The Gospel According To Rhys - Colwyn Bay North Wales Web blog About Sport, Wrestling, PHP, SEO, Social Media & Networking

One of the more interesting websites I discovered over the past few days was Flattr, a way in which “content providers” (bloggers, musicians, plugin developers) can be rewarded financially for the content they put out.

From a BBC article about the service, it says this:-

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

So where you see Digg & Tweetmeme buttons now, you may see Flattr buttons appearing. But instead of sharing content, every click you make donates some money to the creator. You choose how much you pay for the service per month, and then 90% of your cash gets split between the number of buttons you click. (so say if you have 10 clicks & you pay $10 a month, each individual click recipient gets $1).

It’s a fascinating idea, as it does seem in principle to sort out the problem when it comes to people donating (people often say they will, but the effort in doing so often puts a lot of people off), also, with this micropayments platform, if somebody knocks a doozy of a blog post out, then giving them something for it is as easy as Digging it or tweeting it.

However, a service like this needs members, which begs the question – would you sign up to receive payments? More importantly, would you sign up to give them?