How to make some money with a simple metadata

February 13, 2021 • 3 min read • Monetization

While doing some research for an upcoming post, I’ve noticed several people added a strange metadata on their website. A metadata named monetization. Hmmm, what is this about?

Then I’ve remembered about web monetization. The idea behind it is that content creators can receive money from people how like their content. So instead of filling their websites with annoying ads, content creators (like bloggers for example) can get paid directly by users of their content.

There is a W3C proposal for this - if approved, browsers will implement the JavaScript API for this - but for now, people who want to pay need to use a browser extension. So don’t expect to get rich via web monetization. Still, it costs nothing to get your website monetized so why not?

You can find out all the details on webmonetization.org but the gist is that all you need to do is to add a metadata on your website:

<html>
  <head>
    ...
    <meta name="monetization" content="$wallet.walletprovider.com/yourid" />
    ...
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
  </body>
</html>

I’ve used uphold.com as my wallet provider and my metadata looks like this:

<html>
  <head>
    ...
    <meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/FzNEikF9pkQJ" />
    ...
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
  </body>
</html>

That’s it. I’ve added that metadata and I wait for the money :)

I don’t know if this will catch up or disappear in the future, but I think is a good idea. Mozilla seems to support it, hopefully, others will do it.

Resources