Tipjoy: The Latest Run at Micropayments
What web worker has not dreamed of making a living through micropayments. Use the internet to provide useful information, charge each visitor a penny, and rake in the aggregated cash. The only problem: so far, micropayments have been a big flop; too much overhead and not enough people bothering to get signed up to donate money. Startup Tipjoy things they have the answer to this problem by removing as much friction from the process as possible. You put a Tipjoy button on your site, visitors click it and leave their email to give you a dime. When you get up to five bucks, you can draw your money out in the form of an Amazon gift card.
The only problem I see with this theory is that they may have made it too easy to leave a tip: you don’t have to provide any payment info when you leave someone money. When you get up to five bucks in tips waiting for payment, they start emailing you to hand over the money; until the actual tips are in hand, the page owners get nothing but a warm feeling. If you’re optimistic enough to trust the long-term honesty and generosity of your readers, though, the buttons are unobtrusive and easy to use.
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I would be curious to see what the percentage of people that say they will pay actually do pay. Still though, I like the idea of making it very easy for readers to offer a tip in even small amounts.
Wouldn’t we need to see the mechanism through which the donations are made to judge if this is a good tool?
We offer a competing service (http://tipit.to) with the difference that we do allow you to take out money.
We are already seeing that the concept is working for sites with a loyal user base that place the button in a prominent place with an explanation.
I’m a cofounder of Tipjoy. Thanks for the post!
We figure that when serving digital content that is already free, whatever payment rate users choose, it’s beneficial to the receiver.
We’re still aggregating the numbers, but they are better than you’d think.
Justin, you can go to a few sites that are using Tipjoy to see how it works.
http://mattmaroon.com/
http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/26/thoughts-on-startups
http://www.ijigg.com/songs/V24PB0
http://wickedflavory.com/
We will allow users to take out cash once we complete a Series A round of funding and get licensed as a money transfer agent. This is required to operate in the US, obeying things like the Patriot Act.
We’ve found that the charity side of it is actually very much in line with the voluntary donation aspect, though. Lots of bloggers are excited to use it just because of that aspect.