I don't feel sorry for Flattr. The creator, Peter Sunde, one of the creators of The Pirate Bay, not only facilitates the sharing of content against the wishes of many of the owners, but charges 10% to use Flattr.
If Flattr was really all about helping others, the fee would be much less.
I still remember when he spoke at a conference and he talked about how everything should be shared/free. It seems he's not being very honest with us.
With the amount of advertising on TPB (and traffic), I know he was making a profit (and paying his salary).
Why should he get to profit on the backs of hard-working developers and musicians and at the same time saying they shouldn't be able to earn a living?
Come on, you can't compare TPB with Flattr. If your gripe is with the 10% fee, fine. I also think it's too high, and Sunde himself said when the economics allow for it, the fee may be reduced.
Why should he get to profit on the backs of hard-working developers and musicians and at the same time saying they shouldn't be able to earn a living?
When did he ever say the developers / musicians shouldn't be able to earn a living? Just because someone thinks culture should be shared for free with the world, doesn't imply that the creators (more like "remixxers") shouldn't be able to make a living from their work.
Find me a developer/musician who had to close up shop because TPB ran them out of business and I will eat my words.
>If Flattr was really all about helping others, the fee would be much less.
How much less? Five percent? One percent? The only other micropayment processor I'm aware of that has better rates than Flattr is Paypal's micropayment service at five percent plus five cents. Given Paypal's massive size advantage I'd say Flattr's doing well so far.
>...talked about how everything should be shared/free.
I'd think founding a startup aimed at micropayments for all kinds of artists and other creators would indicate that Peter's ideas about distribution of art and creator compensation are more nuanced than simply "everything should be shared/free." He says as much in TPB AFK. He certainly doesn't believe that copyright as it stands has any place in a digital world and Flattr seems to be his manner of investigating ways to share content while still giving back to creators.
>With the amount of advertising on TPB (and traffic), I know he was making a profit (and paying his salary).
I've found no numbers on just how much has been made via adverts or what it was spent on, though I'd imagine the costs of bandwidth for coordinating the majority of the planet's bit torrent traffic could easily reach thousands per month. The recently released documentary has one of the prosecutors arguing that there were 64 unique ads on the site at any given time, each costing 500 dollars per week, coming out to about 1.7 million in revenue each year. Gottfried says in the documentary that there were four unique ads, and that even 110k annual revenue was bigger than they had typically gotten but a more realistic figure. I'd love to see the actual balance sheets, though I doubt anyone from the defense or prosecution has any to speak of.
>...at the same time saying they shouldn't be able to earn a living?
90% of flattrs that cost next to nothing for the creator to take advantage of constitutes an incapacity to earn a living? Sounds better than what an artist would get via itunes or an old-fashioned record deal. Of course, this is all operating on the poor assumption that most artists would ever be able to earn a living off their work, no matter how draconian copyright law became or how perfectly DRM was designed and implemented.
We can get a hint about how much of the advertising went to the founders, by comparing it with an other high alexa ranked site: Wikipedia. Their budget is public.
At the time when Peter Sunde operated it, Wikipedia had about about 3 times the traffic of TBP. Wikipedia also had about 10 times higher of the operational budget (not counting Salaries and wages). We get this by looking at the TPB advertising money as reported by the police, and comparing it to the WP budget.
One can then either assume that Wikipedia administrators are swimming in money and have all bought small island in the Caribbeans, or that running a services on that scale is actually quite expensive.
> One can then either assume that Wikipedia administrators are swimming in money and have all bought small island in the Caribbeans, or that running a services on that scale is actually quite expensive.
Running services on the WMF may be quite expensive but that tells us little about TPB - the WMF is not really comparable. They're running hundreds of projects, not just the English Wikipedia; their staff are living in one of the most expensive places in the world, San Francisco; they're developing & supporting an infrastructure much more complicated than 'upload a torrent file and a textual description box', due to editing pages by all sorts of users with different privilege levels and rich media and exploiting HTML5 and working with new MediaWiki extensions like Semantic and of course the truly enormous size of Commons' media database of millions of photos and images and videos; they work under many more legal pressures than TPB (which takes joy at thumbing their nose at any legal issues); coordinate dozens of chapter organizations worldwide (some with significant amounts of revenue like the de chapter); and do other things like the floating Wikimania conference or the DVD encylopedias aimed at Africa or surveys or editor-retention projects or third-world article writing contests etc.
What TPB does is impressive in its own way, but simply is not on the same scale of complexity or variety.
At that time, Semantic was developed and funded by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Commons was just a year old and was of 1/16 of todays size. I am also not sure how many chapter organizations they had, or if the work towards any DVD encylopedias was in the works then.
I also intentionally excluded travel for the above calculations.
An other telling part can be seen in the Wikimeda fundation 2006 budget under the heading of "Internet hosting". To my understanding, that number is exclusive bandwidth costs.
The lowest I have seen is WebMoney with a 0.8% flat fee on all transfers. I have no idea though what the fees for depositing and withdrawing money from the system are though.
Card processors take 3% and have a ready made solution they can sell and sell again with zero modification. I don't see why a custom app for a specific purpose which will have limited use can't say they're taking 2x the card processors, 6% (adding up approximately to the 10% total cut).
edit: fixed a typo that inverted my whole point :)
If Flattr was really all about helping others, the fee would be much less.
I still remember when he spoke at a conference and he talked about how everything should be shared/free. It seems he's not being very honest with us.
With the amount of advertising on TPB (and traffic), I know he was making a profit (and paying his salary).
Why should he get to profit on the backs of hard-working developers and musicians and at the same time saying they shouldn't be able to earn a living?