alt Hacker NewsHow do I pay the publisher of a web page?
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It's worth noting that Ted Nelson's visionary Xanadu project had actually addressed this issue decades ago. In the original design of Project Xanadu, rule 9 states "Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ('transclusions') of all or part of the document." This suggests a foresighted approach to content monetisation which the modern web, in many ways an unfinished hypertext prototype, still lacks. Nelson's idea was to embed financial transactions directly into the fabric of document interchange, an integration not yet realised in today's digital content landscape.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...
> I have money and I have a URL, how do I send money to the publisher of that URL?
This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it’s not worth exchanging it).
Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it’s a pretty big challenge.
(For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that part - minus the international part.)
Some people don't want to be paid. They do things as a hobby and for fun. As soon as one is being paid there is a ned to publish more and good quality stuff, which turns a fun project into work.
I think the way you support publishers is one of a few things
* they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support them directly * They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with this)
I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for free.
The open web is a platform for freeloaders. Since day 1 the expectation is that whatever is accessible will be free. And whatever isn't will be made free by whatever means necessary. Web content creators/publishers don't bother with micropayments infrastructure because no one is going to pay. Ads are a proven business model and they are going to stay.
There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been solved – see Twitch, OnlyFans, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, IAP on iOS/Android, WeChat, Gaming. That's where the innovation in the space will be because that's where the money is.
Isn't this the problem Brave browser set out to solve? It's just that they did it with cryptocurrency so everyone shunned it. https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
Seems fairly simple to have a smart contract do a DNS validation to unlock funds. For example, someone sends to a contract "$1 to example.com". Then the URL owner publishes either a TXT file or DNS record that has a list of crypto wallet addresses. Contract then forwards the payments. You could even make the keys just the ISO codes for each currency.
It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to DNS hijacking, etc. Make the contract immutable to meet tornado.cash standard. There are already oracles for DNS lookups so this contract might already exist somewhere.
Add in a couple of features:
1. Allow tracking per domain so publishers can know that there is a demand to set it up on their end.
2. Allow refunds in case the publisher never opens it up.
The Web Monetization API was another recent effort to try to make this, the latest of many attempts. See previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39274455
My guess is that 1. there’s virtually no demand from potential supporters for a more convenient way to pay creators than existing payment/subscription apps, and 2. relatively few creators have direct control over their own internet presence anymore, so any solution that requires modifying a web page is dead in the water.
Any new attempt to pay creators that doesn’t factor these two realities in will likely fail, because it just makes things harder than existing solutions.
Worst part about such small payments is that intermediary, that will process the payment, might get 50% or even more of said payment, leaving not much to receiver. If someone really wants support, they will either have a link to "merch" store, or links to Patreon, Kofi or some other platform. Worth noting, that content creators usually seek recurring payments, not a single tip.
I'm out of the web dev game but wouldn't you just write code to search for links to the ten or so most popular wrappers for Paypal or Stripe and then an API to perform the transaction? That should cover 99% of the actual payments that happen (there are LiberaPay and crypto schemes and bank transfer and SEPA for nerds). I think that basically all the money that moves to support free webpages is through PayPal or Stripe, maybe a few percent by the EU SEPA and Canadian eTransfer systems.
Realistically you Ctrl-F "donate / Paypal / Patreon / support" and click that link. Good web design should make it clear on a screen and in the code what is site content and what is third-party content such as comments with spam links.
Browsers should have pay/tip button to support website owners. And browser vendors should handle the payment. This would limit ads and tracking as well which aligns with Mozilla goals. Can I pitch this idea to Mozilla somewhere?
Author here! My primary motivation is to tip the hundreds of web creators that I enjoy every year without linearly increasing my spend (I can only afford so many $3/month Patreons).
It's manual for now, but the computer tracks who to pay next, who to stop paying, and give you links to speed up the process.
See: https://fosstodon.org/@sethmlarson/113575887792359030
Happy to answer questions :)
The European Union is working on a standard for QR-code payments [1]. In the Netherlands, most banking app already understand QR-code for payments. There are serviced that offer a possibility to ask for a payment without a specified amount that do not the reveal the bank account of the requester.
If this could be turned into a world wide standard, one could add a link to a QR code in a web page to request for donations. One should realize that there are very different payments systems in the world and that there are payment companies, think credit card companies, that have good reasons to resist these kind of global standards.
[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/document-library/guid...
We’re three decades in with the web and it’s pretty clear that voluntary payment nudges don’t work. Most people won’t pay for free content after they’ve consumed it. Humans need an extra incentive to pay for free content.
This is why so many sponsorship platforms are effectively subscription models with additional exclusive content or early access. And for that to work, you need more than just a payment button, you need a content publishing platform that will handle all the subs and content gating.
humans.txt [1] could be an approach for this.
I don't see much of a point. If someone makes a website and wants people to be able to send money to them for that, a link on that website should work just fine. I'm failing to see the benefit of a HTML meta tag related to that.
> I wish I could click a button to easily send a "tip" to someone who created something I enjoy or to browse other options for supporting them.
I believe most people invested in getting donations already have a similar button on their page.
I know this forum hates crypto but this is very doable with ENS. You can both point to content via an ENS domain and also link to a wallet address.
Come to think of it you can do this with normal DNS by just setting a wallet address in a TXT record but that's not integrated into anything. It's just text.
I wrote about a country or worldwide like system before that would do automatic funding to visited webpages:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106
Would be nice for the EU to implement such a feature.
You scan the qrcode on the page which will launch your banking app that initiates the transfer and fills out the details leaving for you to enter the amount and the fingerprint confirmation to send it off.
If they'd fancy a donation, they'd have a visible button or section on their website so anyone interested could send it their way. Liberapay looks like a decent alternative to Patreon. Crypto (XMR, namely) is also a good option.
Isn't the solution for Patreon et al to offer embeddable widgets that implement the Payments Request API?
You'd need everyone to setup the rails for it to work smoothly, but it can. I've documented one way this could work at http://micropayments.fyi
Honestly this is one of the main usecases of crypto, in my opinion. And it's only in 2024 where the transaction costs are cheap enough that it's worth it.
Still, fragmentation of crypto makes the whole experience shitty - but we've been working on this to fix that: https://docs.peanut.to/checkout-api
This is a relatively straightforward problem to solve. There is a “payment required” HTTP status code and lightning network micropayments are very easy to set up and use.
The problem is that payments that cannot be centrally surveilled and centrally vetoed (without burden of proof of probable cause, usually) are actually illegal to implement.
To do anything like this requires strong ID and KYC for payer and recipient and that isn’t what bare URLs and the web are about.
All of the cool applications of online payments that would spread quickly and efficiently are illegal.
It’s truly sad.
Is this the same issue with content creators being reimbursed for generative ai?
This week someone finally vandalized an old long forgotten sign at the train station. It's purpose was to ask the traveler not to walk on the rails. It said because of delays 30 000 people were late for their appointment every year. It attempted to appeal to a kind of decency and care for others that just doesn't exist anymore. It is also true that no one walks on the rails anymore.
The answer to the riddle, how to pay the publisher: You make your own website and write your own article(s) If the reward worthy publisher wrote something that fits the context of your website (or one of them) and it is worth reading for your readers you make a link to it. <a href=""> etc An endorsement like that, from the right person, is worth a lot but it is not required. You just make a nice article for other people, they could do the same. We all win or lose together.
Sorry, but I don't really see the problem, I mean someone that wants to get paid will make sure to let you know where to pay them.
Great idea.
This could be solved with a simple <link> standard.
If we're talking "direct" payments, as much as it pains me to say it, it would be bitcoin, wouldn't it? Just put a wallet address in a <meta> and you're done. But with its operational overhead it may be a waste for micro-transactions compared to traditional payment methods.
To be honest, the real problem isn't that there is no way to mark this up, is that even if there WAS a way to mark this up, most people wouldn't because it's not a browser API. People don't even use RSS because browsers don't tell users about RSS links. There needs to be a tangible consequence of using a tag for people to bother with it. If a $ doesn't appear on the address bar, what is the point?
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This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and especially for international transfers that cross between, say, the MC/Visa duopoly regions into other ones like the Asian ecosystems.
But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.