Pause for a second and think. When you hear the phrase Content Creator, what comes to your mind? You’re thinking Instagram Influencer, Vlogger, Travel Photographer, and Blogger. Continue thinking: Developer or Engineer does not come to mind. But are Developers content creators? If they are, what kind of content do Developers create? How can a Developer get started? And how can they earn from the content they create? Let’s answer these questions in the following sections beginning with: Yes, Developers are content Creators.
Developer Content
Open Source contribution
Many developers contribute to open-source projects. Some have started their projects, and they continue to maintain and improve them. As part of the process, they create content like documentation, guides and even speak about their projects are conferences. All this open source content is freely available on the web, and most times, the Maintainers and Contributors do not get paid for their work. How can a Developer Monetize their open source contribution?
- Web Monetization: For documentation, articles, and even tutorial videos, a Developer can use an Interledger Payment pointer to directly receive micropayments from viewers that read their documentation and watch their tutorials. When they earn from content using Web Monetization, payments are instant, and there is no fee for set up or process. Learn more and get started at developers.coil.com. And Monetize your website or portfolio.
- Earn from your code: With Flossbank, built with Interledger, if your package is used at any point of a dependency tree, you can earn money from content and code. To get started, check out Flossbank.com and talk to companies that use your packages to support you via Flossbank because you get paid, and packages that you use also get paid.
Blog posts, Portfolio, and articles
It’s Saturday, and you open your laptop, sit at your desk and start writing about a shiny new technology you just built with. You write the outline and then complete the first draft without standing up. Then you look up. Three hours have passed. You review and rewrite until the article is perfect, but you realize you’ve just spent 5 hours writing a 2,000-word article. You smile and hit publish. And when you look at your post analytics, you see 2,000 reads. That’s satisfying but will earning some money from those reads not be more satisfying? Let me show you how.
- Add an Interledger Payment pointer: An Interledger payment pointer (ILP) is like an email address, but instead of receiving email packets (data), you receive money packets (micropayments) in your ILP. And all you need to do is to add the monetization meta tag (<metaname=”monetization”content=”$wallet.example.com/alice”>) to the head of your blog or update your profile on Dev.to, Hashnode or Hackernoon. Learn more here.
Tutorials and code samples
It’s very warm and bright outside, and you have just received your fancy new gears for your programming tutorials. You’ve been doing this for a few months now, and you’re very excited to see the feedback that viewers send to you. Today, you need to look sharp, so you get some facials done. You are super pumped to make a video about W3C standards. You look at the proposed Standard, and you find the proposed Web Monetization standard. Yes! I’ll talk about it, you say. Then you set up. You’ve already spent 4 hours just preparing and setting up your gear. Then shooting starts. After seven retakes, you have the perfect videos. Then it’s time to edit and post. 1 am on Monday, and your video is live! But then you started at 9 am on Sunday, so you’ve spent over 12 hours working on this one. But you shrug because you usually get 3-10k views per tutorial and your comment section is always on fire with great feedback. But then, how can you recover some of the cost of your equipment purchase? And how can you get some payment for your time? Here’s how.
- Post your videos to Cinnamon: With Cinnamon, you can directly and easily monetize your video tutorials. It also allows you to provide premium video content to users who are subscribed to Web Monetization and are streaming micropayments to you. Check it out.
- Monetize your Youtube channel: If you don’t want to move your channel or if you still want to maintain some content on Youtube in addition to having them on Cinamon, you can still monetize your Youtube channel. By adding an Interledger payment pointer, you receive Micropayments in real-time when a user watches your video. Get started here.
- Earn from your Twitch live streams: If you’re a streamer with a Twitch Partner or Affiliate account, your streams are automatically monetized. There’s no additional setup required! Learn more here.
Ok. That’s it! What are you waiting for? Get started at developers.coil.com.
Read more at uchibeke.com/blog.