Not sure if this is ironical. Either way, it is a donation as the MDN pages do not have a <meta name="monetization" ...> tag and the payment wouldn't go through OpenCollective which does not seem to support Web Monetization.
This was a straight donation. A thriving Web ecosystem of independent developers and creators building and hosting their own content is what gets us out of bed in the morning.
Credit to Ali Spivak who kicked this all off and helped us realise what a crucial role good platform documentation plays and how important it is to fund good knowledgeable writers.
Ok, I wasn't necessarily doubting the donation. I thought though that if they didn't donate but gave the money that their algorithm determined that it would be an interesting thing for several reasons:
1. would show coil is getting quite a bit of money.
Ah, yeah, I don't think that many people have the extension installed yet, but I can see them not requiring big sites to add a monetization header and just sending the money to them instead.
We're working to make the Web Monetization API a standard that browsers can adopt natively: https://webmonetization.org
The extension helps us bootstrap the ecosystem but a native integration is far superior. Check out Puma browser for an example of the integrated experience for mobile.