Monetization events

Web Monetization API

One responsibility of the Web Monetization agent is to instrument payments. The agent does this by calling the Open Payments APIs, which are APIs implemented by wallet providers.

The agent makes calls to the /incoming-payments endpoint at your wallet provider and to the /outgoing-payments endpoint at your site visitor’s wallet provider.

Each time the agent receives a 201 outgoing payment created response from the site visitor’s wallet provider, the agent fires a monetization event on the browser window.

Specifications

Specification
Web Monetization #events

Event listeners

When a monetization event fires, there’s no guarantee that payments will follow or, if they do, how often or how large the payments will be.

A monetization event indicates that the site visitor’s wallet provider has created the resources needed for it to send a payment.

By adding an event listener to the relevant monetization <link> element (or one of its ancestors), you can use the monetization event properties to verify payments. These properties provide:

• Information about the amount and currency of a sent (not received) payment
• A URL representing an incoming payment that can be used to determine the amount received, similar to a receipt
• The URL representing the payment pointer or wallet address that an incoming payment request was sent to

High-level flow

1. You add an event listener to a monetization <link>.
2. The site visitor accesses your page.
3. The site visitor’s Web Monetization agent calls the Open Payments APIs to begin setting up the payment. More information about these API calls is provided in the How payments work page.
4. The Web Monetization agent receives a 201 (outgoing payment created) response from the site visitor’s wallet provider.
5. The Web Monetization agent fires a monetization event.
6. Your event listener calls its defined function.

Event properties

amountSent

The amountSent property returns the value and currency of the sent payment.

• value - The amount. A valid decimal monetary value containing the amount that was sent.
• currency - The currency code. A well-formed 3-letter ISO4217 code that represents the currency that was sent, such as USD or GBP.

Example

"value": "1.23"
"currency": "USD"

Received amount

The amountSent is not necessarily the amount received. For example, if your payment account is set up to receive GBP, but your site visitor’s account sends in USD, then exchange rates and currency conversion fees could affect the amount you receive.

Example using amountSent

<link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example.com/alice">
<script>
  const link = document.querySelector('link[rel="monetization"]')
  link.addEventListener('monetization', (event) => {
    const {
      amountSent: { value, currency },
    } = event
    console.log(`Browser sent ${currency} ${value}.`)
  })
</script>

// #### amountSent browser compatibility

	desktop						mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	WebView Android	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on iOS	Samsung Internet	Puma Browser
amountSent	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Full Support

No Support

You'll need to use a Web Monetization Extension

Specifications

Specification
Web Monetization #amountsent-attribute

incomingPayment

Experimental

incomingPayment is an experimental technology.

The incomingPayment property allows you to check whether a payment was received and, if so, the amount received.

The property returns a URL that represents the incoming payment at your wallet provider. By querying the URL, you can get the receivedAmount.

Example using incomingPayment

This example shows a hypothetical verification method that makes a basic request to the incomingPayment URL and returns the results. For simplicity, it has no logic for authenticating the request.

Authentication

In many cases, requests to the incomingPayment URL must be authenticated because you’re fetching sensitive details. The payment account owner should request these specifics from their wallet provider.

/** @type {MonetizationEvent} event */
async function verifyPayment(event) {
  // Legacy receivers don't support returning incoming payment URLs
  if (!event.incomingPayment) {
    throw new Error('No incoming payment URL')
  }

  const response = await fetch(event.incomingPayment, {
    method: 'GET',
    credentials: 'same-origin',
    mode: 'same-origin',
    cache: 'no-cache',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    },
  })

  if (response.ok) {
    const { receivedAmount } = JSON.parse(response.json())
    const { amount, assetCode, assetScale } = receivedAmount
    console.log(`Received ${assetCode}${amount / Math.pow(10, assetScale)}.`)
  }
}

// #### incomingPayment browser compatibility

	desktop						mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	WebView Android	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on iOS	Samsung Internet	Puma Browser
incomingPayment	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Full Support

No Support

You'll need to use a Web Monetization Extension

Specifications

Specification
Web Monetization #incomingpayment-attribute

paymentPointer

The paymentPointer property returns the URL that represents the payment pointer or wallet address that the payment was sent to. In most cases, the value will be the same as the href URL in the monetization <link>.

Property name

Earlier versions of the Web Monetization specification only used Interledger’s Simple Payment Setup Protocol (SPSP), which calls for payment pointers. This is why the property was named paymentPointer.

As of v3, both payment pointers and Open Payments wallet addresses are returned by this property. GitHub issue 439 is opened to discuss changing the property name.

Example using paymentPointer

<link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example.com/alice">
<script>
  const link = document.querySelector("link[rel=‘monetization’]");
  link.addEventListener("monetization", (event) => {
  console.log(event.paymentPointer)})
</script>

// #### paymentPointer browser compatibility

	desktop						mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	WebView Android	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on iOS	Samsung Internet	Puma Browser
paymentPointer	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Full Support

No Support

You'll need to use a Web Monetization Extension

Specifications

Specification
Web Monetization #paymentpointer-attribute

Example use cases

amountSent

Program your website to show a thank you message to your site visitor when the amountSent returns a non-zero amount. In this use case, you’re only checking that an amount — any amount — was sent.

incomingPayment

Program your website to remove ads or provide access to exclusive content to your site visitor after receiving a specific amount.

In this use case, you’ll query the URL returned by incomingPayment to track the receivedAmount. If appropriate, you can ensure the amount is increasing after each monetization event to verify that a new payment was received.

paymentPointer

This section describes two use cases: one for vanity payment addresses and one for probabilistic revenue sharing.

Vanity payment address

Let’s say your payment pointer or wallet address is:

https://wallet.example.com/GK9D420BL42M

That’s hard to remember. Fortunately, your wallet provider offers vanity addresses which act as aliases. Your vanity address is:

https://wallet.example.com/bob

You add the vanity address as the href value in the monetization <link>. Then, you set up an event listener for paymentPointer. The value that’s returned will be:

https://wallet.example.com/GK9D420BL42M

Probabilistic revenue sharing

For this use case, let’s assume you are familiar with probabilistic revenue sharing, which is iteself an advanced use case.

When you use our Probabilistic Revshare Generator, you enter multiple payment pointers and/or wallet addresses and assign each one a weight. When finished, the generator creates a unique URL.

For example, after entering five wallet addresses and weights, the generator creates:

https://webmonetization.org/api/revshare/pay/W1siJGFsaWNlLndhbGxldC5jb20iLDUwLCIkYWxpY2"

You add the generated URL as the href value in the monetization <link>. Then, you set up an event listener for paymentPointer. The value that’s returned will be which one of the five wallet addresses that the payment was sent to.