I posted a few days ago about my flattr installation, and I thought I would say a few more things about it and how it works. I’m really enthusiastic about the idea, and I’m hoping to convince more people to give it a try. The more like-minded people we have as a group who are signed up the better, and I’ll explain why in a moment.
Invitations
I have a few more spare invitations to give away, and might be able to ask for even more later. Soon it will be open to the public anyway, and anyone can register. If you’re interested in an invitation, please ask. At the moment this is the only way you can register as it’s still in beta testing.
Please don’t ask for an invitation if you aren’t interested in signing up right now.
If you are interested, don’t be shy about asking for an invitation, because I think I can probably find enough for everyone who’s interested.
Before you sign up, you should give some thought as to what you want to do with it. I’ll explain more in a moment. There are also costs associated with signing up that I’ll also explain more about, and no guarantee of making any money from it.
Micro-Payments
First of all, for clarity, flattr works in euros. This doesn’t really matter, because you pay with a credit card which will automatically convert a currency like US dollars into euros. Taking money out in dollars is also not explicitly implemented yet, but they have promised to support this sort of thing in the future. I assume you will be able to request either a check be sent to you or a direct deposit into your bank account. Here in Europe they have promised to support BIC/IBAN payments, which is a type of low cost bank transfer.
What’s a little unique about flattr is the size of payments you make with it. Typically a payment is only a few pennies in size. So why is this interesting?
If you consider this blog for example, which has roughly 10000 unique visitors per month. If, on average, each one of these people gave me 1 cent every month, that would mean €100. This would be quite a nice amount of money.
If I got €100 per month, I would probably give away a portion of this to other plant breeders and garden bloggers, perhaps 50-100 payments of €1 each. This means even if you don’t have a popular blog, and can’t expect thousands of tiny payments, you may still get enough larger payments from people like me to make it worthwhile.
The expression of the people running flattr is ‘streams make rivers’, and what’s important is the idea of combining lots of tiny payments into larger amounts of money. For this reason the whole system works better if more people are participating.
Pyramid Scheme?
I was chatting with someone about flattr the other day, he said there must be some kind of pyramid scheme, and asked what it was.
That’s an important question!
There are three kinds of people who use flattr:
- Those who want to earn money by doing something.
- Those that want to give money away.
- Those that want to do some combination of the above.
In fact there are a lot of people with significant amounts of money they want to give away. All flattr users have to give away an amount that’s currently between €2-20, but I expect the upper limit in particular will be increased with time. You can certainly have more than one flattr account if you want to give away more than it allows. I have already talked with a few people who don’t plan on asking for any money, and plan to give away at least €50 per month.
It’s my plan also to give away something along the lines of €50 per month, but only if I can generate at least that much myself. I think a number of people fall into this category too.
There are many people in the world motivated in this way, and want to do something to help the greater good. There will be a lot of money floating around in flattr.
On the other hand, flattr’s goal is to reward people who do things. In the words of the flattr people, to reward ‘content’. If you don’t do anything interesting, no one will want to give you any money! If no one wants to give you money, then the only thing you can do with a flattr account is give money away to others. If there’s a pyramid scheme associated with flattr, this is where it lies. There’s no free money in flattr!
What’s important to understand too, is for these people who want to give away larger amounts of money, they will probably want to give it away to a number of different kinds of people. For example, some to musicians who’s music they download, some to bloggers who write good blogs and maybe some to people who write computer programs.
If we as a community, want to get a good share of this money, we need to have a lot of flattr buttons on our blogs and a lot of good reasons why someone should click on these buttons. If someone wants to give money away to garden bloggers, and I’m the only one who uses flattr, as a community we will only get one payment. The more of us using flattr the better!
Costs
Flattr has costs associated with using it, although depending on how you use flattr these may not be very high.
Everyone has to give away at least €2 per month to at least one other flattr user! If you don’t do this, they will take the €2 out of your account anyway and it will be wasted.
It’s no problem to team up with another flattr user and give each other this €2, in order to keep it from being wasted. Every time you make a payment to someone with flattr there is a 10% commission, so in this case both of you would end up paying 20 cents in fees per month, but that would be all. If you decide to do this, remember you need to login every month!
Finally you have to pay the costs of depositing and withdrawing money from flattr, which at the moment are a little expensive because everything has to be done with PayPal. The flattr people have promised to implement more low cost options for doing this, but they are not yet available.
Also, you need at least €10 in donations before you can take your money out, and some people won’t be able to make this much.
Beta
It’s important to understand flattr is currently in beta testing. This means it may not work as you expect, and in fact no one is sure it will work at all in the end.
It may not work for technical reasons. It may not work for legal reasons, for example they may decide it’s too easy to use to launder money.
Probably the most important concern is if people want to use it. This is how many similar systems failed in the past, because people simply didn’t want to use them. I personally find flattr absurdly easy to use, and I think the ideas behind it will be interesting to a lot of people, so here’s hoping!
If you sign up now, don’t put a lot of money into it, and be prepared to lose your money if it doesn’t work out.
I’m still hoping a lot of you will be adventurous and give it a try!
It’s a nice idea but unlike advertising, where the money ultimately comes from the profits of people selling stuff, the money to run this system comes from philanthropists, benefactors who receive nothing for their money except a warm glow. And the main people benefiting are the owners of Flattr, who take a cut no matter where the money comes from or goes. That’s your classic pyramid scaffolding although admittedly the money from that usually comes from the poor b*ggers buying in at the bottom.
That said, I might still give it a go except I won’t use paypal under any circumstances since they allowed my account to be hacked and sums removed from my credit card. I did get it back eventually but not without grief.
Hi Catofstripes!
Your argument here is one of the reasons I decided not to have advertising. It’s because there is (almost) always a middleman taking a cut. Google is not a charity, and their ad-sense ads are intended to generate a profit for them too. If you just accept simple donations, this will almost certainly be through something like PayPal, and will have a middleman too. There’s really no way around it.
The 10% commission flattr charges is too high, but they have promised to lower it over time if they can. Right now they have a lot of startup costs and not a lot of users, so I have some sympathy for them. I think more people will complain about this if they don’t do something about it soon.
You’re not the only one to say that about PayPal! A number of people have said the same thing on the flattr discussion forum. They have promised to find an alternative to PayPay, maybe even a simple bank payment, but for the purposes of the testing phase they are in now PayPal was the easiest to setup quickly and easily. I’ve heard lots of bad stories about PayPal and I avoid them when possible.
The people setting up flattr are good people, and I think with time they will address some of these issues. I hope you signup someday!