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Currently, there are four predominant ways to fund websites and content creators:

1. Advertisement
2. Paywalls
3. Merchendise
4. Donations

I use merchendise as I believe that it's the most economically sustainable option from that list, and I don't have enough brand recognition to justify asking for donations (the website needs to be revamped and I need to start writing more if I want that).

So that's a pretty short list though. Ads are intrusive and privacy violating, paywalls turn many viewers away from quality content, merchendise requires a double edged tactic of producing content as well as merch, and donations are hit or miss.

Wouldn't it be nice to have the fidelity of payment to the creator as advertisements, but be as unobtrusive as a donation button?

Let's think about a user visiting a website. There's a client (the human on their computer or phone), and the server (a machine giving the client the website). The connection between the client and server can be thought of as a transaction. For advertisements, for example, the server brings the content the client wants, and the client brings the ad space and eyeballs (and insane amounts of user data) the server wants. With that line of thinking, and the wish to transition the web off the addiction of advertisements (due to them breeding bad habits of insane data collection and privacy invasion), what else can the client bring to the table other than ad space and user information? How about processing power and storage? Great, so if the client can bring processing power and storage, we've essentially made a high latency super computer. A consentual and legal botnet.

So now a few more things. How can the server directly benefit from this processing power and storage? And how can the client not be impeded by it?

My idea of the structure is as follows: there are now 3 entities in the interaction, the client, the server, and the monetiser. The client loads the webpage with a script from the server, the client runs the script which phones to the monetiser telling it that it's available to process things. The monetiser uses that node until it stops running the script/leaves the website. The monetiser should be able to generate value from having significant processing power either by processing valuable data, such as training machine learning models or simulating stock markets. The revenue generated by the monetiser should then be returned to the server proportional to a) how much the server paid the monetiser to begin with, and b) proportional to how many clients/nodes the server supplied the monetiser with.

Maybe that will never work, but hey, it's a thought, and I'm going to try implementing a prototype on this website within the next couple years, then if it works well, I'd like to expand on it.