I came across the Web Monetization standard a couple months ago when I was looking for alternative ways to fund my website [0], but I couldn't find a lot of information on actual implementations, so I decided to add it myself as an experiment.

It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented.

You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer).

Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com

Nice to see that there are efforts but until they can roll it out as a core feature with prompts/nudges it's not going to cut it and I'm not entirely sure they have the market/mind share to pull it off these days. Pateron came out in 2013 and has strong community/network effects now, YouTube Red/Spotify also address much the same problem. The current state of affairs is like their idiotic mobile 6 full years after the iPhone came out and at a time when Android/iOS had already won and Microsoft efforts already imploded.

If they rolled out a payment option for third-party sites as a core feature with prompts and nudges, do you really think the reception would be positive? I expect the comment threads would be full of people telling Firefox to work on being the best browser they can, and not getting in people's way with a payment system that "nobody asked for".

I think that would depend a lot on how it's done. If it were simply a mediator/platform that could be opted-into by the serving site kind of like a pateron ad/button I think that could go a long way. The value-add of pateron being in intermediating the transaction and collecting/collating my top interests in a privacy conscious way.

Interesting, seems to be Mozilla's version of Flattr ?