Online Tip Jar

Have you ever felt the urge to donate some money to an artist after profoundly enjoying a book, movie, or song you paid nothing for? Paul Carr, of TechCrunch, got the urge this weekend when he watched a bunch of episodes of Jonathan Creek, written by English television writer David Renwick. He wanted to send Renwick some cash as a token of appreciation for his brilliant work, but could not find a readily accessible mechanism to do so.

As Carr mentions, there are a number of web services that attempt to address this problem, such as Flattr, Sprinklepenny, and Kachingle. All of these sites allow content consumers to subscribe (usually $5/month), and then let you distribute your love (cash) to artists and content creators who have a Flattr/Sprinklepenny/Kachingle button on their websites. Carr proceeds to systematically point out the inherent deficiencies of each of these services (mainly that the likelihood that any of his favorite artists using one of them is very slim). Further, he details his underlying psychological motivations for wanting to show these artists his love (reward and encourage them to continue producing brilliant work), the sociological motivations of fanboydom (have others notice your appreciation/level of fandom), and ultimately, how these services satisfy none of them (giving artists pennies a month is not meaningful, and your contributions are no advertised).

He concludes by outlining the four things his ideal service would do (creative forms of payment, displaying the payment publicly, allowing artists to be rewarded directly, and rewarding artists who aren’t on the service). Unfortunately, a subpoint of one of his commandments is no commissions, which would make it a bit harder to create a financially viable company.

The idea is certainly interesting, and there are already a number of companies working on solving the problem. I’m sure some of them have already started looking for investors, garnering some interest from venture capital firms, and will one day raise venture funding. Even if they are able to meet Carr’s four demands, creating meaningful differentiation from PayPal will be challenging.