I really like what http://kickstarter.com is doing in this space. But really, commerce is more important than this kind of P2P system. Easy payments != voluntary micropayments for free content.
edit: so contenture didn't involve explicit clicks like flattr, but I think the analogy still sticks.
I disagree in that this channels a (perhaps irrational) human behavior - the desire to click a button just to be able to click it. Present a button to someone in a clean layout without much clutter, and they are going to want to press it. And given Sunde's pseudo-internet-rockstar-type status, this could very well take off.
People aren't compeled with the presence of a paypal button, to click it and give money. That's because money is a cognitive barrier. People don't want to spend anything unless they have to.
Agreed, money typically is a cognitive barrier - but remember we're talking micropayments, and the internet is a BIIIIG place. I think that works in favor of overcoming that barrier.
And maybe, just maybe, the paypal button is out of date. Paypal buttons are little more than a dressed-up hyperlink from 1996 that will take you to a form with stuff to fill out and even more buttons to press (no novelty, redundancy, paperwork, etc). It's also a solitary activity.
This is inviting in that you get to see a count displayed from people who have already clicked it (much like the digg button), and invites you to participate in that community. I think that community force is a very strong thing that has yet to be tapped in to.
Who I see this working really well for at the Seth Godin-types, where they have really developed a whole tribe of followers who hang on to their (and truly benefit from) every word. These people will want to participate in their online community, and this will be a very tangible and easy way for them to do so.
Actually Seth Godin explicitly doesn't want this kind of donation tool. His blog is a tribe he cultivates to sell books.
Believe me, I know about this one.
Also, micropayments make it worse. You'll get the same dropoff for $0.05 as you would for $5. Again, I know from data. Making the amounts small just means you get less revenue. http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html
I don't know if the data you are looking at are proprietary or not, but I would sincerely love if there were published numbers that I could point people to when I tell them what you are telling them right now.
I think the missing piece to flattr (or maybe just the intro) is that content sites would probably paywall off their content to be available to only flattr subscribers.
That way to have any access to the content, you would have to put a minimum in your flattr account (maybe $15/month?). Then you could get access to this premium content and choose to "Flattr" it if you like it.
Maybe there would be different levels of flattr accounts... e.g. silver, gold, platinum at different monthly rates. And the content providers could only let gold people in one area but silver or gold people in other areas.
I think this comes from Pirate Bay believing their own PR, that their users are not thieves, they merely lack a good way to get money directly to the artists for their works. I just love when people get to dogfood their own PR. This should be good.
Like Ivan says, there is a lot of room for improving payments (take Paypal -- please!) but difficulty of affecting payment is not the number one issue for small content producers. The problem is, ahem, they are trying to sell something to people who do not want to give them the money that they largely don't have. Also, there are a million content producers chasing the same pool of money and many of them get queasy at the notion of actually charging for value.
Looking at the economy stats in the New York Times I do not get the impression that high school students have 15 times more disposable income than a decade ago. However, they are consuming digital content at a multiple far, far above 15x what they were a decade ago. This means that even if you came up with the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy who could somehow convince them to pay their money for things, each producer would see less and less. Also, the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy, if she is fair, is going to tell you that by weight the kids seem to be consuming about 90% Brittney Spears and other mass market hits (oh, I'm msorry, you thought people pirated music that was low quality and paid for the artists they wanted to support? Dogfood your PR.) and 10% long tail, of which you are individually entitled to 1/1000th share.
The traditional way to avoid this is to actually charge money to people who have it for things they are willing to buy. If you totally lack in ideas, "Software for grown women" works pretty well and it isn't nearly as fished out as producing anonymous "content" for the usual suspects.
It seems a bit arbitrary to just chop up a flat fee and pay it out equally once a month to all the content providers I "flattred"; it's sort of like saying everything was of equal value, which probably isn't the case. However, from Flattr's point of view, I see how this makes it a lot easier to manage as far as distributing funds goes.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on how to use it to replace payments for an industry (like music) or to replace the subscription model for a webapp, and maybe that is a bit far-fetched but I can see a huge use in this for low-level stuff.
If I Google a programming exception and get an answer from a blog I can show them some love. I create a lot of small websites used by friends and people from school or some other social context and I can very well see myself sticking that button on all of them to help me buy an extra beer this weekend.
If it grows enough it might be able to fund some "real" stuff, but I don't think it should be put in that context from the get-go.
People still are generally want to do good and genereally want to pay for and reward good content if it's super easy and they don't have to think about spiraling costs.
I think the "flat rate" part might be the trick to make this work. If I know I'm only paying for instance $5 or $10 a month, why wouldn't I use flattr to reward content i like?
The Flattr video isn't loading for me and there doesn't appear to be any other info there, so please excuse me if they're already running with the concept of guilt-micropayments.
A half-baked idea I had (and emailed Ivan from TipJoy about ages ago) was the concept of a tip jar that accumulated funds based on pageviews from each specific user, then tried to encourage them to tip.
Right now, a donate button on a blog will just have a flat approach - plain button, donate x, y or z, and that's it.
I wondered if a content provider couldn't set a value for pageview (e.g., 2 cents for a blog post or forum topic), and then count per user. Following wording is off the top of my head and completely awkward, but you'll get the idea:
"In the last month you've viewed 582 pages on mysite.com for a total of $11.64. Would you like to make a voluntary donation that reflects your use of the site?"
Like I said, half-baked but could interest blog and forum owners enough for them to try it and virally spread the word.
The customer visits a paid content site, let's call it https://valuable-information.com. The customer's browser has a cookie for that site which stores a Loom location (an ID such as 1d425bd38f6520e6fab684a18b9c924e). A pile of assets sits at that location.
When the customer views a paid article at valuable-information.com, the site debits that Loom location accordingly. Or, if the site uses a monthly charge, it debits the location once on the first of each month.
The location also serves as an identity for storing the customer's preferences.
When the balance gets low, the customer can "top off" the location however she likes. If she decides to stop using the site, she can sweep all the assets away from the location.
I should also emphasize that this alleviates the "password proliferation" problem.
The customer logs into her Loom folder using a passphrase she already knows. She creates a new Loom location there, nicknaming it "valuable-information.com" to remind her what it's for. Then when she signs up at valuable-information.com, she simply pastes the location into the sign-up form and presses Go.
As long as her browser cookie lives, she never thinks about it again. If her cookie ever disappears, she just logs into her Loom folder, copies the location, and pastes it into the log-in form at valuable-information.com.
Because of this question I went ahead and wrote this little blurb on how to integrate Loom into shopping carts (and paid content sites): https://loom.cc/faq#shopping
Would be better with a camel as an example and not a cake because thats what many industries has to swallow to get into this model. Interesting approach though. Micropayment is a nut that needs to be cracked and if browsers vendors doesn't do it someone else should.
this will forever be up to the content producers rather than some centralized service. when artists make it easy for me to buy stuff from them I will often pay them rather than search for their stuff for free.
Any transaction involving anything of value is going to have to be full secure transaction. A secure transaction takes time and effort for a person to make.
Any new supposedly "simple and easy" transaction system is going to have to remove security somewhere. Within 6 months of launch, everyone is the world is going to wake up to find one morning all their flattr cake are belong to some guy in a Former Soviet Republic. After a few failed desperate patch attempts wind up with more cake being bulk shipped to former Soviet Republics, Flattr will be declard a flop.
God knows I think it would work in theory.
I really like what http://kickstarter.com is doing in this space. But really, commerce is more important than this kind of P2P system. Easy payments != voluntary micropayments for free content.
edit: so contenture didn't involve explicit clicks like flattr, but I think the analogy still sticks.