Creating a healthier internet with Tipjar (Patreon)

The web as we know it today relies primarily on advertising. While ads to provide a (mostly) steady stream of income for countless websites and content creators, web ads often rely on one or more corporate entities collecting data about your behavior, so ads can be more specific to you (which generates more clicks, which pays websites more). Even beyond privacy implications, many choose to block ads simply because they are annoying.

Some sites and content creators have ways for their audience to support them through direct contributions, such as donations, merchandise, Patreon subscriptions, and so on, but these methods often aren’t as visible as advertisements. This is where Tipjar comes in.

Tipjar is a new browser extension from me that makes it easy to give money directly to your favorite sites and creators. When the site you have open accepts direct contributions, you’ll see a green money icon in your browser’s toolbar. All you have to do is click it, and you’ll be sent to the appropriate page. Tipjar doesn’t take a cut of payments or require that sites set up complicated accounts to receive money - it’s not a payment processor, only a tool for discovering the support methods the site already has.

Tipjar looks for an HTML meta tag in the page’s header that links to a donation/support page. If one isn’t found, the extension will check its internal list of sites for an available option. Tipjar can also detect a variety of other payment options (cryptocurrency, Scroll, etc.), and will display buttons for them if available.

The end goal for Tipjar is to integrate its behavior into web browsers, so that the extension itself ultimately becomes unnecessary. I’m already working with websites to integrate the meta tag, which in turn could encourage browser vendors like Mozilla and Microsoft to add the Tipjar button to their own browsers. If you have a website or blog, see this page for instructions on how to add Tipjar support.

Tipjar is an experiment, but it’s one that could reduce the web’s dependence on online advertising if successful, and I think that’s a goal worth pursuing.

Download for Chrome 

Download for Firefox