Flattr is billed as “a social micropayment platform that lets you show love for the things you like.” It’s similar to the Facebook “like” button, except that each time you “like” (“flatter”) something you also donate a small amount.
That amount is capped, however, and the user determines the cap, thus avoiding the nickel and diming that plagued previous micropayment platforms. Clay Shirky notes that people hate to be nickel and dimed. With Flattr, they aren’t. Users decide to part with a specified amount of money per month (€2 minimum) to support content they like, and at the end of each month that amount is divvied among sites they’ve flattered. They nickel and dime themselves.
Rather than making micro-decisions about micro-transactions, Flattr aggregates the micro-transactions into one — deciding whether to give €X per month. This avoids the marginal mental effort, which people hate, required to decide whether a blog post is really worth 10¢.
Flattr avoids another micropayment pitfall that Shirky has noted — limiting content distribution. Flattr still allows what Shirky calls superdistribution. No content is sealed behind paywalls, so I can still tweet links all day without worrying whether friends will be able to access content I link to.
Further, Flattr isn’t really a micropayment, or even a social micropayment. It’s a microgift. People have a more positive connotation for gift-giving than payment-making. The system implicitly frames “flattering” as a value rather than a cost, which true micropayments are.
Lastly, people don’t like ads or being tracked online. Flattr feedback requires no tracking, and it’s a direct signal of how many users value something. Traffic is a similar signal that fosters online ads, half of which work, but, according to the old saying, no one knows which half. Innovations like AdWords help identify what works but don’t help mitigate users seeing most ads as noise.
Because it’s solved many problems of previous micropayment ventures, Flattr might “work.” People might give to WikiLeaks and Tor, or podcasters and bloggers might make a little money on the side, but Flattr will not save newspapers or old media. Such change on the margin, however, could be labeled a success, especially after the failure of micropayments so far.
But will Flattr exist in 5 years? It’s solved many micropayment problems but begs the question, “What problem does it solve?” Many, like Shirky and Tim Lee, have long argued that micropayments are a solution in search of a problem — we already award content-creators with fame by paying them with our eyeballs. Will microgifts find a problem to solve?
We’ll have Flattr founder Peter Sunde on the pod soon to discuss this question and more.
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