Google’s monopoly throne in online search and related advertising matters may have taken a serious blow, but that’s just one type of digital market and Google (of all entities) knows there are plenty of others out there. Have you ever heard of Patreon?
Now, Google is reportedly developing a new “Web Monetization” feature for its Chrome browser, and with it potentially comes a whole wave of changes to the way payments can be made online.
On the Internet, many websites that exist for commercial purposes can make money through advertisements and subscriptions. To us, many of these transactions at least have the appearance of being straightforward, sometimes without a processing fee. But facilitating these payment processes also costs a fortune due to intermediary services and additional costs that can arise during the digital payment process. This is why there are often surprising situations where fees end up representing a large portion of the money exchanged.
Don't panic: this is Google's proposal
This isn't Google's only major effort to offer (and in its heart of hearts, replace) a part of the browser status quo with its own Google-led alternative. In a new support document posted on the Google Chrome Platform Status site, Google explains that web monetization is a new technology that will allow website owners to “receive micropayments from users as they interact with their content.”
Google says its intentions are noble, writing that web monetization is designed to be a new way for webmasters and publishers to generate revenue directly that doesn’t rely on ads or subscriptions.
Google explains that with Web Monetization, users would pay for content as they consume it. A new HTML link element has also been added for websites to add to their URL to tell the Chrome browser that the website supports Web Monetization.
If this is set up correctly in the website URL, in the case of websites that make it easy for users to set up digital wallets, when a person visits that website, a new monetization session (for that person) would be created on the site. Right off the bat, I’m skeptical about the possibility of monetizing people’s attention even further than it already is, but Google assures us that visitors will have control over the entire process, such as choosing which sites they want to reward in this way and how much money they want to spend.
Furthermore, Ghacks explains that this requires websites to have a mechanism that can add funds to a digital wallet and a mechanism that can manage the sites each person chooses to financially support. Chrome Web Monetization will then take care of the rest, but if you want to dig into the details, you can check out the technical documentation.
A new way to empty your wallet online?
Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself with my immediate skepticism of this plan, as Ghacks also notes that this could be a more direct way to make micropayments by eliminating the middle points that generate additional fees. This benefit would only be multiplied if you use it for multiple payments, as it removes the requirement for users to pay fees every time they make a payment.
The need for payment service providers will continue to exist, but it seems that the overall costs of doing business online could decline with web monetization. Of course, whether companies selling goods and services decide to pass the savings on to users is another question entirely.
There's also the fact that we're still learning what it's going to look like, and there are a lot of uncertainties about it. If regulators find any issues, it could go the same way as Google's Privacy Sandbox (or suffer an even worse fate), and even after that Google could lose faith in it for some unrelated reason (remember Google Plus?).
