Swedish micro payments provider Flatter has partnered with Dailymotion, the world’s second largest video portal with 100 million unique monthly visitors and 20 000+ daily uploads. The partnership will allow viewers to directly pay video creators by “Flattring” online videos, creating what they call the world’s first crowd-funded social video network.
Flattr buttons found on the web are very similar to Facebook “like” buttons, but involves a real money transfer to the creators of the content you Flattr. A user’s Flattr account has a fixed amount of money to give away each month, and at the end of the month this balance is split between websites, podcasst, videos, and whatever else the user Flattrs. The service is designed to easily repay content creators for their time, while getting rid of the mental task of “how much is this going to cost me?”
To add a Flattr button, the video creator must be part of the MotionMakers program – the site’s premium content club where users can upload HD quality video. The Flattr buttons are to be shown on each video page, and on the content creator’s channel page.
“Dailymotion is pioneering a new world for video makers to earn a living just by broadcasting their own content on our site,” said Roland Hamilton, Managing Director for Dailymotion US. “By empowering video creators to take control and earn money from their work, no longer will online video be limited to an unpaid pursuit.”
The company already has integrations with services like Soundcloud, Socialvest, Instacast, and a a growing list of popular websites and blogs. In our interview, co-founder Linus Olsson claimed that there really isn’t any real paradigm shift in users’ minds to get over — people want to pay for content they enjoy.
Is Flatter tapping into a natural human tendency? I believe so, and Flatter’s rise to become a daily part web activity seems almost inevitable.
