Readability's new service

When you think long enough about this whole idea of supporting web content, there are some major requires that arise:

• Support should be direct (whereas ads are indirect)

• People publish all over the Internet, most people don’t own a domain, they have (hosted) Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub accounts where they publish content, this content _has_ to be supportable.

• You can’t effectively charge someone fees for their acts of voluntary support.

• Voluntary, is voluntary, is no subscription, and is the right to choose!

• Easy to use, low barrier to give, no pulling out the credit card for 25¢.

• Support something while browsing the web and on that web page.

• The mechanism/service you use to support content online can’t be the only winner, consumers and publishers have to be the outright winners!

• The service used _must_ be trustworthy and transparent.

• The service _has_ to work with the Internet, which means it has to work when only given URLs of web pages to support.

So! We actually did this, and built TipTheWeb http://tiptheweb.org/ with all these ideas in mind!

A non-profit that gives 100% of the money tipped by people to the web publisher of the content, non of that fee or cuts crap, 100%. You can support something with TipTheWeb by just giving us a URL to what you want to support and an amount, that's it; no publisher integration required.

We want to provide a positive feedback loop for the web, give publishers a way to know what their followers actually like, give readers/consumers a way to directly support what they truly love online and choose how much they want to give (5¢ — $100 per Tip). We want to encourage publishers to keep it up! Keep their content freely-accessible to everyone The Internet is valuable. Good publishing is hard. Selling content doesn’t work. Advertising is not sufficient. Community-supported web publishing can work!

Apparently, they've retired the old one.

Here's a link to the new free bookmarklet: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/

I am different. I use readability bookmarklet almost everywhere, in order to read in the unified clean design, but with the two exception: I read some blogs in Google reader, and I send some articles to Instapaper and read them in my phone. But I almost always get rid of the original webpage design, even if it is easily readable. I just got used to the "pure text with the same font" approach.

There's no need to embed any code on anyone's site. The whole point is that Readability automatically detects the main body content from a page and extracts it.

As a publisher, if your main body content isn't being detected automatically, probably because your HTML is awful, you can add some classes to the key elements to fix that. But that's not necessary.

There's also no need to register as a publisher to receive contributions. From their FAQ:

"Readability keeps track of pages visited even before a publisher registers with us to view their statistics. If your site has garnered traffic to Readability, we’re already earmarking money for you."

https://www.readability.com/faq/#view-plainGuidelines

However, you will need to register to actually get the funds.

We hope to always error on the side that will benefit the user in these cases.

Telling web publishers they have tips waiting for them is tricky business, i.e. Don't want to be spammy. We hope to develop some interesting ways to notify people that they have tips; but tippers have been filling this void by mentionig on services like Twitter that they've tipped someone for something.

For now, if a tip goes unclaimed by the publisher for 6 months, it's automatically canceled, and the money is returned to the tipper for them to use to tip something else.

We don't currently have a way for someone to block or decline tips for a particular website, but we've talked about adding this type of feature; someone could claim their site, then say they don't accept tips there.

Bottom line, we don't have any intentions of keeping people's money that goes unclaimed, we rather return it so they could fund other tips with it. People can also help support our operations by tipping us, TipTheWeb; eating our own dog food.