The economics of a flattr world.Smarter ways to flattr your readers.
Last week I discussed the interesting economics underlying a social nanopayment service like flattr. And I offered the gift economy pessimists (me included) some food for thought: the widespread fear that such approaches could still fail to draw in enough of the read-only audience (instead of drawing in just the writers themselves) could eventually be tackled by a critical mass of very cost-intensive sites requiring their users to register with flattr.com before being allowed to view the content.
A chicken egg problem?
But even if I myself liked this theoretical thought, in the real world it would leave us with a kind of chicken-egg problem: the first chickens who decide to move in such a direction (restricting access) could experience even worse problems to get a daily egg laid (and generate some income). But does the real world provide us just with white and dark eggs? All or nothing?
(Foto Credits to vanherdehaage according Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Restricting access is still more of the same all or nothing, black and white thinking, isn’t it? What if we don’t think in terms of restricting but instead more in terms of attracting? If the fear that many people will in the long run not have enough incentives to share a small amount of their money turns out to be correct, we should consider to give them some more incentives, shouldn’t we?
Carrots for the read-only folks?
The world of such incentives for paying users is already well explored in the field of software development: give away most of your software package for free but provide some really nice additional features for a paying audience. So why not consider similar things in order to give people a better reason to register with a service like flattr? E.g. let just users with a flattr account watch … the result of your latest user poll he or she just participated in? Well, why not. Or: let just users with a flattr account watch … the video embedded in your text and you are referring to? Maybe too harsh. Or: let just users with a flattr account watch … all comments to a text instead of just the ones older than 24 hours? Mmh, interesting. But there are probably much better ways.
Once flattr releases a (hopefully smart and capable) programming interface, the only limit to such things will be your sites content and your fantasy to take advantage of it. And you are requiring nobody to actually “pay” for anything on your site. You just suggest that a basic readiness to pay a little bit for the valued things would also give access to some additional benefits on your site.
The smarter such incentives and the more sites offering some well-balanced benefits the more readers who were not willing to pay before would then be willing to make a basic commitment by registering with a social payment service: just one flat fee a month for the ever growing amount of such benefits, globally? Bought.
(Foto Credits to kyntharyn74 according CC BY 2.0)
It’s a read-write culture.
And speaking about readers and writers: who is just consumer, reader and who is also contributor, author in the twenty-first century? Aren’t we heading more and more in the direction of a read-write culture anyway? Everybody who publishes a video on YouTube is an author? Fur sure. Everybody who shares his or her knowledge by contributing to Wikipedia is an author? As sure as eggs is eggs. Everybody who twitters valueable links on some special interest topic is an author? I believe, yes. And everybody who shares his or her valuable insights into upbringing children in an online community dedicated on the topic is an author? Of course. So why not having the option to flattr all those things in the future? One could easily find oneself having the flattr fee financed for lifetime after having published some boring afternoon video like this one with almost 400.000 views.
And if flattr one day also becomes a kind of a personal “transparency check” to measure whether you yourself on average actually “contribute more” or “consume more” in the internet, you can choose to either balance this with some dollars or choose to take time to write some more of your maybe already “famous” product reviews on amazon.com and let users flattr them…!
(Foto Credits to flashpro according CC BY 2.0)
So. Just something (almost) completely different left to be said: after my last post, I got some free beta invite codes from flattr. And I still have some of them. Anybody needs one? (And no, I am not affiliated with flattr at all. 
)
Feel free to comment in english or german. And don’t forget to subscribe to updates for Brainstorming the Bastille on facebook.
Blogging about “Smarter ways to #flattr your readers.” http://bit.ly/ax3×8U
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I like the idea of thinking of Flattr as the equalizer between consumers and producers. Pure readers pay a little, generators get to use Flattr for free if they receive enough attention for their work. Of course, even small contributions like blog comments and tweets should count (but you’ll probably need a lot or very good ones, because the bar has to be set somewhere and someone has to pay the bills after all).
But I am not sure I like the idea of giving extra content to flattr members. Flattr should be about sharing without preconditions.
In addition to Flattr hopefully not being too comfortable with using their service in this way, I would as a user also not be too comfortable with such a system, as it implies that my Flattr profile (or at least the fact that I have one) would need to be shared with the content owner’s website.
There is a thread on the forum about giving people access to a page only after they have flattr’d it (https://forum.flattr.com/showthread.php?tid=339), so that flattr could be used “pay-per-view”.
The response from the admins was that this would be against the idea of wanting to tear down paywalls and an abuse of the service.
I appreciate that the system you propose is different from a paywall, and that it is meant more to promote Flattr itself than (directly) generate revenue for the content owner, so I am not completely against this.
But on the other hand, the best (and hopefully only necessary) way to promote Flattr is to put great content out there and slap a Flattr button on it.
Hi Thilo,
Thx for your thoughtful comment.
Exactly: just the fact that you have a flattr account would need to be shared with the content owner’s website. And as you mentioned, I do not propose classical paywalls. If anything, then I propose additional “options” for site owners that could fill the wide gap between “closed” and “free”.
Also, like you, I’d love to see that “the only necessary way to promote Flattr is to put great content out there and slap a Flattr button on it.” On the other hand, I wanted to contribute to the discussion in a way which shows that the underlying “business model” idea of Flattr will not at all be “dead” if the gift economy pessimists turn out to have a point in that not enough “read-only” folks will see incentives to create an account. With this I want to contribute that the idea is not given up too early in such a scenario. At the moment it’s still an experiment.
What’s necessary in order to make social payment a success is that almost everybody has an account. I’d like flattr not to be too harsh when it comes to the question, how the incentives to create one will look like in the future. Site owners should decide that. However, I fully agree that attempts to “force” flattering are an abuse of the system. I just speak about incentives to create accounts.
I could totally use a flattr invite! I’d be very grateful if you could send one to M8R-les7u@mailinator.com
I think it can be a good idea to create incentives for readers/listeners/viewers to give tips over flattr, but flattr is not suitable as the gate through a paywall. And the rewards you give out have to be appropriate. For example, Slashdot has a nice incentive for signing up: the initital rating of your comments is one point higher. This is a neat idea, but giving this reward in exchange for money would be wrong IMHO, as this might amplify the reach of the comments of wealthier people, and reduce the visibility of contributions from people with no extra money.
OTOH, if the incentive is that you’ll get to customise your ‘avatar’ picture (or maybe gain the option of using an animated one), won’t see ads on that site for a while, or that your name will appear on a list of sponsors and you can add a link to your site, I’d be cool with that.
Hi les7,
I agree that the rewards have to be appropriate. You give good reasons why they can be inappropriate.
And just in case there is any remaining misunderstanding I stress that I don’t like the idea to actually give incentives “to click the button”. For me this would be an abuse of the system. What I think about are just incentives to *create* a social payment “account”. Nothing else, not more.
And I especially like your idea of eventually reducing ads in exchange for, again just “having an account”, not: clicking the button. Clicking the button must remain a completely uninfluenced decision.
I don’t like the idea of excluding any readers of any content, based on their willingness to spend. It doesn’t only collide with my conviction that all information should be free. It also contradicts some basic logics of how the internet culture works.
First, integrating this kind of paywall is costly – either in time or money. Ok, that’s only short time costs if it would wokr afterwards. Still, it raises the necessary investments for your thing – something I despise.
Second, it’s a google world – if people aren’t willing to spend money on your content, they for sure are able to use their searchbar in the top corner of their browser, instead of changing their mind and paying for some small benefits. I can’t think of any clever and exclusive things that I want and can share only with a paying audience on a regular basis.
Third, I think it is very hard to produce content that would still be great, if it is scaled down. And you can only attract people to your stuff, if it is great.
Fourth, how should people know they want to pay for great stuff, if they can’t easily experience it first hand?
All in all I think the idea of this kind of paywall suffers from quite similar flaws as the Rupert Murdoch-bullshit that right now lays a quite good newspaper to waste. It just devaluates the great stuff one does, making it more average to a broad audience.
I really prefer the idea to convinve people, that they want to give something, because what I do is valueable to them.
Tom,
Let’s first make the definition of a paywall clearer. I think the paywall you mainly critizise is a paywall that requires you to pay somebody in order to access his content. This is a fundamental difference to a requirement to pay one fee to the whole community in order to access some content. Because you can still decide for which specific content you actually want to pay, you don’t have to pay anybody for his content in order to access it. You would just have to value the cultural work in general.
Second, I actually showed in this entry, that instead of restricting anything, one could think about gentle incentives to register with a social payment service. Again, nobody is required to pay for anything on a site doing such a thing. E.g. on zurpolitik.com you give the incentive to have ad-free content for registered users. This would also be such a possibility to think about: offering users to remove any ads once they register for a social payment service. Again, nobody is required to pay for anything on a site doing such a thing. The site just has a fair chance that the user will do it, if the content is worth it.
Third, I understand you and share your feelings (convinve people, that they want to give something). But we don’t have to decide now, because people themselves will decide it. If social payment becomes a huge success just because everybody wants to register, I am even more happy. But if not, I’d strongly advise not to call the approach “dead” too early. Because it’s the way most promising thing to finance cultural work in the future I’ve yet come across. But I am quite sure, it will just continue to work, if it is not just a (”negatively” working) redistribution of income between authors.
About the distribution between authors: You already explained the reason that most people using flattr are authors themselves – because so many people are authors nowadays.
And the people who are authors also are the consumers of other authors and the ones who know the value of this work. So speaking big: Maybe we have to stimulate more people to produce content and everything will work out just fine.
But seriously and related to that. I rather believe it is not Flattr or any other specific service that we should promote, but blogs (etc.) and the culture that drives us. After all we’re having a similar “problem” here: Most readers of blogs are bloggers and rarely we are intrucing other more mainstream spheres – so how could Flattr achieve that?
This also would solve a problem I have with your “Register to a service and get our content for free”-approach of yours (that I believe to understand better now): I don’t actually want to be too much of an advertisment spokesperson for any enterprise.
It’s one thing to install a flattr-button and switch to kachingle, if it turns out to be the better service (or install some other additional buttons). It’s a pretty different thing to fully integrate a service in your site and pretty much rely on it’s succes. You’d lose a lot of independence.
Wouldn’t we actually have to promote a comparatively hard to change monopoly/oligopoly to make this work? Do we want that? I can see some of the advantages but I’m not too sure.
And a very important question: Can we make it easy to integrate those services? Because every fool can install a flattr-button. But I tried to integrate facebook on my blog once and while not being the most stupid person in terms of programming, I still failed pathetically.
Hi Tom,
Exactly, I am giving part of the answer in the last paragraph. Still, this does not change the basic question if the ones who have a “negative read-write balance” would continue to pay without having any incentive whatsoever. We’ll see, but a cash burning startup like flattr also doesn’t have time forever.
With respect to your “blogger read bloggers” analysis: That’s right. But it can slowly change with a changing culture and a changing perspective on what is “important”. Furthermore, I actually do not necessarily see a tool here that helps just “bloggers” but a tool that could really become a working business model for online journalism, “big” sites included, especially local big sites like austrian newspapers, IF they start to use it (and IF they give their readers a reason to register)
With respect to monopoly and company spokesperson. I don’t see that. From a technical perspective you can easily integrate many such services on a site and if you want to give your users some incentive (like e.g. no ads, maybe some other idea) to register with *one* of them of their personal choice, you are happy and they get their “bonus” feature…