Posts Tagged ‘Flattr’

This week Flattr teamed up with DailyMotion to give video creators a new way to make money off their content.

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Live mobile video streaming service Bambuser has teamed up with social micropayment service Flattr to give video bloggers the chance to be “flattrd” and earn real money for their work.

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While major online financing services such as PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa have shut down their dealings with the embattled WikiLeaks, one microfinancing startup is still hanging on. Flattr, a micropayment startup created by Peter Sunde, co-founder of the infamous BitTorrent sharing site The Pirate Bay, still accepts donations on behalf of the document-leaking non-profit.

WikiLeaks, which has come under intense international pressure after publishing leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, has seen its most of its major funding sources dry up (the big ones are U.S.-based). PayPal, owned by online auction giant eBay, restricted WikiLeaks’ account on Saturday, saying the organization violated its policy on facilitating illegal activity. MasterCard began denying donations to WikiLeaks on Monday, followed by Visa a day later.

PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss postal system also shut down a bank account owned by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was using it to collect donations. Assange was arrested in London on unrelated criminal allegations Tuesday.

Sunde has been a public advocate for Assange and WikiLeaks. He has also proposed a peer-to-peer DNS system that would prevent domain name registrations from being revoked, as was done with the WikiLeaks.org domain.

His company Flattr, based in Sweden, allows users to vote on content they like, much like Digg or Condé Nast’s Reddit, except each vote is actually a micro amount of cash. Users pay a monthly donation to Flattr (minimum €2). At the end of the month, that fee is split between all the content providers that user has Flattr’d.

Sunde started Flattr in March along with Linus Olsson. WikiLeaks, which has experienced funding problems in 2009, was among its first financing partners, although any company can now sign up to accept Flattr payments. At the time, he told TechCrunch that Flattr was “prepared for the controversy.”

Paypal is making it easier to donate money to your friends and family on social networks. From raising money for a child’s soccer team to gathering donations to support a loved one’s surgery, this new service, called Fundrazr, makes it easy to to make relatively small donations directly on your Facebook wall. This easy one-click solution is right on the heels of similar products to come out, most notably the donation tool Flattr. Whether these services will compete or be able to carve out their own niches is yet to be seen.
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While mainstream media struggles to find a balance between free online content, paywalls and subscriptions, Wikileaks is happily experimenting with a new micropayment service, Flattr. Flattr lets organizations set up microdonations on individual blog posts, articles, videos, photos and other media so that users who like the content can give their financial support. And what sets Flattr apart is really its ease-of-use: users don’t have to log in to a larger payment site like Paypal and donate large lump sums – Flattr is a true microdonation platform. It looks like mainstream media could learn a lesson or two from Flattr and Wikileaks.
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