Coil

Pioneering but niche player in web monetization; failed to achieve mainstream adoption before shutting down in 2023

Coil was founded in 2018 by Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple, with the ambitious goal of reimagining how content creators monetize their work on the internet. The platform was built around the Web Monetization standard and the Interledger Protocol (ILP), enabling a streaming micropayment model where subscribers paid a flat monthly fee and that payment was distributed in real-time to any website or creator they visited that had Web Monetization enabled. This represented a fundamentally different approach to online revenue — one that sought to replace intrusive advertising with a privacy-respecting, user-funded alternative. Coil raised $4 million in seed funding and attracted attention as a novel experiment in the creator economy and open web standards space. The company partnered with organizations like the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, and collaborated with Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund co-established with Ripple and Creative Commons to promote web monetization. Coil's membership was priced at $5 per month, and the platform gained a small but dedicated community of creators and developers who integrated the Web Monetization API into their sites. Despite its innovative vision and backing, Coil struggled to achieve mainstream adoption. The model required buy-in from both consumers (to subscribe) and creators (to implement the technology), creating a classic two-sided network challenge. In 2023, Coil announced it was shutting down its consumer product and winding down operations, citing the difficulty of scaling the model. The company's legacy lives on through the Web Monetization standard, which continues to be developed by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG), and through the broader conversation it sparked about advertising-free, user-funded content monetization.