[eferraiuolo]

When you think long enough about this whole idea of supporting web content, there are some major requires that arise:

• Support should be direct (whereas ads are indirect)

• People publish all over the Internet, most people don’t own a domain, they have (hosted) Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub accounts where they publish content, this content _has_ to be supportable.

• You can’t effectively charge someone fees for their acts of voluntary support.

• Voluntary, is voluntary, is no subscription, and is the right to choose!

• Easy to use, low barrier to give, no pulling out the credit card for 25¢.

• Support something while browsing the web and on that web page.

• The mechanism/service you use to support content online can’t be the only winner, consumers and publishers have to be the outright winners!

• The service used _must_ be trustworthy and transparent.

• The service _has_ to work with the Internet, which means it has to work when only given URLs of web pages to support.

So! We actually did this, and built TipTheWeb http://tiptheweb.org/ with all these ideas in mind!

A non-profit that gives 100% of the money tipped by people to the web publisher of the content, non of that fee or cuts crap, 100%. You can support something with TipTheWeb by just giving us a URL to what you want to support and an amount, that's it; no publisher integration required.

We want to provide a positive feedback loop for the web, give publishers a way to know what their followers actually like, give readers/consumers a way to directly support what they truly love online and choose how much they want to give (5¢ — $100 per Tip). We want to encourage publishers to keep it up! Keep their content freely-accessible to everyone <— _this_ is what makes the Internet so great.

The Internet is valuable. Good publishing is hard. Selling content doesn’t work. Advertising is not sufficient. Community-supported web publishing can work!

[vampirical]

You say "100% of claimed Tips". How much initiative do you take to inform publishers that they've received a tip and should sign-up and claim their money? What do you do if a publisher who has received tips declines participating?

The idea that I could donate money which the publisher hasn't agreed to receive and you could end up keeping it if the publisher doesn't decide they want to be a part of your service rubs me the wrong way.

[eferraiuolo]

We hope to always error on the side that will benefit the user in these cases.

Telling web publishers they have tips waiting for them is tricky business, i.e. Don't want to be spammy. We hope to develop some interesting ways to notify people that they have tips; but tippers have been filling this void by mentionig on services like Twitter that they've tipped someone for something.

For now, if a tip goes unclaimed by the publisher for 6 months, it's automatically canceled, and the money is returned to the tipper for them to use to tip something else.

We don't currently have a way for someone to block or decline tips for a particular website, but we've talked about adding this type of feature; someone could claim their site, then say they don't accept tips there.

Bottom line, we don't have any intentions of keeping people's money that goes unclaimed, we rather return it so they could fund other tips with it. People can also help support our operations by tipping us, TipTheWeb; eating our own dog food.

[vampirical]

Thanks for clarifying :)

I don't know that I agree with the refund strategy as the way to handle the issue but it's good to hear you guys come down in a good place ethically/morally on the issue (as you say, the most important thing with this sort of site is trust).