. There are many creative possibilities that are enabled by this technology — for instance, the web page can reward the monetized browser with an enhanced experience. We encourage you to check out some submissions to the GftW Hackathon to see some other interesting applications of the technology.

Grant For The Web is a $100M fund aimed at boosting open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in Web Monetization. The organization is a collaboration between Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Coil. They are providing grants ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 to provide grantees with an opportunity to innovate even further on the technology. We hope that many DEV Hackathon participants choose to extend their projects by applying with an official GftW project proposal.

Getting Started

In order to start generating micro-payments with Web Monetization on your DEV content, just following these steps:

• Set up a wallet (here are a few options). We recommend UpHold.

• Once your wallet is set up, you'll receive a Payment Pointer address

• Add this address in your DEV settings

• That's it. You'll now receive a micro-payment every time a monetized browsers visit your your profile page and posts.

If you're interested in supporting creators and the broader monetized ecosystem, you can pay a monthly fee to a Web Monetization provider. Currently, the only provider for sending payments is Coil, but more providers will pop up as the ecosystem expands.

Disclaimer: we have partnered with Coil as our recommended Web Monetization provider, and we'll benefit if you sign up with these referral links.

Earnings for all parties involved will likely be quite small to start, but there’s a bright future ahead as more people and platforms begin to adopt this standard. Soon, we hope that a large percentage of DEV authors will have enabled their own payment pointer, providing monetized browsers with a way to directly reward their work.

As a friendly reminder, our hackathon ends Sunday, June 14 and the Grant For The Web proposals are due June 22.

Good luck, and happy monetizing!