I started off with a brief history of monetisation and then bored myself half way through and decided to make this straight to the point!

Yes you can.. but you have to work for it!

If you are not familiar with what Coil is then there are more in depth articles covering this, here’s a great one from PatriciaC but in a nutshell:

You pay a $5.00 monthly membership fee to join the club and then gain access to exclusive content on Coil Blogs. Now this membership does give you access to other monetised content, for example the video streaming service Cinnamon, but for this article we are focusing on Coil.

So you pay to be part of the club?.. ok… where’s the money making part?

There are two ways you can make money on the Coil platform:

1 . Subscriber views

2 . Coil Boost Pilot

Subscriber Views

When another Coil member reads your blog you are paid in the cryptocurrency XRP per duration that the person spends on that page. I must add due to the nature of XRP this happens instantaneously. The trickle of XRP hits your crypto wallet like Michael Jordan's tears.

Now before you get too excited you have to remember that Coil is in it's beta phase. Its still in it’s infancy which means the number of subscribers available to view your content is limited. The Coil platform does try to make content discoverable through Exploration filters such as New, Top and Trending and the Coil team regularly push notable articles to the pride of place “Featured” section giving an article more chances of being read by Coil users.

Outside of the coil ecosystem users also share their blogs on social media. Now if you create a literal work of genius and it is worthy of millions of views the monetisation only occurs when a Coil member reads it. So if only one of those million views is a Coil subscriber then in regards to monetisation you got one view, and you are paid for the duration that that person spends reading your article.

I liken it to fishing. Social media users are like a huge shoal of fish in the internet sea and you are trying to cast out a net in the hopes of catching a few Coil fish. Coil has a fantastic community on Twitter where other Coil subscribers help promote each other’s work, helping you cast out your net in the right places, but on a good day with a good haul of subscriber views you are going to be making pennies.

Now you can make a good case that pennies are better than nothing. This is very much true. We all have posts online and unless you were commissioned to write it or have been approached to endorse a product then the most payment that you ever received were a few likes on Facebook.

But in regards to an actual meaningful income you will be lucky if you will make back the $5 monthly membership fee on subscriber views alone.

Here is where the Coil Boost Pilot comes into play.

Coil Boost Pilot

The Coil concept is fantastic for creators on the internet. It moves monetisation away from the “shake your arse” on instagram for likes and followers to get an endorsement deal, to letting the content shine and financially rewarding it. If your content is good then people will spend more time viewing it leading to the creator getting paid more. That’s the way it should be. If the content is bad then readers will move on to the next thing, so it drives the overall quality of content on the internet up.

That’s Coil’s big picture.

Right now in these early stages we are far from this ideal. But you have to start somewhere. To help incentivise Coil subscribers to keep going and put up with the pennies until this ideal is achieved they offer monthly boost rewards to candidates they believe are contributing towards this goal.

I received my first boost at the end of June. Now it’s not enough to be able to live off for a month but it’s certainly enough to support my creativity. I can use it to buy new equipment or materials to help create more work and ultimately give back better content to the Coil platform. In producing better Coil content then I have the possibility of being rewarded with a bigger boost and so the circular iterations of driving up the quality of content begins, step by step. With more and more Coil members receiving this boost the quality of content will increase even more, and will start to attract and onboard more users to the platform, slowly revealing the big picture.

In regards to answering the original question.

Again.. Yes you can.. but you have to work for it!

I started really posting on Coil in April and in two months I have written more than I think I have ever written online. The only time I can write and create is when my son is asleep and the bulk of it on the weekends, so I can proudly say I have given my fair share of skin towards it. Before the boost sometimes it was hard to see the light, feeling as though the effort and the small return in monetised subscriber views wasn’t worth the sleepless nights. I have had my moments of disillusionment. But that comes with anything you try and do for the first time, whether its trying to play the guitar or learn a new language. Stick with it and reap the rewards.

I hope those learning about Coil will give it a go and come and join a fantastic community, and I hope those already writing for Coil who are having second thoughts about whether its worth it will hold on a little longer for that boost.