How Wikipedia and Flattr can together change the World | Hacker News Reader

How Wikipedia and Flattr can together change the World

jyro.blogspot.com

21 pointsjayeshsalvi13 comments

The way it works is, your visitor has a Flattr account that he/she fills with some money each month.

Unfortunately that is where it falls apart.

The fund-raising model that "works" for Wikipedia is very different from the Flattr model. And I am not convinced that the Flattr model can scale up to the Wikipedia level.

(not to mention the fact that donations would be a lot more random, difficult to track and will come in fits & spurts; which is basically useless when you reach the levels of money the WMF is after)

If wikipedia adopts Flattr as their micropayment solution, overnight tons of people will open a Flattr account.

I do not think this would happen as easily as suggested.

Agreed. That's what we found at Bitpass, a micropayment system for digital content in which people were asked to buy a prepaid "phone card" for digital content. The minimum prepay was $3 and people were still complaining.

So, based on our experience at Bitpass, we recently launched a cashless micropayment system, ThankThis.com. Instead of a Flattr button, there's a ThankThis button. Clicking it shows you a small sponsored message (i.e. an opt-in ad), which pays the publisher and gives you points for your favorite charity or nonprofit, which could also be wikipedia.

In my experience the rate of flattr donations is not very bursty month over month. Even before they allowed to subscribe to continue re-flattring a Thing each month.

And of course I have lower volumes than wikipedia would, so I'd expect it would average out even more for them. :)

One thing is for sure: If Wikipedia managed to handle their funding through Flattr, Flattr itself would be making a killing with their 10% cut.

> One thing is for sure: If Wikipedia managed to handle their funding through Flattr, Flattr itself would be making a killing with their 10% cut.

A serious issue and a major downside from the perspective of Wikipedia, since people still worry about community effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_en...

Of course, there have been large-scale collaborations that have worked out before, so it's not impossible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Off-line_publi...

Well. I was mostly basing the fits and spurts thought on how we tend to get traffic on Wikipedia. Activity and visitor counts do vary wildly; and, of course, one would assume that suddenly high profile news stories would bring in a spike of traffic and possibly donations.

I'm not convinced that uptake would be widespread enough, though, to get enough people to contribute. The big ad-banner prompt is a "once a year" prompt, something that exists all the time I reckon would have less impact.

Why micropayments will not change the world: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...

Why don't they have one ad, a homepage big box?

YouTube's big box costs $200-250k/day.

Even at $50k/day they could easily rake in 15 million+ and still be a little undersold.

Jimmy Wales has been asked this a few times (probably a lot more than that), and their independence is more vauable than the money they would get from such sponsorship.

Instead they have a HUGE beg banner. Gah. It's like PBS donation mongering.

I think the idea is that this would be a one-way street. That once you start relying on ad sales, all future decisions would be colored by that reality. Since the impact of the ad(s) would be great, the effect on the evolution of Wikipedia would likely also be significant.

The big problem with this idea (other than the fact that the wikipedia fundraising model isn't broken at all), is that it's asking Wikipedia to use it's hard-earned clout and prestige to "improve the world" in an area that is not part of it's focus (micropayments).

Not to mention that if a banner once a year asking for money looks awkward, a micropayments button next to every single article is going to look a lot worse.

It would provide a way to compare that 10k people liked article A, while only 3 liked article B. In many ways that is a more interesting part of Flattr than the money itself.

Has anyone else noticed the double entendre in the name, "Flattr"? Flatter the recipient, and create a "flatter" distribution bypassing content middlemen.

I don't know whether this potential interpretation is/was intended. I skimmed their web site / blog, but I didn't see an allusion to the latter interpretation.

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