How do you flattr?
Posted by maloki på 13 juni, 2010
I’ve been thinking again. To admit, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Flattr.
Flattr is, for you who know what it is and heard of it, still in Beta. I’ve been thinking, and wondering, how does this effect how people use it?
First month, I tried to be a good girl. I even payed a €5 montly fee, so that my slices wouldn’t get to small. I was pleased when it evened out, since I got €5.11 revenue.
This month, I’m back down on €2 since I’m helping out as much as I can with finding bugs and what not, which has resulted in 55 clicks, after only 13 days. It’s way worse than my first 14 days.
Christian Riesen posted a statistic review of May. It’s quite interesting, and it will likely look widely different, depending on who’s report you look at.
My wonder is, how do you flattr?
Do you concider that it is still just beta?
Are ju only flattring ”the very best”, or are you helping people who just registered feel like it might give them something using Flattr?
3 svar till “How do you flattr?”
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maloki 
Patrick said
In the long run flattr is going to be most interesting to me, and I think most people, if it becomes very widely used and everyone gets used to giving a small amount to lots of different people. My blog gets around 10,000 unique visitors a month, and what I’m hoping for is an average of a few cents from each visitor, something that could be compared to Google Ads. It will certainly happen that some people give me a lot more than that, but I don’t expect it often.
When there are more things on the Internet to click on, I expect overall the value of flattrs will get less. Some people will give me less than one cent, and this will offset those people who give me more.
Since this is what I’m expecting to get, this is how I use flattr now. Everytime anyone says something I like and I want to agree with them, or anytime someone publishes something nice on their blog, just a few cents to everyone. Flattr is ‘flat rate’, so what I pay each month doesn’t matter, and if I’m giving a gift to someone else as a flattr, it’s their problem if it’s only worth a tiny amount. My flattrs last month were worth 2 cents, and this is fine with me. It might be nice to give different people different amounts in this way, especially if it were done in some clever way, but it’s not a priority.
This is how I expect to use flattr in the future, but I also think I’m going to get bored with it. Probably in 6 months or a year, I won’t feel like logging in anymore. I would still like to be able to use it like this when I want to, and I do think fundamentally this is what flattr is all about. For this reason I like flattr exactly the way it is now.
Now, having said all of this, my hope is eventually there will be a considerable amount of money in it. If all my readers average even a few cents, my number of readers grows and sometimes people give me a €100 or something, it could add up to hundreds of euros a month. In this case there needs to be more flexibility on how flattr can be used.
In this case, what I would like to do is use some of the money myself, but give some of it away in larger amounts to specific people or causes, as well as using it in the ‘traditional’ flattr way. I would probably keep the first €50-100 myself, and give most of the rest away, mostly to other flattr users.
To answer your question about considering flattr to still be beta, yes, very beta. There are still lots of bugs to solve and important decisions have to be made on functionality. If flattr doesn’t become ‘better’ and more mature, I will probably look for some alternative. I am completely open minded on what ‘better’ means, and I’m very optimistic about what flattr will become. I’m prepared to wait years if necessary for flattr to mature.
2nd month Flattr-stats « maloki said
[…] This month has been good, and yes I might be a little bit obsessed but I feel that it is important that I talk about Flattr alot, make people understand the good use of it. I want to, together with the Flattr-community that we already have and the Pirate and Activist community that I am part of, lead the way by setting a good example and showing that this really works. We are all responsable to help Flattr reach Critical Mass Have you given out your 3 invites yet? If not, get on with it already! And I’m still curious about how how you flattr. […]
maloki » Blog Archive » My Flattr link-collection said
[…] money where your mouth is, about what Flattr is, and what I’d like it to become. 2010-06-13 How do you flattr? Think about it, and I’d love to hear more about your thoughts. 2010-06-17 ImFlattrd: New […]