Tipit.to would like to congratulate Gerard van Enk with the launch of his new site for his daily news publication the gvenk daily. Gerard has been summarizing the news in Dutch every day on his twitter account for a while now. With the gvenk daily site he has built this out into a more complete publishing and distribution platform powered by twitter.
The gvenk daily site has a Tipit button for support so we would like to wish Gerard best of luck with his work and urge you all to go and leave him a nice tip.
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.
This weekend the Amsterdam Software Social will organize a summer barbecue to socialize and celebrate. Tipit.to and friends are sponsoring the drinks, so this should be a very fun event.
Register at the site and have fun. I myself unfortunately won’t make it but other Tipit.to founders as well as many of the other usual suspects (and I hope some new faces) will be present.
Paul Graham’s latest essay (“Be Good”) about how you should try to do what is good and this does not necessarily have to be the path to the largest short term gains, but probably is the path to the best thing for you, your company and your users in the longterm, sounds very logical to us.
As you may know, the Tipit.to service is free by default. We do not charge any money and only subtract a sufficient amount of money to recoup our transaction costs. Any savings we can negotiate on transactions will directly benefit our users (and an actual percentage of the current overhead is available on our FAQ page).
We make our money by soliciting a tip from users who cash out money from us. So if our tipjar owners do not get paid, we do not get paid. We think this is the best way to organize a system such as this and it keeps us motivated to make it easy for our users to give and especially to receive as much as possible.
You can now message anybody that tipped you, and anyone with a profile. The ability to mail thank you notes has been asked for more than once. I added some abuse protection, but we’ll have to see if I have to go a step further and allow users to block all mail sent via tipit.to
The ability to tip unclaimed tipjar owners will be added shortly.
One place where you can find the messaging icon is where you would expect it, on your tips received page:
You’re then presented with an web based e-mail send form:
We hope you like it.
Comments
Comments on tips were sort of private; they didn’t show up on your profile page, for example. In retrospect, if you can see the tip, you might as well see the comment too. So, from now on, comments are always displayed along with the tip.
Popular tipjars
The new front page algorithm introduced last week is working fine, though I think I’ll increase the factor that makes tips count less and less over time; it seems a bit too static for now.
Also more data will be added to the display of popular tipjars.
If you like it and you would like to support us, you can go to the site pitchstorm.tv, register in the box on the upper right hand corner and after confirming your registration you can vote for us in the poll.
We’re planning a sizable batch of updates during the course of today (these things always take longer than you think), but this weekend I added the original graphics files to the Tipit button page.
We now have the files for the button and the tipjar image available in Adobe Illustrator compatible files for you to take and edit however you want. Thanks again Martijn for his great designs.
So take these images and create your own versions of them. We won’t hold a contest or anything, but if you make something we like, we will definitely tip you.
This Wednesday, I was at the Plugg.eu European startup conference. It was a joy to meet interesting new people and old friends alike at an event focused on the European startup experience.
It was interesting to hear from some of the VCs that they think there is a big market in the near future in small payments for online content. We think Tipit.to is excellently positioned to become a player in that market.
