Coil Wants to Use Blockchain to Save the Publishing Industry

Andy Kirn
Andy Kirn
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read
- Coil recently launched their decentralized W3C Web Payments enabled app - https://coil.com/signup

A plan so crazy-simple it just might work — and Wikipedia is on board

In today’s internet the users who get the “free” experience on many popular sites are paying for it in a different currency than they would for a service like Netflix or Hulu. Their profiles are transformed into detailed digital logs of their online behavior, which are sold to anyone and everyone who might want the data, including foreign actors other mysterious companies and even governments.

In some cases users are served in-your-face ads which popup and annoy them, but the now ubiquitous adblock has put a dent in this practice (and publishers bottom lines) by stripping the sites of these intrusions in real time. Other sites hide behind paywalls, perhaps with a limited amount of free sample reads, AND the data mining AND the ads, for a nice soup of all the worst things on the internet in one place.

In one clever new scheme, sites install spyware that (ironically) mines cryptocurrencies to monetize their content, rendering the user’s computer sluggish at all times! Not an ideal trade off for most.

Yet in spite of all this intrusion and poor user experience, even the mammoth publishing houses of history are in financial danger, and independent writers and content producers are still struggling to meet the bottom line. Why? There is more quality online content than ever, but how can creators large and small fund this new stream of information sources without users having to sign up for 1,000 individual sites or subscriptions?

Enter Coil a new startup from Silicon Valley and blockchain veteran Stefan Thomas, formerly of Ripple and Interledger. Coil delivers a brand new way to “stream” micropayments to the content creator as their content is consumed, in amounts as small as fractions of a cent per second, for a simple $5 monthly subscription fee. As a creator its as simple as registering on Coil’s website and following the instructions, then pasting a block of code in the header of your website. You can start earning right away.

Since Coil pays the creator as the user consumes, for example as they watch a youtube video or read an article here on Medium, it simplifies the process of web monetization across the global internet into a one stop shop. Here independents and giant corps can all more simply monetize their content, and users can access the richness of internet publishing without being digitized into an intrusive digital commodity and sold to the highest bidder.

But why Blockchain?

In today’s legacy banking system, sending fractions of a cent or even a single dollar isn’t even practical for most users. Transfers can take hours or days to arrive, enormous fees are charged to each transaction, middle-men who facilitate the transfer always take a large chunk for themselves. It’s an antiquated and frankly disastrous system which has been holding online industries back since the Internet’s rise in the 90s, from the smallest youtube creator to the behemoth New York Times.

To solve this problem Coil leverages the open source Interledger Protocol (think Internet Protocol but for money) and the digital asset XRP to reduce transfer time to something like email, cut the fees to near zero, and to remove the need for a trusted middleman with his hand in the sometimes meager pot these creators need to survive.

Using this decentralized distributed ledger technology, suddenly new things are possible which have long been discussed but never implemented, because the middlemen had all the control. Today if you are a Coil member and you open Wikipedia, the website (which traditionally relies on philanthropy) starts earning micro slices of money while you browse for your info, an absolutely game-changing development for online resources who need funding to stay alive.

In the future, we can easily imagine a tiered system, where say $10 a month gets you certain newspapers and publications that the $5 plan doesn’t cover, and Coil would use that extra fee to pay the newspapers for their content in real time, even though its being consumed on a laptop or smartphone. Or perhaps a popular show charges their own custom fee structure, enabling creators to customize their monetization plan. The user will barely notice except for the unobtrusive ticker running up as they watch a clip or read an article.

Is Coil the “Amazon Prime for the whole internet” as Apple reportedly remarked after Thomas demoed their product for the legendary Silicon Valley company? The true impact of Coil’s technology remains to be seen, but as of this article’s writing Coil is already supported on sites like WordPress, Wix, and Youtube, and doubtless we’ll see many others on board when the new W3C Web Payments standards which Coil leverages become more familiar to developers across the spectrum (Google Chrome has already added the Payment Handler functionality).

Its not hard to imagine that one day Medium themselves will be Coil enabled, maybe one day sooner than we think. Could venerated institutions like the Wall Street Journal one day display Coil’s ticker as you read the daily feed? Is it possible publishing stands a chance after all? If Coil delivers on their promise we could be treated to a new golden age of online content production, from top to bottom.

For many Coil delivers hope, but luckily for us they also delivered a working product. If you want to support independent resources like Wikipedia head on over to https://coil.com/signup and get in on a preview of the next biggest thing.

Andy Kirn

Andy Kirn

Never swim alone

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