Ushahidi Implements Coil to Prototype Web Monetization

In January 2011, The World Economic Forum forecasted that personal data would be “the new oil”, emerging as an asset class that will touching “all aspects of society.” At the time Google’s market cap was half of ExxonMobiles and Facebook was yet to IPO. Today the market caps of Facebook and Google compared to ExxonMobile certainly show that this prediction came true.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way, and it’s not clear that this is even the most efficient or lucrative model (click through rates are less than 0.9% on Facebook ads, that leaves a lot of room for improvement).

Being a bunch of technologists at Ushahidi, we always like to test new stuff. That’s why when we heard about Coil, we decided we had to give it a test ride. Coil is a web monetization solution. There are no ads or advertisers involved: users pay websites micropayments while on their site. Suddenly attention has real value and real costs. Coil is a product that comes from the same brilliant minds that helped create Ripple and Interledger, and it’s one of the first to leverage Interledger for ultra-efficient, technology-, and currency-agnostic payments.

We were able to integrate Coil onto our website with less than ten lines of code. What that means is that if you are a Coil user, meaning you have 1) setup an account, 2) linked it to your credit card, and 3) are running the browser plugin, then when you visit Ushahidi.com you will start streaming us micropayments. For everyone else, nothing will change and you will notice no difference in your experience on Ushahidi.com.

So if you want to support web monetization, if think websites gathering your personal data is creepy, and you want to support Ushahidi – check out Coil and come visit our site.