Pirate Bay Founder Offers Micro Payback System
Pirate Bay co-founder and spokesperson Peter Sunde is leading a new startup whose goal is to encourage users to donate money to many of the same rights holders that he once helped them grab content from.
Called Flattr, particpating musicians, artist and bloggers but a donate button on their site. Flattr members pay a flat monthly fee to the micropayments system and at the end of each month the money is divided among participating sites that a Flattr member wants to reward.
Micropayment systems in many forms have come and gone with none gaining traction, but Synde hope Flattr is different. "The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month," he told the BBC. "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."
This seems best suited to bloggers, or generally anyone who’s followers have an incentive to visit the site many times per month. I could see this being very useful for musicians, if they have enough worthwhile content to drive repeat visits (I’ve probably spent $500 on Wilco in the last ten years, but I don’t find much reason to check their site frequently).
It’ll be interesting to see if it catches on…
I just can’t see how this is any different to the basic voluntary donation model that is already used all over the place and generally considered to be a failure for serious revenue.
Sure, it’s got some geeky click tracking distribution technology, but there’s nothing in there to change the basic psychology of the voluntary donation model which has already been proven to have an extremely low conversion rate.
I know of some long running and highly respected podcasts with listnership over 50,000 downloads per week who use a voluntary donation model and still can’t cover their most basic costs, like web hosting for the show, from those donations.
^I agree with Sam
If this has any chance of success, it’ll be a matter of ease of use & transaction fees. Even with paypal, donating a couple bucks to a podcast/blog you like is kind of a hassle, and the transaction fees on micropayments are unkind. If it really is as simple as a single click, and your ‘monthly contribution’ can be suitably low, I could see it catching on a little bit.