Flattr

History

In March 2010 Flattr launched via an invitation-only basis and then opened to the public on 12 August of the same year.

Flattr is a project started by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. Users are given the choice to pay any monthly donation (provided a minimum of 2 euros) which is then split equally among websites, pages or service accounts they selected using a flattr button. This is comparable to an Internet tip jar. The word "flattr" is used as a verb, to indicate payments through the Flattr system. Upon clicking a Flattr button, users are logged in to the Flattr site, thus said to be "flattring" the page they are on. Sunde said, "We want to encourage people to share money as well as content."

In the beginning of the service, Flattr itself took 10% of all users' monthly flat rate, however, this fee would later be reduced.

In December 2010, Flattr received large-scale attention when it was tweeted to be a method of donating money to WikiLeaks, which had recently been cut off by PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard.

On 28 April 2011, Flattr announced by email that they would not require users to flattr others before they could be flattrd themselves, starting from 1 May 2011.

On 16 April 2013, Twitter announced that they would no longer allow Flattr users to Flattr favorites, citing commercial confusion problems they believed would occur between users.

In May 2016, Sunde announced that Flattr teamed with Adblock Plus to release Flattr Plus, an add-on that allows ad block users to automatically give money to website owners when an ad is blocked.

Extensions

As the service relies on network effect to prove useful, it is necessary that users join and have the opportunity to flattr and be flattr'd. A wide number of platforms are supported including WordPress, Blogger, and Joomla among many others. To foster faster adoption, including on sites that may not natively support Flattr, a Firefox plugin, Överallt ("everywhere" in Swedish) has been developed. It allows the equipped browsers to parse a simple plain-text tag ([Flattr=ID]) and replace it inline with the Flattr widget. This extends the range of Flattr, so that not only sites that support Flattr, but all sites, can have Flattr buttons.

For real-world or non-web content

Flattr can also be used for micro-donations to offline content, including those which are non-computer based, by way of mobile device recognition of QR codes. A number of existing services exist to allow for the "flattr-ing" of non-web-based content, including offline content, using many smartphones' capability of recognizing physical QR codes. Utilizing QR codes attached to Flattr buttons allows for donations to the specific physical or non-web-based item of choice.

Funding

In 2012 Flattr received funding from Passion Capital Investments, LLP and Federico Pirzio-Biroli to the sum of EUR1.6 million.

Awards