TipiT.to

The recent attention by our tipjar for Wikileaks got a lot of interesting new tipjars signed up into the system:

ArrestBlair is the tipjar for the campaign at ArrestBlair.org to make a citizen’s arrest of Tony Blair for the alleged crimes against peace he has committed (see also: Removing Immunity).

There are several tipjars dedicated to donating to the Haiti relieve effort such as: DonateForHaiti.org and another for French Unicef.

A citizen journalist in Greece ‘teacherdude’ has lost his equipment and has setup a tipjar to raise money to replace his gear.

And we also got the Dutch life hacking community with stalwart Martijn Aslander on board with tipjars for various community sponsored initiatives.

And those are just a few of the tipjars. We’ll be building better functionality to explore the activity on the site in the future. In the mean time, keep tipping!

This weekend Paypal froze Wikileaks’s account impeding their efforts to get funded (the entire site had been turned into a big pledge drive to secure future operation). This is a common occurrence for merchants of all sorts.

We also think that Wikileaks performs an important function online and in any case they are a great cause to have on TipiT. I tweeted them and told them TipiT is very much available and one of the few donation services that does not use Paypal to transfer money (with obvious and non-obvious benefits). Not to mention that we are far more responsive.

After some initial trouble keeping up with the load was resolved (which turned out to be just a minor glitch), the tipjar and thermometer for Wikileaks is up and running on the site (tipjar). It seems that Paypal has unfrozen the Wikileaks account again (see The Register), but we continue to serve as a donations conduit for Wikileaks and hope to do so in the future.

Some effort recently was focused on making the site available in different languages. TipiT is now available in a Dutch translation (try it out now!) because we also support a specialized Dutch payment method. Other languages are forthcoming.

Translation:

We hebben pas wat moeite gestoken in het beschikbaar maken van de site in verschillende talen. TipiT is nu ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands (probeer het direct uit!) vooral omdat we ook iDeal ondersteunen. Andere talen volgen spoedig.

Dutch privacy advocates Bits of Freedom have setup a tipjar requesting donations for their ongoing fight to preserve privacy in the Netherlands.

We could not wish for a more deserving cause to use TipiT and we would urge you to consider donating to them.

TipiT was represented at the Dutch Media Professionals event last week called “Show me the Money”. A small writeup can be found on Alper’s blog.

Another still-born attempt to try to make people pay for content: bitcents. Didn’t we try this before?

Also compare that to Springer’s jump on the bandwagon idea to charge for online content. A broader initiative with richer content linked to a tremendously easy payment method may have some success, but the old media executives trying to safeguard their bonuses indulge in a nontrivial amount of wishful thinking:

“How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said. (NYT)

And an interesting remark at the end of the article:

American publishers, he said, have been too timid in dealing with threats to their future […]
“The Americans don’t give a damn if the newspapers go down,” he said. “This is very different in Germany. This is Gutenberg’s country. We invented this.” (NYT)

A collaborative strategy such as the one discussed by Murdoch and Microsoft vs. Google, may work in the short term but in the long term it will probably provide a too lucrative and seductive upside to defectors. At least it would be an interesting play in a too boring discussion.

The above initiatives are why TipiT allows people to pay whatever they think your content is worth after they have seen it. This solves many of the problems associated with the pay-for schemes above.

Very unfortunately at a recent Plone conference Sree’s laptop got stolen. So to help him replace his laptop they setup a webpage to raise donations and they used a TipiT tipjar for the donations.

This is interesting and it is definitely a use case of TipiT but what is even more interesting is that TipiT isn’t the only service they setup to receive donations with. In fact the first link they have is for a cause on ChipIn. Now if you follow the links to both pages, you can see that TipiT has raised more than twice as much money for the same cause in a straight side-by-side test.

Just look at the screenshots:

Why is this the case?

Figuring out why this is the case requires some guesswork. I think we have the better albeit somewhat barebones donation system but the core of the difference is probably one vital factor: Paypal.

ChipIn uses Paypal as a payment processor and that will kill your conversion dead in its tracks. We know because we used Paypal and are intimately familiar with its integration options. Paypal offers a complete experience and for somebody who has an account already setup with an associated payment method, checkout is indeed very smooth. For somebody who doesn’t have that (which is still a very large part of the internet), the mental cost of setting all of that up just for one donation is too high.

Compare that to our checkout process which is just a form on our website where you enter your credit card number and the payment is processed directly. It’s not very hard to figure out that that is conceptually much more easy for a larger amount of people and therefore yields a higher conversion rate.

So important lesson: if you want to make donations really easy, it’s not enough to just integrate with a monolithic walled garden payment processor. Make it really easy.

Today is a nice start of the week for us. Lots of new stuff!

New payment options

We had been working on new payment options for a while and these are finally done. We are now allowing you to pay your tips using either credit card or iDeal (for Dutch customers) thanks to Adyen.

Payout options right now are limited to IBAN bank transfer. We are working to add mailed checks for US account holders this week or next and we recommend parties not covered by these options to get in touch to discuss a viable option to receive money from us.

There are some kinks in the credit card processing right now which should be ironed out during the course of today. iDeal is working fine. Update: Credit card processing is also working now.

Also see FAQ pay and receive money.

New site design

You may have noticed the new frontpage design which is not the only thing that is simpler in the new site. The entire interaction for a first time user coming in and tipping your site has been simplified to the point that a tipper does not need to create or verify an account to be able to pay their tips.

This is good news for tipjar owners because it further lowers the barrier to tip.

Integration with your website is already very easy but to make it even easier for you Wordpress users, Coen Jacobs has written this awesome TipiT Suite Wordpress Plugin which puts links on most places where you would want them.

A new design of course brings some bugs which we will be working on removing this week, if you stumble into anything, get in touch either here or at Get Satisfaction.

Funding

And last but not least we’re happy to announce that we have received an investment from the Dutch Creative Internet Fund, giving us the resources to focus on improving TipiT.to and build on the knowledge and experience of those already in the network.

See: press release, Dutch piece in Emerce, Webwereld, Freakenstein, Bright

Like I explained in this comment on Techcrunch, we think that tipping online (or any kind of voluntary payments) is just at the start phase and will experience a massive increase and development during the next years. We’re starting something new (again), join us and tell us what you think.

I just wrote a comment at Techcrunch to explain why we think tipping does have a future and what we hope to do once we relaunch the site.