TipiT.to

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

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.

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.

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.

Running a startup or any other kind of small creative company in the Netherlands is an interesting experience, but it poses its own share of hurdles which in large part are unnecessary. On my own blog, I posted an article summarizing all the friction you need to overcome to get some office space.

To help startups in the Netherlands overcome these obstacles and join their efforts together the STIKK foundation has been founded, which Tipit will be joining in the near future.

Two notable new tipjars on Tipit.to this week:

PluginAudio.net — a site which seems to be about audio plugins as far as I can tell put up a tipjar and got a big flurry of initial visitors and tips. This kind of community knowledge site is exactly the stuff we envision Tipit supporting.

Spotlight Effect Movember — some friends in Amsterdam decided to participate in Movember this year (and I’m joining them). They put up a tipjar all proceeds of which will go to the Dutch cancer foundation.

So much for this week. Keep the tips coming!

We recently added a thermometer widget so you can ask your readers to pledge tips for a goal. We have thermometers in a large vertical version and in a smaller horizontal variant, both of which are visible below:

You can reach the thermometer configuration from your tipjar page along with the other widgets and get the code necessary to paste it anywhere you want.

More stuff coming, but do let us know what you think about this.

Tomorrow I will be holding a session at Reboot not about Tipit but about topics very much of interested voluntary economic models in general.

It should be interesting and I’m very curious to see what the Reboot crowd can add to this story.

Slides and the likes will be posted later.