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Discussion on: How to make money with your content?

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

That's interesting, but I would like to understand it more.

If Coil pays me to look at articles on dev.to who pays Coil and why is this transaction worth to them? Is it "only" that now Coil will also collect information about my web behaviour or is there something else?

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Oke so Coil is a subscription.

You as a person can get a Coil subscription for let's say 5$ a month, those 5$ will get pushed to people's articles you are watching, the longer you stay on one article, the more that person will receive.

I for one have a Coil subscription because I see value in what I read online and would like to give back, needless to say, it's not mandatory and only if you are cool with it should you get a Coil subscription.

I hope that makes sense, and clear how it works?

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo • Edited

I see, the talk about "Add Funds" in the article confused me.

So as an author I don't need to add funds, just sign up and add their code to dev.to (or to my own web site) and the money starts flowing. Or dripping, probably. Sounds promising.

However, I am still a bit unclear, as a read why would I give money to Coil that will end up who-knows-where? With Patreon I can support the specific people I like. With Coil I might pay a web site where I spent time while I don't actually enjoyed being there.
e.g. I can imaging the IRS in the US getting paid by Coil for all the time people are on their site trying to fill out their form.
Same with Facebook, sometimes I waste my time browsing Facebook. With Coil set up it is not enough that I waste my time (which I know is my problem), but now I might even pay Facebook for that. And I still see their ads.

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Ah ok clear, the Add Funds is to receive money back actually haha, weird naming.

As an author you literally have to do nothing, just add the meta tag from uphold and you can start to earn.

Well Patreon is cool, but it's one-directional.
How about that one person who you've only read one article from, but that helped you immense.

Perhaps you wouldn't support his Patreon, but now you would support this article in specific.

So you can setup coil to only pay for specific content as well as I understand correctly., it will only fire on certain sites, like not facebook as is now.

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

Thanks for all the fast responses!

Oh, so the "Add Fund" is really confusing then.

I can clearly see the value of somehow paying an author for an individual article a few cents, (and as an author being paid for all the content I create) I am just worried the lack of control the paying person might feel.

Anyway, I looked at the HTML source of the homepage dev.to. It has the following entry:

<meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/24HhrUGG7ekn">
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I assume that means dev.to monetizes the homepage and probably all the pages via Uphold.

I also looked at the source of this page - your post - and it had the same entry with the same value.

Does that mean you have not configured the monetization on dev.to yet?

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

Oh and I clearly missed the last sentence from your previous comment about setting the sites. That explains it. I'll check it out.

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

They use a base payment pointer, and an author one I see, so they are probably also getting some cash from this.

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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

Where do you see the "author one"?

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Main one:

<meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/24HhrUGG7ekn">
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Pointers:

<div id="base-payment-pointer" data-payment-pointer="$ilp.uphold.com/24HhrUGG7ekn"></div>
// Author
<div id="author-payment-pointer" data-payment-pointer="$ilp.uphold.com/2gJj2MkgGJ64"></div>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
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szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

Thanks!