الأربعاء، 14 ديسمبر 2011

Is Flattr a useful blog micropayment method ?

Most bloggers dream of generating some income from their work, but most of the mechanisms for doing so are either cumbersome or intrusive.  I once told myself that if I reached the point where Blogger (my host) charged me for storing the images, I would add a "tip jar" to the site to cover those expenses - but to date I've only used about half of my available image-storage space, so that justification hasn't arisen.  And I looked at Amazon's "affiliate" program, especially since I occasionally review books, but decided it probably wouldn't be worthwhile.

Recently, I've read about a new platform called Flattr.  Here's a summary from Huffington Post:
What it is: Flattr allows you to donate tiny amounts of money to a blogger, filmmaker, photographer or any other content creator without having to type in your credit card information each time. The service also enables users to give mobile micro-donations to things in the real world.

How it works: Once you sign up for Flattr, you must deposit a minimum of $3 each month into your Flattr account. Over the next month, you can "flattr" certain web pages (blog posts, videos, images, etc.) that use the service simply by clicking the page's Flattr widget. Each time you flattr something, your monthly budget is divvied up between the sites you've flattr'd. The more sites you flattr, the smaller each donation becomes. And if you don't flattr at all in a given month, your monthly budget is donated to charity. 
The Forbes magazine website offered these thoughts:
Launched in August and based in Malmo, Sweden, Flattr has 50,000 registered users. Sunde hopes to have a million by this time next year. A handful are making a steady income from it. Tim Pritlove, who blogs and podcasts from Berlin, Germany about technology and personal media, makes about 1,000 euros per month from Flattr, depending on his output. Pritlove is an outlier. Online technology magazine TechDirt had only 6 Flattrs on a recent popular post that had 250 comments and 47 tweets.
There's further discussion at The Economist and at Neatorama.  I've not noticed a lot of Flattr buttons at sites I usually visit, and I'm a bit put off by the company's 10%-off-the-top management fee (which theoretically might decline if they scale up the system) and apparently an annual registration fee to embed the button

This blog has lots of readers in Europe; do you guys make use of Flattr?  Is it really user-friendly and practical?  Unless I receive advice otherwise, I'm planning to give this a pass as well.

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