Best Demo Paper Award At ICWE 2022 conference

Best Demo Paper Award at ICWE 2022 (large view)

Best Demo Paper Award at ICWE 2022

(12-07-2022) "Solid Web Monetization" received "Best Demo Paper Award" At ICWE 2022 conference

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).