How to Become a Web Monetized Creator
At present the steps involved in becoming a Web Monetized Creator include:
- signing up for a Creator’s Account on Coil,
- signing up for and creating a payment pointer with a Web Monetized Digital Wallet Provider, and then
- enabling Web Monetization on your various digital creations.
This tutorial will walk you through the first two steps in this process, and then in subsequent Units we will walk you through enabling Web Monetization on your various digital creations on different platforms of media.
Signing Up for a Creator’s Account on Coil
- Visit coil.com/creator.
- Click on the black ‘Start monetizing. It’s free!‘ button.
- Sign up for a free creator account.
- Follow the directions below to create a Payment Pointer.
- Add your Payment Pointer to your Payout Wallet, under Payouts in your Coil Settings.
Consider purchasing a Coil membership. If you are benefiting with earnings from Coil members visiting your site, it is nice to share the love by purchasing a Coil membership yourself and supporting other creators. As I write this, Coil memberships are $5 US / month.
Sign Up for a Web Monetized Digital Wallet and Create a Payment Pointer
In order to monetize your digital content with Coil, you need a Web Monetized digital wallet provider. Through that digital wallet, you set up a payment pointer. This is basically an ID for a payment account to send your earnings from Coil to. For more details on Payment Pointers, read this Payment Pointer Overview on Coil’s Support site.
Coil shares details on how to set up a payment pointer on GateHub and Uphold. You just need one of these digital wallets, not both, so take your pick. Here’s what you need to do …
Create a GateHub Payment Pointer
- Sign up for or into your GateHub account.
- Select your Interledger wallet by clicking on the wallet drop-down arrow in the upper-left to select it.
- Click Add Funds.
- Select the Interledger Payment pointer, then copy your payment pointer.
Best of all here, you can choose the currency that you wish to be paid in via your payment pointer.
Create an Uphold Payment Pointer
- Sign up for or into your Uphold account.
- Click on the transact button – in the side navigation bar on your desktop or bottom navigation button in the app.
- Under Anything to Anything, click on the From menu and scroll down and click on Interledger.
- On the To menu, scroll down to select your preferred currency and account.
- Copy the payment pointer and click Done.
As with GateHub, you can choose the currency that you wish to be paid in via your payment pointer.
Add Payment Pointer in Coil
- Go to your Settings.
- Select Payouts.
- Add your payment pointer.
You can do other things with your GateHub or UpHold Account too, including the trading of certain commodities and exchanging currencies.
That’s it, you are now ready to attach your payment pointer to your various digital creations to Web Monetize them. Look over the subsequent Units, as we get them built to discover how to Web Monetize websites, digital video, podcasts, digital games, events, and more; as well as to discover which social media platforms are Web Monetized.
How Much Can You Expect to Make from Web Monetization?
It’s important to understand that at present Web Monetization is not magic fix to all your financial needs as a Creator, rather my team and I think about Web Monetization as the source of royalties on our work, and as a way to keep the maintenance costs on our digital works sustainable.
How much you earn from Web Monetization depends on the number of digital assets that you have Web Monetized and whether those Web Monetized assets are being consumed / viewed by people who have Web Monetization subscriptions with Coil. Dependent on this, what you can expect in earning at present is a few US cents to dollars / day. Some of the Web Monetized community have shared their earnings in this post in the Web Monetization community: ‘How much money have you made through Web Monetization?‘ This may not seem like a lot, but in thinking of these earnings like royalties, we actually earn more from Web Monetized Royalties, than we do from royalty cheques on our professional videos on professional broadcast streaming sites and we receive these earning daily. Web Monetization also makes it easy to automatically split our Web Monetized earns between multiple creators.
Read on in the next lesson to immerse yourself in the Web Monetization ecosystem, see what others in the community are creating and building, discover sources of funding to help you build your Web Monetized projects, and find places to engage with the Web Monetization community around your Web Monetized digital content creations.