Flatter is making news announcing a new micropayments initiative for Twitter users. You can now give small amounts of money to the people you follow on Twitter, in addition to RT them, replying to them, or quoting them.
It's laid out here at mediabistro, the program expansion that moves from users with a payment button on their blog to any Twitter user.
If you find great, compelling content that you love online, you can still retweet it, like it, share it around. But now you can also Flattr it easily. As a Flattr-er, you simply enter the creator’s Twitter handle into your Flattr dashboard, and it will store you pending micropayment to that individual until they get their own Flattr account. You can tweet to that person to let them know that you Flattred them, and when they join up the pending payment will go through.
The problem is an old one - people purchasing content don't mind paying for content. If I'm willing to pay $.20 for a song, I'm willing to pay $1.00. If I like getting the paper each day, I'll Pay $10 a week, and $12 a week won't change that. If it's online, I have to decide if it's worth it to pay for something I can find elsewhere.
Micropayments have been talked about for some time, and they assume the problem of the world is price. The problem of my world is time. I pay for all manners of things that i could do on my own, but who save me time. My whole business is based on this principle.
Micropayments don't take into account the time people spend consuming, and try create a market out of the goodwill of others. But we know what's going to happen. It's called a TipJar.
Really, this is what the tipjar on blogs was all about. If you like someone's blog, you give them some money. The vast majority of people who did so merely pushed money around. Small amounts between blog communities was moved around, but only a few people profited. Those were the ones like Andrew Sullivan who launched full scale blegging campaigns, and netted tens of thousands, and sometimes over hundred thousand. Of course, Andrew was already a writer with an audience. How many people match his output and had his audience? Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a tipjar, and asks on occasion, but these are both top ten blogs. Glenn makes a little, but not nearly enough to compensate him for his time, and much less than he makes on Amazon affiliates.
Micropayments to Twitter users is a natural extension for Flattr, but I'd be surprised if they make aas much as any decent Google adwords program or even a jobamatic job board. It's a nice idea, but if you're good enough to get paid in micropayments, you're good enough to get paid in macropayments.
Call it my
