Flattr doesn’t work for me

So my six month experiment with Flattr has come to an end. In short, my revenue was a measly €0.42 for €2/month payment. Not worth it.

Flattr was just too much hassle. I’d want it to be able to add pages from an RSS feed, but instead, every page had to be added manually. It wouldn’t even spider your sites to index content. You had to go to the site to find new things to read (I’ve never found a Flattr badge in the wild), and it is really difficult to filter by language and keywords. Worst of all, you have to remember to click on at least one thing a month, otherwise your payment would disappear down a black hole.

Here’s my payment/revenue breakdown:

Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-10-31
€-1.70
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-10-10
€0.09
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-09-30
€-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-08-31
€-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-07-31
€-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-06-30
€-2.00
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-06-10
€0.33
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-05-31
€-2.00
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-05-10
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-05-04
€-0.44
PayPal -> means
2010-05-02
€12.14

And here’s what was actually clicked:

Period Thing Clicks Revenue
2010-05 We Saw a Chicken … 1 €0.20
2010-05 Numpty’s Progress 1 €0.13
2010-09 Numpty’s Progress 1 €0.09

My blogs might be a bit, um, niche, but I’d expected to have at least broken even.

Flatter: hopefully, not the Dexit of micropayments

Micropayments are a bit like legal weed – only the users want it, and the suppliers and their opponents would rather keep the status quo. Lots of smart people have tried it (remember Peppercoin? Ron Rivest was in on that one) and not many real users have ended up using it.

Flattr, like every other new system, claims to be different from every other system. It’s a patronage system, where users/readers/listeners can click on the Flattr link and divvy up their monthly contribution amongst everyone they liked.

I forget how (or exactly why) I got an invitation, but I finally activated it and credited enough for 6 months’ usage this morning. Now I need to go out and find things to like … and they’re thin on the ground.

Jag kanske inte svenska tillräckligt, but I’m not seeing much that has likeable content. Maybe my user number – in the low 1000s – is a hint, but let’s see how things go by the end of October.  I’m hoping it doesn’t end up like Dexit, the dismal downtown Toronto cashless payment system that never got the inertia (or reliable terminals) needed to survive. One can never tell with these online things; when I signed up with Twitter in early 2007, it was a pretty hopeless system …