As I was saying in my last post about migrating my podcasts with simplecast, I’ve been listening to the ShopTalk Show again.
Last week Dave and Chris were talking about different ways to make money on the web and one that I hadn’t heard of before was coil.com
Coil is a bootstrapped approach to making money on the web through the browser, and through people spending time consuming the content that you write.
The core idea is
- As a content consumer I pay $5 a month to coil
- I can then add a <meta> tag to the <head> of my websites which contains a unique key… like my referral key.
- If I visit a website that has been set up in the same way then for every second I’m there they get a fraction of my $5 a month
- If someone who also is a member of coil visits my website, I get a fraction of the $5 they contribute each month.
One of the caveats with this is that it isn’t a specification — yet — but as a result you need to install a browser extension so that websites that have signed up will get paid.
The long term plan is for this to become a standard, and for browsers like Firefox, Safari, Edge and the Google one to implement this directly into the browser.
Note: There is already a browser out there that does this, it’s called Brave. I’m pretty much exclusively using Firefox now, but if you’re looking for a privacy focussed browser with a built in ad blocker then check out Brave.
So far since implementing it yesterday across three of my sites I’ve made a whopping $550. Hold on, I forgot to include the decimal point. So far I’ve made $0.0055 …. about half a cent.
Still, I’m not expecting to make loads of money with this, but I love the idea that you can sign up to something, add a <meta> tag to the head of your site and start making money. While small amounts of dollars might not seem much for someone in a first world country, those that create great content where their dollar doesn’t do quite so well can really benefit from this.
The best part is that it gets us away from the current advertising model which relies of a tonne of trackers which impede the performance of our sites.
Check out Coil.com, and install the browser extension…. in fact, install the extension and go back and slowly reread this article :D