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…

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.

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.

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.

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.