Flattr.com – A new way of giving credit to bloggers?

We’ve been trying out a service called Flattr.com, which is a way of giving bloggers, and other authors/creators credit for what they produce and publish on the Internet. It should also be possible to reward people posting comments in your blog using this, but we never got it working. It’s a nice idea, but will it work in reality?

Flattr is a Swedish company founded by Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, famous from the Pirate Bay trial, and it’s the only (???) company allowing donations to Wikileaks.

Bloggers (or anyone producing content like videos/pictures etc) can add a small button on their pages, so that visitors can give the author a little credit for their work (i.e. donations). This requires that the visitor got an account with Flattr.com and also that they have money in the account. At the end of the month the minimum of 2 euro each user must give are divided by the number of Flattr’s the user have given during the month and that’s given to the people receiving the Flattr’s. So if you decide to give 2 euro and give 100 Flattr’s each person you have given a Flattr will get 2 euro / 100 Flattr’s = 0.02 euro each. The value of each Flattr is depending on both your minimum spend and also how many Flattr you give. Confusing? Just a little bit, after a while you get used to is.

What’s more annoying than the value of each Flattr is the errors you get from their button (see example button the the right). Most of the times I’ve checked the button we have on this page (see the top and the bottom of this post) I got an error message instead of the possibility to click on it 🙁 . They are still in beta, but if something isn’t working most of the time it should perhaps be a private beta or an alfa release instead. People will get annoyed if they just see errors.

Another downside is that you need to give money every month. You may perhaps take a break in the giving, but from what I’ve understood you will not be able to get if you don’t give, so what do you do during your vacation etc?

One good thing I like about them is that when you have their plugin (I don’t know which one of them because they have several and they all work really poorly) it’s posting your blog posts to their web site so Google can find them. Every new post we’ve posted while we’ve been testing the plugin have been found by Google within just a few minutes 😉 . I don’t know if that’s worth 2 euro / month since if you ping Feedburner you get the same results.

As mentioned above they got several WordPress plugins doing different things, but very similar things. I don’t know why they haven’t created one plugin doing everything, and then a settings page where you can turn on or off services you want or don’t want.

Anyway, this could be a new Entrecard: Really popular until people lose interest. What do you think? Do you have a Flattr account?