TipiT.to

Sinds februari is het helaas niet meer mogelijk om geld te doneren via TipiT. Uit veiligheidsoverwegingen hebben wij onze faciliteit uitgeschakeld. Aan al onze enthousiaste gebruikers bieden wij hiervoor onze excuses aan.

Wij beseffen dat het steunen van goede doelen door ons besluit moeilijker is geworden voor u. Ook organisaties die uw steun nodig hebben, zijn hiermee getroffen. Het uitkeren van geld uit de bestaande fooienpotten aan doelorganisaties blijft overigens onverminderd mogelijk, zij het met vertraging door de noodzakelijke extra controles.

Juist om in ons gestelde vertrouwen waar te maken, hebben wij tot deze drastische maatregel besloten. Dit als antwoord op pogingen om TipiT te misbruiken voor creditcardfraude. Deze pogingen zijn dankzij onze controles mislukt. Uw donaties zijn dan ook geen moment in gevaar geweest.

Onze controles zijn afdoende om incidentele pogingen tot fraude via TipiT te blokkeren. Maar tot onze teleurstelling schiet ons systeem tekort om operationeel te blijven bij grootschalige pogingen tot fraude. Hiervoor hebben wij helaas nog geen oplossing gevonden. Elke dag werken wij met volle kracht aan een vernieuwd en volledig veilig TipiT. Wij houden u vanzelfsprekend op de hoogte van de voortgang.

Mocht u vragen hebben, aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen.

English translation:

As of February it is no longer possible to donate money via TipiT. Due to security considerations we disabled money receiving facilities. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our faithful users.

We realize this has made it more difficult to support charities and this has reduced options for organizations that need support. Payout of money from existing tipjars has been and remains possible, though with some necessary delays for additional checks.

Attempts to abuse TipiT for credit card fraud forced us to take this drastic measure to be able to continue to meet all our obligations. None of these fraud attempts has been successful and your donations have not been at risk at any time.

Our checks suffice to prevent occasional attempts at fraud through our system. But we are disappointed to say that our system cannot stay operational during large scale attacks. We haven’t found a sustainable solution yet to deal with this. We are looking for a set of adjustments that will enable us to resume operations in a secure manner and we will keep you posted of developments.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Hello everybody,

TipiT has gotten a lot of attention recently. We are very glad about that. Most of this attention has been positive but a significant part of it has turned out to be fraudulent. These fraudulent attacks are taking its toll on the site to a degree that operation is not sustainable right now.

We will be disabling creation of new tips and tipjars until we figure out a way to solve this problem in a scalable fashion. Payment out remains possible but may be subject to delays to screen for fraud.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we thank you for your patience.

Thanks,
The TipiT Team

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.