Anybody noticed those new badges at the bottom of all articles on barganews ? We are taking part in an experimental new micropayments system known as Flattr.
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn’t for a really important cause.
Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01? And €10 was just too high for just one blog entry we liked…
Flattr solves this issue. When you’re registered to flattr, you pay a small monthly fee. You set the amount yourself. In the end of the month, that fee is divided between all the things you flattered. You’re always logged in to the account. That means that giving someone some flattr-love is just a button away. And you should!
Clicking one more button doesn’t add to your fee. It just divides the fee between more people! Flattr tries to encourage people to share. Not only pieces of content, but also some money to support the people who created them. With love -- source
Petter Sunde, one of the founders of the controversial bit torrent tracking website Pirate Bay, has just launched this new micropayments system, with the aim of helping people get paid for the content they create.
How it works is that members will pay a fixed monthly sum (around 2 euros but members can pay more if they want to) and then at the end of each month the accumulated cash will be divided amongst those sites that the Flattr members want to reward.
“We aim to revolutionise how people pay and get paid for content on the internet. Come, join and show the world that good content is worth some coins out of your pocket,” says the message on the front page of the Flattr site.
Sunde says that when people create content on the Internet they don’t find it easy to make money from it (true) and at the same time if you come across content you like, there’s no easy way of rewarding those sites.
For example, “Bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film makers, programmers and so on so” says the Flattr promotional video. So they created Flattr to solve this “universal problem”.
“When you have a cake you want to give slices to the people you like” they say. So if you have a Flattr button on your site and someone likes what they see, they can click it. Each time someone clicks the Flattr button on your site you are basically getting a slice of the cake.
Why the name Flattr? Well it’s a word play on flatter and flat-rate and with that you can flatter people says Sunde.
“The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month,” he says.
“We want to encourage people to share money as well as content -- It’s a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments.” -- Petter Sunde
Ok so there must be something in it for Flattr too otherwise there’s no point. According to Sunde they will initially take 10 percent for admin costs but as the site grows, they hope to lower the percentage.
“We’re not really in this for becoming rich,” said Sunde.
“We’re doing it to change things and making people get money they never got before.”