The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde aka. brokep together with Linus Olsson aka. bonq, have just launched a new project named Flattr – combination of “flatter” and “flatrate”. It’’s still in the early beta stages and an invite code is required upon sign up. The video below describes the idea behind the service very good.
You sign up for a Flattr account like you would with any other social network like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc. You can then choose your monthly flatrate amount, there is a minimum of at least 2 EUR/month. For you as a content provider you have to be willing to give if you also want to receive, so if you want to add a Flattr button on your site then you will have to sign up for the monthly flatrate first. This isn”t a one-way service, it goes both ways.
Think of it as something kind of like Digg but where you donate or give micropayments to the content provider every time you click the Flattr button. As the end of the month Flattr will divide your monthly flatrate amount out to the content providers whom buttons your clicked.
So lets say you had a 20 EUR/month flatrate and you clicked the Flattr button 45 times this month then each provider that you clicked would get 1/45th of the 20 EUR = 0,44 EUR. I would imagine that users would make their own system so they would click some buttons twice if the content was really great – but I”m sure we”ll see some solutions about how you can give more to some.
Flattr are having informal talks with several large sites, such as Youtube and Flickr, it would make it possible for users of those sites to add Flattr buttons next to their content. Think of all the great possibilities if this service gets accepted as the standard payment across the web. No more trouble signing into PayPal, entering your CC details and so on. One click with one budget – can it get any easier?
“We are currently having informal talks with several large sites. We welcome anyone who wants to join, we do not exclude, we include.” – said co-founder Linus Olsson in an email.
It’’s not all good news, in the beginning Flattr will take a 10% cut of all the payments that the users make. They hope to be able to bring this cut down as the service gets more popular. They”re aware that if the service gets too expensive and only a small amount goes to the content makers, then people will simply stop using the service.
“We will at start have a 10% fee of the monthly Flattr amount, but hope to lower that as fast as the system takes of.”
I also asked them what they thought about expanding the service to mobile platforms and to that Linus Olsson answered:
“We are planning to build API’’s for every possible platform, iPhone is on that list.”
This seems quite interesting and I can”t wait to see how it will play out. There will be some bumps in the road for Flattr but if they get past them, the service could revolutionize the way content is delivered on the internet. It would give copyright owners a realistic alternative to giving their content away for free or have it pirated and distributed without their control – with Flattr they could now make money if the content is good enough.
In an interview with the British BBC Peter Sunde said the following:
“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.”
Content providers before have been successful in giving their content away for a price that the consumer decides themselves, just look at how Radiohead gave away their album for a price that the consumer decided. It was a huge success and it shocked the record industry, but the old men still didn”t change anything.
You can sign up for an invite code over on the Flattr site. According to Sunde the service will open up to the public around March.
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