Grant for the Web aims to fund open monetisation projects

Mozilla, Coil, and Creative Commons have announced a partnership to provide grant funding for projects designed to provide 'open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in web monetisation.'

In its early, academic days, the Internet was very much not a place for monetisation. The birth of the World Wide Web and opening of the Internet to businesses and general public changed all that, and today's web is a battleground. On the one side are the content creators and businesses, who need revenue in order to keep creating said content; on the other are the end users who are tired of being tracked everywhere they go and bombarded with pop-up adverts, autoplay sponsor videos, and other obnoxious forms of advertising.

The Grant for the Web project aims to change that. Founded by Firefox browser maker Mozilla, web monetisation specialist Coil, and permissive licensing specialist Creative Commons, the Grant for the Web offers $100 million in funding to projects which will develop 'open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in web monetisation.'

'The web’s richness and diversity comes from its individual creators: writers, coders, musicians, podcasters, app makers, journalists,' says Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman. 'But in the current web ecosystem, big platforms and invasive, targeted advertising make the rules and the profit. Consumers lose out, too — they unwittingly relinquish reams of personal data when browsing content. That’s the whole idea behind "surveillance capitalism." Our goal in joining Grant for the Web, is to support a new vision of the future. One where creators and consumers can thrive.'

'At Creative Commons, we’re very interested in identifying new ways of rewarding open creativity and enabling people to show their gratitude to creators who share their work openly with the world,' adds Creative Commons' interim chief executive Cable Green. 'We're especially excited by the Grant for the Web’s commitment to putting at least 50% of its funding towards projects that are made up of openly-licensed content and software. Creators have told us through our own user research that gratitude is a core element of why they choose to share their work, and micropayments may be an excellent way to offer that gratitude.'

'When I was starting out as a developer, the openness of the Web gave me incredible opportunities to learn and grow. It's so easy to create on the Web, but when it comes to earning money, people are mostly stuck with app stores or large content platforms,' adds Stefan Thomas, whose company Coil has developed an application programming interface (API) for real-time micropayment streaming. 'With this grant, we hope to tip the scales in favour of an open, native way for creators to be compensated for their contributions to the Web community.'

Grant applications aren't yet open to the public, however, with the Grant for the Web indicating that the first formal call for proposals will go out in early 2020. More information is available on the official website.