Flattr - I want to give you my money

http://www.conceitedcode.com/2011/04/i-want-to-give-you-my-money/

by ConceitedCode • 15 years ago

69 58 15 years ago

StavrosK3• 15 years ago

I will second this, I have a flattr account and will rather certainly flattr your site if I like it.

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

Flattr is "failing" (failing as in, failing to gain substantial traction) because of lack of users. Notch (of Minecraft fame) used Flattr for a long time on his blog and he removed it because he made so very little off it, even though he has a very high traffic blog.

They shot themselves in the foot when they launched the service: a "private beta". It was the most ridiculous idea ever, here is a service that NEEDS every user they can get vaguely interested to sign up and use it, and then when they have users interested (the initial launch "buzz") they say "nope sorry, it's a private beta, we'll send you an invite some time".

I used Flattr for a while and so little sites used it I just ended my subscription. I was lucky to get an invite too... they should have been trying to take everyone who WANTED to use the service, instead they pushed them away.

StavrosK3• 15 years ago

In their defense, artificial scarcity can drive buzz for the product a lot, if done well. Also, a service that's not yet done can't afford to launch to the public, especially when there's money involved.

Rather than think about launching in beta vs launching publicly, think about launching in beta vs launching much later. Which is the better choice?

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

In the case of Flattr? The latter would have been much more beneficial for them. I wanted to sign up to give them my money, to improve the value of their service (the value for content providers is the amount of users) and I had to "apply" and wait for it. Everything about that is wrong for Flattr.

robryan• 15 years ago

I think they fit more into the Google Wave category than say the gmail. With gmail everyone could instantly gain value from having an account, with wave, people fired it up, had a quick look around and noticing none of their friends were there to talk to forgot about it.

fleaflicker• 15 years ago

Could reddit pull this off? Their "reddit this" buttons are already everywhere.

tesseract• 15 years ago

Hmm, that sounds like it might have some potential. I'm envisioning a setup where the first upvote is free, but you can get a second one by spending a quarter (or whatever amount of money) that gets shared with the site owner.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Or Facebook. Their "Like" buttons are everything and I'm sure Facebook would love to collect money from users, not just advertisers.

watchandwait• 15 years ago

People forget that PayPal got started by literally giving money away -- $10 -- to get people to sign up.

limmeau2• 15 years ago

Perhaps that's a regional thing? A subjective majority of the German blogs I read regularly have a flattr button.

pedrocr• 15 years ago

Flattr could create a bookmarklet to flattr any webpage. Then if enough people have done so for a given domain they can contact the owner saying "Hey, you have 5$ to collect at flattr, why not sign-up?". This is basically what paypal does, allowing you to send money to anyone with an e-mail address even if they're not yet registered.

3pt141592• 15 years ago

I went back and forth with someone at flattr like 8 times saying this. At the end of the day that person just broke down and told me that it was a deeply political issue and the sides were divided on it.

Sigh.

3pt141592• 15 years ago

Oh and I should say that I was coming up with solutions left right and center for the "problems" associated with it. Each of the problems was more like a starting point to a great solution than a fundamental problem. (Eg. "what if 1m sites have less than 2 cents even after months?" "Auto lottery that shit" or "what if we can't contact the person?" "Same solution to someone signing up for flattr and getting hit by a bus. You can never rely on getting in touch with a person set reasonable limits and state them publically" etc, etc, etc)

carrotsalad3• 15 years ago

TipTheWeb ( http://tiptheweb.org/ ) lets you tip almost anything, as long as it is free to access. When a publisher claims their site, they'll find the tips waiting for them. (If tips go unclaimed for a really long time, they get returned to the tipper's account).

maccman• 15 years ago

ha, I had just emailed them with this idea - great minds think alike ;)

a5seo• 15 years ago

exactly. or going another step... i'll set aside some $ amt to give each money, then I want to point flattr to my instapaper feed and have them figure out each site's split of my monthly largess.

I would not sign up as the service stands now because the whole thing requires too much daily thought from me.

limmeau2• 15 years ago

Isn't that how the new Readability was supposed to operate?

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

I think that the Contenture/Readability model is probably the most likely to succeed. I'm biased, of course, having dreamt up the same basic model circa 2008.

When I learned about Kachingle (similar model with an opt-in step), I pretty much threw a wobbly and gave up on the idea. But I've taken from Facebook the idea that first to market doesn't always win, even if they have what seems like insurmountable network value. The race is not always to the swift ...

In any case, I've turned some of my design work into the basis of an honours project, so if all else fails I'll have an upgraded degree and something cool to talk about in interviews.

rudasn2• 15 years ago

That's cool. My thesis was on a project very similar to flattr - voluntary payments (not donations). This was in 2006/07, a few months before flattr opened for beta users, and was really existed to see it happen.

It didn't come up during an interview though :|

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

> voluntary payments (not donations)

What's the difference?

> It didn't come up during an interview though :|

They keep warning me this will be the case. Lies. Lies and slander!

donofrip• 15 years ago

I don't completely think that this is an execution issue. Do we really think there is a large market out there for "flattr-ing" blogs and other sites?

I don't know how many people would pay for/donate to something they're getting for free.

Something about not buying a cow when you're getting milk for free comes to mind...

cabalamat3• 15 years ago

Flattr would work better if it did more stuff. For example, if there was an API allowing any Flattr user to pay an amount into any other Flattr user's account. This would probably involve issues with banking regulations, however.

cabalamat3• 15 years ago

Can someone explain why this was downvoted? It seems a reasonable comment to me.

carrotsalad3• 15 years ago

Well, I wouldn't call it a "market", exactly. But people spend money on plenty of things they don't need to. And if no one supports all the great stuff people work on and put up for free on the Web, then we'll just get more and more obnoxious advertisements and more crazy schemes from big businesses.

At TipTheWeb (see my comments above), we think that by supporting the publishers of the stuff you like online, you're helping to make the Web a place that's more valuable to you. We all want more of the good stuff and less of the crap. If you tip a blog post that you like 10 cents, then not only does the publisher of that blog make a little money, but they also get some information about which of the stuff they write is valuable to their readers. This is a feedback loop that's missing from advertisement-driven publishing, where they get the ad impression regardless of whether you like the content.

Devilboy• 15 years ago

It's a donation system. Lots of people want to donate.

ugh2• 15 years ago

Flattr is not rare on German sites and those who use it seem to be doing reasonably well if they are fairly well known.

Tim Pritlove, for example, (a podcaster) is making close to 2.000€ per month (chart and German blogpost: http://tim.geekheim.de/2011/04/14/ein-jahr-flattr/).

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

The european/american thousands separator always manages to confuse me for a second: "Two Euros a month? Who gives a crap?"

romland• 15 years ago

I hear a lot of people saying that. Interesting, however, is that I, as European, don't even think twice about it[1]. My brain must be wired to look at the context primarily.

Why that is, I can only take a stab at: I guess we see a lot more from you guys on the other side of the pond than you see from us. :)

[1] Comma overload -- my English teacher would kill me.

ugh2• 15 years ago

Oops. I normally try to use the correct separator. I don't know why I didn't this time. Strange how the brain works sometimes, I remember typing a comma, deleting it and thinking "No, I have to use the other separator on HN."

markkat3• 15 years ago

HN could allow us to put a flattr link in our submissions. I've done it for my site, crickets so far...

There is a similar service for Bitcoin that I am thinking about adding. That might be more interesting.

Tiomaidh• 15 years ago

To flattr the OP or HN? If it's the first one, that could be deeply controversial (see also: the squawk on Metafilter about the same thing).

markkat3• 15 years ago

I do it for the submitter on my site. I understand why some might think it is controversial, however. Actually, it might be best to keep it to comments only. -That's user created content. I'm going to consider that for my site. Thanks.

sgornick• 15 years ago

Are you referring to http://Witcoin.com which is like a HN where every time you upvote or reply, the poster gets commission?

Or are you referring to YouTipIt.org which is fairly close to a Flattr except for using bitcoins instead?

eferraiuolo3• 15 years ago

TipTheWeb handles this chicken-egg problem: http://tiptheweb.org/

Tips identify content just by URL de-coupling content attribution from the authors claiming their tips. This also us to work for tipping content on YouTube, Flickr, and GitHub, etc. without requiring the site to be directly integrated with TipTheWeb.

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

> This also us to work for tipping content on YouTube, Flickr, and GitHub, etc. without requiring the site to be directly integrated with TipTheWeb.

What happens if I tip someone whose video, photo, or code gets taken down?

eferraiuolo3• 15 years ago

Content attribution happens at the time the Tip is made, so it will be there even if the content is taken down after a user makes a Tip for it.

Andrex• 15 years ago

Thanks for this. I tried Flattr but it seemed A) too barren and B) too Euro-centric for me. TTW seems like an awesome service, I've already made $4. =)

rick888• 15 years ago

I will use Flattr when there are no service fees. After all, the developers/owners, who also just happen to run the pirate bay, feel that everything should be free and "shared, just like when we were children".

Why do they need to charge 10% service fees if they want a "free" society?

eferraiuolo3• 15 years ago

Yeah. That's why we went with no fees at all for TipTheWeb.org!

Lost_BiomedE• 15 years ago

It seems like they should just allow you to flattr flattr. They believe in their model, right?

soult• 15 years ago

Here are two big reasons why not everyone has a Flattr button on ther website yet:

- To put the button on your website you have to also be a paying Flattr user (pay a minimum of €2/month).

- You are forced to pay a hefty 10% cut of everything you earn to Flattr. Also, you further have to pay all PayPal fees (those are not included in the 10% Flattr cut). And possibly taxes depending on where you live.

carrotsalad3• 15 years ago

TipTheWeb ( http://tiptheweb.org/ ) is a new (non-profit!) service that just came out of private beta a few months ago- it has no fees for tippers or publishers, and passes 100% of claimed tips to web publishers via monthly awards. And TipTheWeb doesn’t require a subscription or any kind of ongoing commitment. Both flattr and Readability take big cuts of the money before it gets to publishers. In addition to working with popular publishing platforms and independent websites, TipTheWeb allows multi-contributor sites, like multi-author blogs, to add simple metadata to their pages so that tips can go directly to the authors of the content being tipped.

usaar333• 15 years ago

I love how immediately following:

"It is an incredibly simple process and there is no downside."

is:

"The minimum amount of money needed to continue use of Flattr is €2 (about $3) each month"

zachbeane3• 15 years ago

Another fun feature, from the FAQ:

    Can I disable/inactivate my account?
    - No. As long as there's money in your means 
    account, these will be used each month. When they 
    run out your account will be deactived until 
    you add more funds.

I signed up thinking Flattr was a way for people to pay me who hate paypal. It turns out it's not anything like that, at all. But there's no way to immediately get off Flattr and close my account, and each month they've been emailing me garbage I don't want.

cabalamat3• 15 years ago

> I signed up thinking Flattr was a way for people to pay me who hate paypal.

Maybe Flattr should do that as well. For example they could extend the service so that you could put a button on your website which when someone presses it, it pays a fixed amount from their website to yours, which could be used as an easy-to-use micropayment scheme allowing people to pay for content.

zachbeane3• 15 years ago

I was wrong about this; further along in the FAQ there's an entry about "deleting" the account. I stopped reading after the "disable" question, not realizing there was a difference.

westiseast• 15 years ago

I must admit I don't 'get' flattr - why would you ever signup if you weren't also trying to get paid? Surely Flattr's biggest problem is that they don't have users who want to freely donate, just users who want to get paid. It's a crap pyramid scheme. Or like a trade show, when the only people there are all salesmen, with no customers.

techiferous• 15 years ago

Site owners have to sign up for the service before participating. That barrier should be removed.

For example, you should be able to flattr any URL, not just web sites that have opted in. Here's how it would work: if you see a site that you wish to give money to, you would flattr the URL with a promise of money, but not real money. You would do this on flattr.com. The owner of the URL will go to flattr.com and see that they have $89.13 in "flattry" waiting for them if they sign up. At that point, the site owner has incentive to sign up and collect the money. Once the site owner has signed up, the users are notified that they need to pay (or payment is taken automatically).

This way, users don't have to wait for a site to add the flattr button and site owners will have much more incentive to sign up once they see the money waiting for them.

boboblong• 15 years ago

bitcoin will make this irrelevant...

flattr_intern• 15 years ago

Handling money requires a stable and trusted service which is why it would have been a bad idea not having a closed beta to test it out properly before released. The problem with handling money is that there is a lot of legal issues around it.

@cabalamat there is already an API that community has used to create a lot of cool stuff with: https://flattr.com/support/plugins Hoping to see many more though so if you have good ideas feel free to hack away:) Donating specific sums can already be done to other Flattr users via their profile page.

We're actively working on getting Flattr more accessible and available to "flattr everything". Big changes happening in a few days! http://blog.flattr.net/2011/04/flattr-reloads-the-cannons/

/josef (@flattr_intern)

Flattr - I want to give you my money

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