Our work on Solid Web Monetization received the "Best Demo Paper Award" at the ICWE 2022 conference last week. In this paper, we show a prototype and propose a new web standard for monetizing web content like news articles or images without using privacy-infringing ads.

The most common way to monetize content on the web is by using advertisements. These are often very problematic from a privacy perspective. Traditionally, your private data is sold to advertisers so they can target you more effectively. In this paper, we show a prototype of web content which is monetized without ads. Instead, each user pays a small amount of money to see the content.

Although similar systems already exist, they require the user to install a third party plugin/extension in their browser. Our solution works without any plugins, making it possible to reach a much wider audience. Existing solutions are also not standardized. As a result, only few content providers use these systems. To solve this issue, we created a draft for a web standard, with the goal of ensuring broader compatibility and more adoption.

This research was partially funded by Grant for the Web, a fund to boost open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in Web Monetization.

Ruben Taelman is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) (1274521N).