TipiT.to

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.

Recent discussions have raised the question if tipping is a viable model for sites to earn money. A question often asked is what do you do if somebody makes a lot of tip intentions and never pays them. The default answer to that is that those people were never really interested in tipping you anyway and to focus on building a relationship with people who are.

Anyway, we got into the database and racked up some numbers and it looks like it is actually working quite well. We are seeing an overall payup rate of 54% and if you exclude the people who didn’t bother to verify their e-mail (the drive-by tippers) the percentage goes up to 76%. So we’re quite happy with that result and we are thinking of ways it can be improved further.

When I talk to people about Tipit here in the Netherlands, I always have to add to my pitch that, ‘It is working and yes people really do pay up.’ Now we have some figures to back it up.

Here’s a passionate demonstration by Jeff Atwood about why donating is just so much simpler than registering shareware. We couldn’t agree more, obviously!

If you are a software developer who wants to try this out, by all means, shoot us an email if you need anything.