The conversion of something into money.
This can happen on a couple different layers:
- This could be tied to liquidity by taking an asset and turning it into cash by either selling it or using it as collateral for a loan.
- On a national economic scale, this is taking debt and turning it into currency via the selling of bonds.
- It can apply to companies turning data into money.
- Corporations often monetize their receivables by factoring them.
One of the aspirations of Web 3.0 is giving people the ability to monetize their content. This is where content creators are able to receive compensation for their talents, efforts, and time. At present, the existing internet structure, Web 2.0, all monetarization is done at the application level. This is leads to the situation where the users are actually the product since their data ends up being sold to advertisers.