The cake is a lie. This is exactly like contenture, which shut down:
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/the-anti-ad-network-contenture-shuts-its-doors/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/the-anti-ad-network-content...</a><p>God knows I think it would work in theory.<p>I really like what <a href="http://kickstarter.com" rel="nofollow">http://kickstarter.com</a> is doing in this space. But really, commerce is more important than this kind of P2P system. Easy payments != voluntary micropayments for free content.<p>edit: so contenture didn't involve explicit clicks like flattr, but I think the analogy still sticks.
I think this comes from Pirate Bay believing their own PR, that their users are not thieves, they merely lack a good way to get money directly to the artists for their works. I just <i>love</i> when people get to dogfood their own PR. This should be good.<p>Like Ivan says, there is a lot of room for improving payments (take Paypal -- please!) but difficulty of affecting payment is not the number one issue for small content producers. The problem is, ahem, they are trying to sell something to people who do not want to give them the money that they largely don't have. Also, there are a million content producers chasing the same pool of money <i>and</i> many of them get queasy at the notion of actually charging for value.<p>Looking at the economy stats in the New York Times I do not get the impression that high school students have 15 times more disposable income than a decade ago. However, they are consuming digital content at a multiple far, far above 15x what they were a decade ago. This means that even if you came up with the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy who could somehow convince them to pay their money for things, each producer would see less and less. Also, the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy, if she is fair, is going to tell you that by weight the kids seem to be consuming about 90% Brittney Spears and other mass market hits (oh, I'm msorry, you thought people pirated music that was low quality and paid for the artists they wanted to support? Dogfood your PR.) and 10% long tail, of which you are individually entitled to 1/1000th share.<p>The traditional way to avoid this is to actually charge money to people who have it for things they are willing to buy. If you totally lack in ideas, "Software for grown women" works pretty well and it isn't <i>nearly</i> as fished out as producing anonymous "content" for the usual suspects.
It seems a bit arbitrary to just chop up a flat fee and pay it out equally once a month to all the content providers I "flattred"; it's sort of like saying everything was of equal value, which probably isn't the case. However, from Flattr's point of view, I see how this makes it a lot easier to manage as far as distributing funds goes.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on how to use it to replace payments for an industry (like music) or to replace the subscription model for a webapp, and maybe that is a bit far-fetched but I can see a huge use in this for low-level stuff.<p>If I Google a programming exception and get an answer from a blog I can show them some love. I create a lot of small websites used by friends and people from school or some other social context and I can very well see myself sticking that button on all of them to help me buy an extra beer this weekend.<p>If it grows enough it might be able to fund some "real" stuff, but I don't think it should be put in that context from the get-go.
People still are generally want to do good and genereally want to pay for and reward good content if it's super easy and they don't have to think about spiraling costs.<p>I think the "flat rate" part might be the trick to make this work. If I know I'm only paying for instance $5 or $10 a month, why wouldn't I use flattr to reward content i like?
Would be better with a camel as an example and not a cake because thats what many industries has to swallow to get into this model. Interesting approach though. Micropayment is a nut that needs to be cracked and if browsers vendors doesn't do it someone else should.
At the end of the flattr intro video, the guy says:<p><i>If you haven't guessed it, flattr is a wordplay of "flatter" and "flat rate"</i><p>I'm curious, did others think of the "flat rate fee" wordplay before he mentioned it?
tipjoy I believed a y combinator companyhas tried something similar to this concept, and they shut down already .. <a href="http://tipjoy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tipjoy.com/</a><p>I hope they have better luck
this will forever be up to the content producers rather than some centralized service. when artists make it easy for me to buy stuff from them I will often pay them rather than search for their stuff for free.
Don't see security questions addressed.<p>Any transaction involving anything of value is going to have to be full secure transaction. A secure transaction takes time and effort for a person to make.<p>Any new supposedly "simple and easy" transaction system is going to have to remove security somewhere. Within 6 months of launch, everyone is the world is going to wake up to find one morning all their flattr cake are belong to some guy in a Former Soviet Republic. After a few failed desperate patch attempts wind up with more cake being bulk shipped to former Soviet Republics, Flattr will be declard a flop.