Flattr: Micropayment System for Independent, Online Content Providers
Flattr is a concept by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, and is an interesting take on providing money to independent, online content providers.
The visuals are nicely done, and how can you really go wrong with a cake analogy? Getting a large enough adoption rate will be the biggest hurdle, but presumably Sunde and his team will have enough street cred to pull this off. With sites like BoingBoing promoting it, a lot of the likely adopters are more aware of it now, at the least.
This sounds pretty interesting. It runs a few parallels to Kachingle, which I was interested in a little while back. I think Kachingle gets it mostly right – their model is based on pageviews, not clicks. So, once you’ve subcribed to a particular site, your contribution amount to each site is based on how often you visit and how many pages you hit when you’re there. I like this better than having to actively click every time you visit (a la Flattr), but I’m still waiting for a service that lets me both base it on page views and let’s me also manually set a percentage for sites that I might not visit too often, but I still want to give them a piece of my “cake,” as it were.
Chris (February 11, 2010 at 2:24 pm)Never heard of Kachingle before. Also an interesting take on things.I like how The Oatmeal handles the approach to money for content. There are ads on the site, but there’s also an explicit “Buy Me a Cup of Coffee” link.I like the spirit of that approach, though the PayPal transaction is where things get a bit messier. Not sure how much PayPal takes per transaction, but that’s also a bit of a down side, particularly if you’re just talking a dollar or two.I’ve added ads back here to this site, and have tried to make them as un-obtrusive as possible. But I really dislike them, and the smallish traffic I get here doesn’t amount to all that much. If there are lots of clicks, I’ve seen a dollar or two for a day. But usually, it’s like one cent… and oftentimes zero.I’ll try to keep an eye out for both Flattr and Kachingle. Thanks for the info!
avoision (February 12, 2010 at 9:13 am)