About
Copen exists because the web’s oldest bargain quietly stopped working, and nobody replaced it.
The bargain that broke
For thirty years the deal was: publish something useful, people arrive, and you make money from their attention through ads, subscriptions or goodwill. It was never elegant, but both sides understood it.
Agents don’t arrive. They read, extract the part that matters, and hand it to someone who never sees your site. The value still moves. The visit doesn’t. And the publisher is left with two bad options: block the crawlers and lose the citations and search traffic they still want, or put up a paywall and lose readers.
What we think should happen instead
Stay open, and be payable. A site should be able to say what it accepts in a way software can read and act on, and an agent should be able to pay without a human in the loop. That is a plumbing problem, not a policy problem, and plumbing is buildable.
We also think payment is the smaller half. The agents reading you all day are the ones that notice your stale step 4, and the ones with questions your pages nearly answer. A channel that only carries money wastes the more interesting traffic.
Why the protocol is separate
The Open Funding Protocol lives in its own repository under an MIT licence, with its own schemas and conformance fixtures. Copen is one registry that implements it. That is deliberate, and it costs us something: the tag a publisher installs is named after the protocol, not after us, so anyone can build a competing registry and publishers can leave without re-tagging.
We think a convention nobody owns has a better chance of becoming a convention. If someone else runs it better, the protocol survives us, and that is the right outcome.
How we make money
A site’s first 1,000 contributions are free. After that we keep 3%. Instant payouts cost 1.5% for publishers who don’t want to wait for the weekly sweep. That’s all of it: no listing fees, no placement, no plan tiers, nothing paid for a better position. We only make money when a publisher is paid, which keeps us pointed the same way they are.
We don’t sell data. What an agent read is between the agent and the publisher; we see the payment, not the content.
Where we are
Early, and honest about it. Most agents crawling the web today will ignore the tag, because their operators haven’t wired up payment yet. What the tag does is make a publisher findable the first time one does. That’s a bet, it costs a paste to take, and we’d rather say so than pretend the network already exists.