Revealing my Grant for the Web Project Result

Last year in October, I was very excited to announce that I had received funding from the first Grant for the Web call for proposals and to introduce my little Web Monetization experiment project.

Now, more than six months later and with a little delay as compared to my initial project plan, I am finally able to reveal the result my project.

A New Approach to Sharing Knowledge on Websites Enabled by Web Monetization

That was the working title that I had chosen for my project, while I was drafting my application last summer.

My goal was to build an online video course platform, which would enable me as a content creator to publish video courses to share my knowledge with interested readers of my blog and to monetize these directly through Coil and Web Monetization.

While online video courses are not anything new at all, trying to monetize them with Web Monetization is probably something that hasn’t been done before, and that is exactly why I wanted to give it a go.

I wanted to be one of the first to experiment with this use case and to find out if it’s something viable to for creators and users.

My vision behind this idea is a future online ecosystem of creators and users that doesn’t require users to make multiple one-time payments to access exclusive content.

What if you could just access all the exclusive content from many different content creators with just your Coil subscription (or maybe some other Web Monetization provider in the future)?

I also wanted to see if I was able to build this platform with WordPress, which is my preferred platform to create and manage content.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the result of my project in action, to see if I was successful or not:

As you can see, my personal online course platform is fully functional and allows Coil users to easily create a new account and log into this platform to access the course content I share there.

The best thing about it?

I don’t need to collect any kind of sensible user data at all to monetize this content. Users also don’t need to type in their credit card details or go through a PayPal payment process.

Simply click on the Signin with Coil button and start watching my available video course, while the Coil browser extension takes care of streaming micropayments to me for every second you’re watching.

If you want to learn more details about the tech stack that I used to build this course platform on WordPress and to integrate the Coil login and Web Monetization functionality, check out my final project report on the Web Monetization Community platform.

The first video course I created to actually make this platform useful, is all about building a WordPress blog with the Divi theme, just like this one here.

I have received many questions over the past two years from different people, but particularly from members of the Coil community, about how to create a blog or website with WordPress.

Therefore, I quickly knew which topic to cover first to launch this project.

Spreading the Word about Web Monetization

I hope my project, along with the course I made, can help to bring more awareness to Web Monetization and the whole movement and development behind it.

It is definitely an early-stage experiment — and was always planned to be that from the beginning — to gather more knowledge about whether or not this monetization technique is actually a viable alternative to current best practices for content creators.

To try to bring also some new people into the blogging space and to make them familiar with Web Monetization from the get-go, I am also revealing the Consistent Me Blogging Scholarship today.

The scholarship will provide five lucky winners with two one-year subscriptions for Coil (worth $60) and the Divi theme for WordPress (worth $89), which are the required tools to follow my video course and to get started with building your very own WordPress blog.

If you want to have a chance to be one of the five scholars or happen to know someone who always wanted to build a blog, but didn’t quite know where to start, make sure to check out the official application form.

Once more, I want to thank all the people behind the Grant for the Web who made this project possible for me to work on and everyone in the Web Monetization community for their efforts to make the web a more inclusive and sustainable space for everyone.