Social micropayments start-up Flattr has
extended its micro donations network to film- makers through a new
partnership with video hosting site Dailymotion.
Flattr allows online users to tip or make
micro donations whenever they see a Flattr button on a blog or a
website. By clicking the button, the micropayment goes to an
account between the content creators and Flattr.
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By GlobalDataOnline users decide how much they would like to spend
monthly. Then Flattr counts up all clicks at the end of the month
and distributes the revenue between the affiliated creators in
accordance with the number of clicks keeping a 10% of the bulk
amount.
alternative pay walls
Daily motion is one of the largest sites for sharing videos in
the internet. The Paris-based firm attracts over 135m unique
monthly visitors and 1.8bn videos views worldwide.
Having also partnered with Instacast, an
online directory of over 30.000 podcasts worldwide, Flattr is now
able to extend its network to writers, as well as audio and video
creators.
By clicking Flattr’s buttons on blogs and
websites, online users can support web content creators of their
choice. This way, Flattr aims to support free content in the
internet and proposes an alternative to pay walls.
“Flattr is a combination of Flatter and
flat-rate. You spend a flat fee to ‘flatter’ people. The ethos of
Flattr is to enable sustainable support for creative work through
voluntary payments,” Flattr’s CEO, Linus Olsson told
EPI.
Eearlier this year, Flattr inked a SEK14m
(USD2m) with angel investor Federico Pirzio-Biroli and investment
agency Passion Capital. In the investment deal, Flattr was valued
at about $13m.
“Our service is built on the idea of people
being nice to others by giving them money. We wanted investors that
have the same love for the internet and what people create.
Something that is very hard to find in the venture capital world,
to be honest. But we did,” said Olson.
Eileen Burbidge, partner at Passion Capital
told EPI that Flattr has “a pretty strong business model”
and said the company is in constant evolution. Flatter is
working on plug-ins to allow people to donate for tweets on Twitter
and for audio creations on Soundcloud, a social sound platform to
create and share audio files of any kind.
Flattr is a small start-up firm with a staff
of around a dozen people – but does not fear competition. If the
Malmo-based firm grows enough they would challenge more established
propositions by market giants like Google’s wallet. “If we actually
get mass market adoption at some point this will become an online
currency. If you have 100,000 users with a Flattr wallet you can
start sending Flattr payments back and forth,” Burbidge says.
Online users can top up their monthly
credit using credit cards, as well as transactions made via PayPal
or Moneybookers (now called Skrill). Flattr can processes
microdonations of cents or even fractions of cents. This payment
process is done on a monthly basis after counting the total amount
of clicks in the Flattr buttons on the websites. Although creators
can receive the accrued amount of microdonations, this is subject
to a minimum of €10 so that the cost of transferring funds
from Flatter accounts to the creators’ bank or PayPal accounts does
not make the donation uneconomical.
