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The life of creators who try to provide their readers with good and original content is getting harder every day. On the one hand you have content farms like Demand Media, eHow and others cranking out mediocre pieces at rates never seen before, on the other hand readers react more and more allergic to advertisements which have not been a great yet stable way to monetize a blog.

I already wrote a post on the possibility of turning a blog like this one into a freemium model, offering extra content via subscriptions. Though this has worked out pretty well for me personally, it may not be the ideal model for everyone. So, let’s talk about reading flatrates.

There are two ways of supporting writers and content creators: active and passive. In this first post I would like to talk about the active ways.

Of course, the most direct way is a donation but lets be honest, this will only work in very rare cases. I regularly analyze follow the activity on blogs in education with a donation button but also the most influential tech blogs and generally spoken people don’t seem to care a great deal for the donation options. If techcrunch, a blog with around 1.5 million page views and a little less than 150.000 fans on Facebook, manages to attract a mere 80 people to donate less than $8000 for a cause prominently positioned on its main page, it says a lot. Same is true for Wikipedia with only 0.12% of unique monthly visitors who donated to get the needed $16 million, largely given my wealthy philanthropists according to the statistics. Let’s not even start with my own blog, you can have a look at it yourselves. Long story short, it blows my mind!  Croudfunding like kickstarter however seems to work in cases where donators have the potential opportunity to hold the product funded in their own hands one day. Let’s boil it down to the essence of paying for something that exists already versus investing in something you might own at some point in the future.
The second option is clicking on advertisements on the site which is actually problematic as Google might count this as click fraud if your readers did it every day, so it’s a very thin line.
Third option was something like affiliate links, the reader sees a product placement from Amazon, maybe a book he or she would like to buy anyway, and then buys it via the affiliate link.

All of the above are possibilities but far from being perfect and suitable for every writer and content creator.

Active Support: flattr

One of the first startups that built a service for content creators to help them generate revenue from their readers besides the classic models of advertisements or sponsorships are the guys from flattr.

flattr is a wordplay from “to flatter” and “flatrate”. Consumers of content, e.g. readers of a blog, viewers of a webcast, listeners of music, … pay a small monthly fee to their flattr account. The amount can be chosen by the consumer, may it be 2 Euro or 10 Euro or more.

Creators of content, e.g. bloggers, video creators, musicians, … can embed a small flattr widget next to their content similar to the Tweet or Facebook Share buttons. If a consumer likes the content, he or she can click on the flattr widget and therefore pay the content creator.

At the end of the month each content creator who received a flattr will get his / her “piece of the pie”. If a consumer “flattred” 10 creators, each of them gets a 10th of the monthly fee the consumer wants to spend, e.g. if the consumer wants to spend 2 Euro each creator will get 0.20 Euro or if it’s 10 Euro then every creator will be paid 1 Euro.

flattr is already quite popular in the German blogger scene and as author André Klein pointed out in the Edupreneurs Club on Facebook, it seems as if there existed a certain range of topics flattr works best for. In Germany’s case it’s politics and culture. I think, what we see is an ecosystem that evolved around a certain circle of blogs that use flattr and a readership that overlaps, e.g. readers who consume content from several blogs within this circle.

You don’t join flattr as a reader for just one blog. In that case you could make a donation directly to this particular blogger. But as soon as the most part of the blogs that are of interest to this group of readers offer such a widget it makes sense and becomes a standard.

To make this work for education we needed to team up and make the flattr button a standard on all blogs and content websites in our space. I could imagine that working pretty well in the circle of lesson material creators for example. If the teachers who download the lesson plans from various sources could flattr all of the content creators it might become an important source of income. But, as I said, the clear majority of those resource sites needed to take part in that in order to make it work.

The other problem I see is the “active” part in flattr. Although it may not seem such a big thing, pushing a mouse button can be very hard for consumers. If your readers don’t even have the time to share your blog post or lesson plan with their network on Twitter or Facebook by clicking on the widget, why should it work with flattr? It’s a constant struggle to get people out of their comfort zone equaling passivity.

In the second post, I will write about passive methods of support. Meanwhile, I would alike to hear your ideas and exchange views. Is flattr an option for your blog, or even better, an option for a group of bloggers and websites you know about?

Related Links:

1. flattr