 Hello, and you're very welcome to this session, which is presented by Erica Hargreave. And the title is exploring the web monetization standard as a solution for sustainability in the creation of open educational resources. Erica, it's over to you. Good morning, everybody. I am thrilled to be here this morning. And well, I'm pretending like I'm seeing you all through my screen right now. Yeah, I'm super excited because I've been doing some experiments the last few months as a part of Grant for the Web. And through those experiments, I'm starting to see some definitely sustainability as far as maintenance comes in the creation of OERs and the potential there that there could also be the potential for sustainability in terms of creation as well. And so I'm gonna take you through a little bit of my journey today with Grant for the Web into what's called the web monetization standard. Now, for those of you when you hear the word web monetization, if you wanna just write for a second in the chat, I unfortunately can't see you or hear you, but just write down what you think of when you hear the word web monetization. Okay, I'm guessing a lot of people are thinking like, because this is what I did when I first, David Porter had nudged me in the direction of the Grant and when I first read web monetization, I thought, okay, so this is ads and affiliate marketing and pay-per-view and freemium models and influencer marketing and brand ambassadors and things like that. And as I started reading, through what he'd sent me and going deeper into what this whole thing was about, I realized that it is not about that at all. And so what it's about is there is a lot of, you know, sort of very bright minds that kind of got together and they realized that we've got a problem on the web. And part of the problem that we have on the web is that creators, people like you and myself are not really getting an equitable share of the micro payments or like of sort of funding for our content on the web. And so I'll just preface this because I know this is an open educational conference. This has nothing to do with gated communities or people having to pay to access your content. And so I'll get into that a little later on on how that this can be worked for open ed. But the basic thing is that these people are out there and they're trying to create this sort of newer, more equitable way for creators to earn micro payments from the time people spend on their content in the digital space. And so, you know, I was quite skeptical about this at the beginning. I thought, well, it can't hurt to try, you know, an experiment and then, you know, sort of build out my findings from this experiment. I teach an immediate studies program. So finding different ways to fund online content and online creation is definitely something that is top of mind to my students as they set out to begin building their careers. And so I thought, you know, the very least, I'm checking this out for them. So the way the system currently works is they basically have this service provider. It's called Coil, although with the grant, they're looking to build other sort of service providers like that. And Coil sells $5 US month subscription for anybody that wishes to buy in and support creators whose digital content they spend time on. And so the creator only sort of gets a little bit of that, you know, $5 each month from people spending time on their content if their content is indeed web monetized. And so, and you basically just get it from people visiting your website. Like, and the time that they're spending there, if you've got, you know, if it's web monetized, you get these little filter through of micropayments and all works, you know, sort of through blockchain and stuff like that. And then there's a few other sort of of the newer web monetized platforms that have also enabled tipping. And so it's specifically XRP tipping with some, but you can then transfer that XRP into whatever currency you wish it to be in. And with the way Coil works, if you are a creator, like a lot of you are, and like I am, you can go and you can go set up a creator's account and you do not have to pay into the $5 a month if you do not wish to. You can still have a creator's account and you go and you set up a digital wallet and you create a payment pointer. And then that basically allows you to monetize content that you can put up on some of the different web monetized platforms. So there's a variety out there. One of my favorites is Cinnamon, which is a video sort of a streaming site. And or it has ways now that you can monetize things like your YouTube channel or your WordPress blogs or you can take a little bit of code and stick that into your site to be able to work with Coil and monetize your digital content that way. And I'm gonna be building an open-ed course on this that'll actually take you through step-by-step how to do all the variety of things. So anybody who's interested, I'm happy to send that to them later once it's built. And so as far as what digital content can be web monetized, this is part of the exciting thing. I've been playing with this for about three months now and I still haven't hit on the tip of the iceberg of these different platforms that you can web monetize. I'm really excited to start experimenting in some of the podcasting spaces. You can actually web monetize games that you create out there. There's ones like Instagram accounts for photos. You can web monetize your research articles. And you can web monetize your online or your open educational resources, including open courses. So we've been doing some of that sort of experiments. You can see this is one of our open courses that we've got in the top of the screen over here. And if you see right down the bottom there, we put a little sort of notification that crops up on our different websites just to let people know that the site is monetized with Coil. We don't put any gates. It does allow you to if you wish to, but we don't put any gates on our content. We only just put the little pop-up thing just so that people are aware in case they're interested in helping to support our creation by buying a Coil membership. But that's the extent to which we share that as you're seeing right there. And if you see down in the bottom corner there, that's what the Coil web monetization. Sort of plug-in looks like as you're setting things up. And as I said, you have the option to, whether you wanna have your content on certain pages on your website monetized, whether you wanna monetize in public or whether you want it gated in terms of Coil members only. I'm picking always the public. And so, and this is like part of what's getting me so excited about this is I work with teams of people. And in our teams, I've got different writers that work with us, different filmmakers and videographers that are working with us. Sometimes when we're interviewing people, it would be really nice if we're actually making some money off of this web monetization to be able to share that, the funds we make with them. And then I've got different course creators. And no, well, most of our course, well, it depends. When it's paid course, they're obviously paid, but we have some people that's, because we've got sort of an online school that we've built that just want a home for open educational courses. And so, those were providing them that home. But here's the beauty with this now is, so this is a username for one of our teachers. And Anne just needs to go in and set up a payment pointer from using Coil. And then all of her content that she builds out on our site, when we receive little micro payments for it, it will be Anne that receives those micro payments to her wallet. Similarly, I created a video the other day with a fellow who's already in the web monetizing community. And so because it was a video, why I was able to kind of put his payment pointer in there and sort of create a 50-50 split. And so he'll get 50% of whatever we make off of that of people just watching our video. And then as I mentioned, there's also some social media platforms, like sort of some of the monetized platforms that are also accepting tips. And so this is just an example of two that are accepting tips. And they're accepting them via this sort of blockchains, sort of secure site called ZUM, which at the moment, they're only working with XRP, whereas on the other sites, you can transfer the micro payments that you get into any currency that you wish. So and you can see at the bottom of both of these where you've got the little tip post and both these people have sort of received some tips along the way. So just with anything new, there is growing pains out there. The interview that I did with the one fellow who I was sharing the revenue with from our video, that was all about his platform, which is GFAN, which is kind of like a web monetized Instagram platform. And his big thing in building, like his big difficulty in building that community so far has been that there's been sphere and skepticism that this is too good to be true. Like, you know, why would people pay me to post my pictures and stuff like that online? And I get that. I probably would have had the same reaction if it hadn't been for the fact that it was David Porter that initially nudged me in the direction of Grant for the Web. And then, you know, I realized that, you know, it's Mozilla and Creative Commons and Coil that are behind the initiative. So that's definitely a growing pain. The name is a growing pain, just like at the beginning when we talked about how the web monetization standard, like I immediately think of ads and affiliate marketing and things like that because those communities have used the term web monetization for a long time now. And so, yeah, so that's a bit of a hiccup. I don't know, I've sort of, the nice thing right now is it's a small enough community that most of the people that are creating in the spaces are talking to one another and sharing these problems. And so that's certainly a problem that I've presented and I guess we'll see what happens with that. So another sort of growing pain right now is that there needs to be a greater variety of providers out there in addition to Coil. And with that, there kind of needs to be, you know, a blossoming of different models for utilizing web monetization. And there's certainly a lot of talk about that in the community at the moment. So I think we're gonna start seeing some shifts in the next year around that. There needs to be a larger base in order to make this truly sustainable. I am making real money on this right now which is really interesting because some of our documentary filmmaking, for example, we have it hosted on different mainstream broadcasts, streaming sites and I see like next to nothing only a few cents from that. Whereas with this, I get a little notification every single day of, oh, I've made a little bit of money yet each day. I mean, it's not huge yet. However, I have actually in the last three months just off of old content of mine that I have just web monetized. I've actually, I think I'm sitting at about $2,000 U.S. at the moment and that's nothing to sneeze at because if I hadn't done this, if I hadn't been nudged in this direction, we would have made no money on that. So it does give me hope that as the subscriber base grows that this will be a stronger and stronger space to actually make things more sustainable for creators. And then the other sort of thing is, is there is a tie in with this because it's how they work the blockchain and the micro payments? Is there is a tie in with cryptocurrencies which a number of people are nervous about? However, as I mentioned before, you can get paid in whatever currency of your choosing. And finally, the thing I'm so excited about right now is there's tons of opportunities out there. As I said, Grant for the Web is helping to build the web monetization ecosystem at the moment and they are doing that by funding new web monetized platforms and also projects in all sorts of different things. Education and they're big on open, of course with the Creative Commons connection. So education, they've been funding people's research papers, they have been funding a lot in the arts communities, like dancers and they've been funding things in wellness and a tremendous number of things in music and things like that as well. And what they're doing, and this is where the opportunities come up too, is they should be doing a new call to funding probably in about, I'm guessing we're gonna see that later this spring before the summer. And they're trying to get a wide variety of different people from different industries from around the world. So keep an eye open, I will share in Discord later or when I get back out of my slides on the channel, the link to Grant for the web. With all of this, there's an increasing number of web monetization platforms. There's a low barrier to begin. I was telling one of my students in my master's program about this and I think she'd signed up for everything before we finished our conversation. And they're making it easier and easier to be able to monetize your content on there. And then one of the things that I'm absolutely loving at the moment out there is that because it's an early adopter community, everybody is so supportive of each other and they're supportive of each other's initiatives that they're building. A lot of the platforms are giving early adopter incentives in building. So Coil's been giving various sort of their top creators each month little boosts, which is a good portion of where we've been getting our sort of income from so far is from those boosts that we get each month. And they're also finding ways to increasingly sort of add ways that you can web monetize the platforms you're already on, like YouTube and WordPress. So yeah, that's the crest of what I wanted to kind of share because I'm so excited about it at the moment. And I will sort of come back in where I can off the slides so that I can see in the chat and see if there's any questions or things like that. Thanks, Erica. We've got about a minute or two left, just if there's one. We've put up one question there from Sonya. I think there's quite a bit that's been going on in the chat just around exploring the Coil website and the privacy concerns there. Is there anything you wanted to say about that particular question? Oh, okay. So I have to admit that I have not read, I might have been a bit remiss in reading all the privacy things when I went in, I think is, but yeah, so I haven't noticed anything where I'm concerned, but I know that these are all things that that community actually wants to address and they've got a forum. So if that's something as you're building and you are finding that to be concerning, if that's something you raise in kind of the grant for the web forum, they've been responding really quickly and Coil actually especially has been responding really quickly because I was running into problems with their plugin in the early days and they actually thanked me for pointing out those problems and those concerns. Yeah, so Erica's gonna post the link to more information in the Discord channel, the Resources channel after this, if you want to follow up and like you say, you don't have the website up yet, but do follow to find out more about that. I'm afraid we are out of time, but let's move over onto Discord and continue the conversation there. Yeah, across some of the research papers that people have been doing on it over there too. Super, yeah. That's great, thank you so much. Thank you, bye. Nom, nom, nom.