Twingy loves blogs, and we’d like nothing more than to see the blogosphere grow and flourish. That’s why we fully support the latest initiative of our friends at Flattr. The startup offering a social micropayments service for content producers and creative people has come up with the clever idea of a “Pay a Blogger Day”, a day when everybody is encouraged to support bloggers and to show them their appreciation.
Before you continue to read, please mark November 29 as “Pay A Blogger Day” in your calender.
We spoke to Andrus Purde from the Flattr team about how they came up with the idea and in which ways we all are encouraged to support bloggers on November 29.
Hi Andrus. Pay a Blogger Day is an initiative by Flattr, supported by a couple of other companies who are friends of Bloggers (among them Twingly). Can you explain how and why you came up with the idea?
We at Flattr are always looking for ways to make our service more useful for bloggers. In one brainstorming session we talked about that to really make a difference we need both, the “chicken and the egg”, so providing good tools as well as encouraging people to use them. From there it was a small and logical step to an awareness campaign that is now Pay a Blogger Day.
How exactly does it work, what do you want people around the web to do on November 29?
We want to inspire people to look for ways they can support their favourite bloggers: Look for the donation or Flattr button, buy an e-book or something via an affiliate link. At first on November 29, but in the future, why not every day?!
How are you going to raise awareness during the days leading to the 29th? Any ideas how you could make big news sites cover your campaign?
The payablogger.org minisite has some viral features built into it which have worked rather well. We’re also happy to have Twingly and other partners aboard that do spread the word. But perhaps the most important thing is that feedback from bloggers has been great, and they’ve been instrumental in getting the word out. That in a way is much more important than what big news sites say.
How many people do you think will participate globally? Do you have any figure in mind (even though of course this can’t be measured)?
If we see bloggers post or tweet that there were more donations and purchases on November 29, this has been a successful cause/campaign. And of course the more bloggers, the better.
It’s not a coincidence that Flattr is the company behind Pay a Blogger Day, since bloggers have been a main target group of Flattr from day one. Can you tell us a bit about what’s going on at Flattr? Any new features that you are going to release or ideas you are working on?
Pay a Blogger Day is not pure altruism. If more bloggers are successful in being supported by their communities, there’s a bigger market for Flattr to operate in. So it’s a win-win. Besides raising awareness about the need to give back to bloggers we are making it easier to discover flattrable content. We also want to make using Flattr become an even more social experience, and we have just released new partner tools, so adding Flattr buttons on community sites is now very easy.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApeZoOsfb1g&w=500&h=315]
I think a “Blogger Appreciation Day” is a nice idea, but putting money front and center could backfire. Now it looks less like “Thanksgiving” and more like “Blogger Tax Day”. I think that most bloggers that are not already monetizing their work are not all that interested in a little extra cash.
It also looks a bit like a Flattr marketing campaign. Did you try to get other companies like PayPal, Kachingle, TipTheWeb to get behind the concept?
The idea of a “Blogger Day” itself is great, of course, just like “Mothers’ Day” or “Earth Day”. Maybe it can be put on a broader platform next year.
Awesome idea and why not gametrender.net is 100 percent behind it, not just because I think that I’ll get more readers from the cause but also because anything that grows and multiplies our social industry has go tto be a good thing. A network of like minded people all bolstering, supporting and helping one another- that’s a position that we need to be in to make things happen ( and a little bit of money doesn’t hurt either!)