Or somebody else.

I’m a big fan of people getting paid for their work, even if their work consists of ideas that are easy to duplicate. Very often I find myself reading a blog or looking at a picture thinking “Hey I wanna pay this person so they can keep producing more!” Usually there is no easy way of doing this and I also think a lot of people find it strange to ask for money for a job that seems “easy” such as blogging or writing music. To me there is no big difference between reading something good in a blog or reading it in a newspaper and I would gladly pay for a lot of blogposts and other stuff, just like I pay for books I read. If more people could make a living out of what they put on the internet we would all get better content, imo.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I found Flattr and decided to give it a try.

Now, I don’t need more money than I make from touring (at least not at the moment) but I do feel strongly about inventive ways to make sure whoever produces stuff I consume gets paid, so I decided to give it a try.

The way it works is you set up an account and create a button such as this one

You put the button in your blog and when people click it you get one piece of their montly flattr ammount that they can set to a minimum of 2€ and a maximum of 20€. So if you set your account limit to 2€ and only flattr this one thing, I would get your entire 2€. If you flattr 10 things during a month I would get 1/10 of your monthly limit. If you don’t flattr anything, they give your monthly 2€ to charity.

The way I look at it is the more people who join this, the better it could work. I’m gonna try it out for a while and for now I will use all funds generated by being flattrd to flattr other things. If you have any stuff that you think I should flattr, please feel free to suggest!

The way I see it the system is not perfect, but a good start. For instance you can only flattr each thing once a month meaning you have to create a new button in stead of just using the same button for everything you would like to be flattrd for. Also, I don’t see a reason for limiting how much people want to spend flattring. I spend hundreds of euros each month on books, magazines and movies and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to spend more than 20 to flattr blogs written by people who often probably are in more need of cash than big publishers…

Also, they should add a way to un-flattr if you (like I just did) happen to flattr yourself. I don’t even know why that is possible… But it’s in Beta-mode so I guess stuff like that will be sorted out.

So, I hope all my favourite blogs add this and that the people behind flattr remove the limits so I can flattr as much as I like. And since people seem kinda uptight about others getting paid for stuff they put on the internet I will let you know if I start taking money out of my account some time in the future.