TipiT.to

Last weekend at Barcamp Amsterdam, I did a retake on the Voluntary Economies talk Reinier already gave at Barcamp London. I changed the order somewhat, focused it on a couple of main threads and put in stories from my own life and experience. I think it turned out quite okay.

Here are the slides and a writeup of the points I covered. I’ll probably give this talk more often in one incarnation or another. It’s fun to give and I think the issues in it are only going to become more pertinent. Writeup below the slides…

| View | Upload your own

Content is Free

A lot of content recently has become free, software applications, newspaper articles. A lot of these have found alternative ways to support their offering either by adding advertising or by partnering etc. This is nothing new, television has been mostly free because advertisers have been footing the bill.

Other content sources have become de facto free by the sharing enabled by digital copies and the internet. Music is one such industry where traditional institutions are struggling but a lot of musicians are finding empowerment and a potential to make money in this new reality. They do this not only by selling music but by managing their Tribe.

In many cases fans are excellent promoters and distributors of content, if you let them. They will manage to have everybody listen to a great CD they just discovered. And more and more musicians are showing breaking free and are showing themselves to be great cultivators of their fanbase.

Peer Production

Another source of value production is by individual amateurs contributing to a large whole, such as Wikipedia or tons of other crouwdsourced sites. In a lot of these sites it is a question how voluntary voluntary really is and where the ownership of the produced result lies and how the producers shoud be compensated.

There have been some established succesful cases (Threadless, Wikipedia) and other cases where a site built on the contribution of a large number of people has been sold by the founders and they have since struggled to find a suitable compensation model which cannot be gamed and which does not destoy the intrinsic motivation of the contributors.

Tipping is an uncertain and subjective enough way of compensating somebody that it cannot be taken for granted and is hard to game. Maybe tipping is a good way to distribute compensation in projects, such as this and maybe it isn’t? We could try it out, initial results are pretty positive.

(I don’t know myself yet, but this is a great topic to debate and to refine this thread for the future.)

Gift Economies

Voluntary payment has been employed for ages in various circumstances. The money boxes at unmanned fruit stalls seem to work nicely but do note the lock on the box. A person not paying for his fruit would be annoying, a person taking all the money from the box would be somewhat more annoying. Abuse is still possible and if it becomes widespread enough, the system as a whole breaks down.

It does seem to work quite nicely in a series of settings:

• the bagle guy from Freakonomics
• Terra Bite as one of a series of coffee shops that employ a pay as you like tab
• a series of Weinereien in Friedrichshain, Berlin where you can pay what you think you’ve drunk
• some freelancers in the Netherlands have begun to contract on a ‘pay as much as you think I’m worth’ basis

And just to think where this trend ultimately might lead, the story ‘Maneki Neko’ from Bruce Sterling’s collection ‘A good old-fashioned future’, paints a picture of a system where an operator-in-the-sky driven barter economy takes care of its participants. The system Sterling describes can happen in a world where there are so many connections and information and a smart system to make it work.

Before we completely automate this, creating a culture where everybody pays as much as they can and feel they should, could be one of the fairest (subjectively fair if nothing else) distributor of wealth thusfar. It’s an interesting thought experiment.

Concluding

Free does not change everything, it has been around for a long time. Free combined with voluntary payment in the current conditions makes a lot of interesting things possible of which we are seeing only the beginning.

So an abundance of information and content makes that paying up front is no longer attractive. If you ask money for your information, news, software application, people will either find a free way to get at it or find alternatives which are fact free.

Given this abundance, it makes sense to first build your fame and then make money off of that. Giving away stuff is a better way to get famous, than to charge money for it especially when the stuff is nearly completely free.

Setting payment at voluntary levels or creating a large amount of price discrimination in another way makes a lot of sense. Different people have radically different budgets and perceptions of value, one price does not easily cater to all of them and probably makes you miss out on money.

Anyway with Tipit.to we plan to provide a part of the infrastructure necessary for voluntary payment for all sorts of online content. Join us and we’ll see how it goes.

It looks like the ability to tip arbitrary tipjars has taken off judging from the front page. Most of these tipjars have not been claimed yet, but if you know the owners of the sites or would like them to claim the tipjar and put it on their site, send them an e-mail to let them know.

This weekend we shot a picture with us -the three founders of Tipit.to- for an interview in Sprout (Dutch entrepeneur magazine).

The interview turned out quite nicely and we think the picture did too.

A new feature introduced today is the ability to tip domains that have not yet been created by their owners at Tipit.to. By tipping them you indicate that you appreciate their work and you want to give them money through Tipit.to.

When they claim their domain, they will receive the money. Don’t worry, if your money sits unclaimed for six months, it will be automatically refunded to your account so you can tip it to someone else.

Sub-domains are allowed, case doesn’t matter and neither do ports. It also doesn’t matter if you add www. in front of a domain or not. We have also prepared a bookmarklet so you can tip directly from your browser’s bookmarks bar.

We have already started tipping our favorite sites (Sinfest, Questionable Content, Boing Boing, Waiterrant) small amounts of money. You can start tipping your favorite sites right now.

You may be wondering if there are strategies that will net your tipjar more money. Getting people to pay you money is mostly your own responsibility. Tipit.to provides the infrastructure and publishes sites that get tipped, but the people most inclined to tip your site are the visitors of your site, not visitors to Tipit.to.

There seem to be a couple of obvious things that make a difference in the amount of clickthroughs on the Tipit.to button and the amount of money donated.

1. Put your Tipit.to button in a prominent place.
2. Tell people to click on it, either with text around the button or in a post. We are going to make the Photoshop files available, so you can make your own Tipit.to buttons.
3. Make it clear what the money is going to be used for (also in the description).
   Things like server costs and other necessary stuff for the continuity of your site stand a good chance of netting a contribution. Promising that you will do something for your visitors when you get certain amounts of money could also be a nice strategy.

A site which has taken the effort to really integrate the Tipit.to button and has netted a lot of of referral clicks is Image*After.com.

We have been busy developing usability enhancements and new features to the Tipit.to website over the last week. Let us know of anything that would make your life as a tipper or tip receiver easier.

We are displaying tips given by users and tips received by tipjars as well as tip intentions. This way you can track interesting people and tipjars on the site much easier.

You can now verify a domain tipjar using e-mail. We noticed that uploading a file or editing the <head> of your page was too complex for most users, so we’ve added the option to verify your domain by sending an e-mail to either one of the trusted e-mail addresses: webmaster@, info@ or admin@.

There’s stil a lot in the pipeline. Tell us your wishes and comments.

I gave a small pitch presentation at a Holland Open event for the breakthrough project of 2008.

| View | Upload your own

There were some other great presenters (like OpenStreetMap) and Tipit was selected as one of the breakthrough projects. We got a lot of positive responses from the audience afterwards, which was great.

It’s been hectic after the launch last week but we’ve already got a tipjar that is very a worthy cause to give money to. Laurens’s house has burnt down and he has lost all his stuff. You can see the pictures of the devastation on Flickr and a movie on YouTube:

The destruction is incredible and just stop for a second to imagine how an event such as this would affect you. Some people already have started to donate, so if you could spare a couple of bucks to show him that you care, I think it would be greatly appreciated.

Here are the two press releases we sent out post launch to various media outlets in the Netherlands and outside. We tried to convey as much information in a readable way.

I’ve pasted them here below for future reference:

Tipit.to is a new Dutch/English tipping startup enabling people to show their appreciation by donating small amounts of money.

Today Tipit.to is launched to the public at http://tipit.to enabling content owners to create tipjars and receive money for their efforts. Tipit.to works as a catalyst in an economy where content is free by default and money is made increasingly by voluntary mechanisms. We see a great need for donation systems where the person giving has maximal control and is subject to a minimum of hassle.

What is tipit?

Tipit.to is an online service which facilitates the donation of small amounts of money to webites as a token of appreciation for the content they have made available. People receive a widget they can put on their sites. Visitors clicking on this widget are taken to Tipit.to where they with minimal friction can store a tip intention. After tipping they are returned to the original site.

Tipit.to is a secure service which takes care of all the details for these microtransactions. Tip transactions are batched together to save on transaction costs. Transactions are done using Paypal for payment processing but other payment methods are in the works. Tipit.to is a free service and depends on the tips of its users for its income.

Tipping has always been a social phenomenon. To facilitate this Tipit.to publishes tips from public profiles so people can publish their tips, subscribe to others’ tips and site owners can display their top tippers. Besides that Tipit.to shows the most popular sites on the web by amount of tips received (forthcoming).

After development and finalization of legal and financial details in 2007, Tipit.to has found its way to an early 2008 launch. Site owners can put “Like it? Tip it!” buttons on their sites and start receiving donations from their visitors today.

Tipit.to is founded by Reinier Zwitserloot, Jeroen van Embden and Alper Çugun, all alumni of Delft, University of Technology. They are available to answer all your questions regarding the service and its socio-economic implications.

and in Dutch:

Tipit.to is een nieuwe Nederlands/Britse startup die mensen in staat stelt hun waardering te uiten voor online content door een kleine hoeveelheid geld te doneren.

Vandaag is Tipit.to publiek gelanceerd (op http://tipit.to) met de mogelijkheid voor site-eigenaren om fooienpotten aan te maken en geld te ontvangen voor hun werk. Tipit.to neemt een rol in als katalysator in een economie waar content bijna altijd gratis is en steeds meer betalingen vrijwillig zijn. Wij zien een grote behoefte aan donatie-systemen waar de donateur maximale controle heeft en minimale moeite hoeft te doen.

Wat is Tipit.to?

Tipit.to is een online dienst die het doneren van kleine bedragen (fooien) aan websites mogelijk maakt. Site-eigenaren kunnen een knop op hun site plaatsen waar bezoekers op kunnen klikken om een fooi te geven. Ze worden dan doorgestuurd naar naar Tipit.to waar hun fooi-intentie wordt opgeslagen. Na het geven van de fooi worden ze teruggestuurd naar de originele site.

Tipit.to is een veilig platform dat alle details van deze microtransacties afhandelt. Betalingen worden samengenomen om niet teveel geld kwijt te zijn aan transactiekosten. Tipit.to gebruikt nu Paypal voor de transacties maar er wordt gewerkt aan meer methoden. Het gebruik van Tipit.to is gratis; gebruikers krijgen de optie om Tipit.to fooien te geven voor de geleverde dienst.

Fooien zijn een fenomeen dat deels werkt op basis van sociale normen. Om die dynamiek online te bewerkstelligen, publiceert Tipit.to fooien van publieke profielen zodat mensen hun fooien kunnen tonen, zich kunnen abonneren op de fooien van anderen en site-eigenaars hun fooigevers kunnen laten zien. Daarnaast introduceert Tipit.to binnenkort een lijst van de meest populaire sites van het internet op basis van ontvangen fooien.

Na ontwikkeling en afronding van de site in 2007, is Tipit.to vroeg in 2008 gelanceerd. Mensen kunnen vanaf vandaag “Like it? Tip it!” knoppen op hun site zetten en donaties van hun bezoekers ontvangen.

Tipit.to is een initiatief van Reinier Reinier Zwitserloot, Jeroen van Embden en Alper Çugun, alle oud-studenten van de Technische Universiteit Delft. Zij zijn beschikbaar om vragen over de site en gebruiksmogelijkheden te beantwoorden.

After the launch this Wednesday, we saw we needed to add some features and clarification here and there. Both based on your feedback and on what we had lying around ourselves.

First the frontpage with the statistics for popular sites has been added. Because we are in the early stages now and don’t have many real tips yet, we have chosen to list tip intentions in the statistical views of the site.
We are still debating how far we should weigh intentions, but the plan is to show them for now but phase them out in the near future. People tipping large bogus tips, will immediately get notifications that they should pay up.

Further we are going to add more lists with interesting data through various places so that you can browse through the site and have something to look at. And a nice way to find and add friends will be added.

In the mean time, keep the feedback and the tips coming.