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Flattr is closing down (2023)

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Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#81

Post by xeromal »

TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

In his comments, he points to this not working for ephemeral websites. Twitter subs and patreon are just the opposite

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#82

Post by Solvency »

jmyeet wrote: post #45
Ygg2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?

Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $1…

How does a government meaningfully and objectively determine what is transfer pricing vs profit shifting in practice? Are they even capable of distinguishing the difference in a case like Twitch:Amazon?

Furthermore... isn't this the crux of Hollywood accounting..?

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#83

Post by PurpleRamen »

Ygg2 wrote: post #39
TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?

Yes and no. They jump around the profit-point. They made some profit in 2019 or so, but the pandemia peaked them, not just in views and income, but also costs. The thing is, Twitch's business-model is very frail. A streamer with too many viewers can cost them more money than it brings them money. Similar, are there millions of small streamers who barely make them a dollar. And then are there also too many side-costs, like South-Korea's network-fee recently, or the too many law cases where come cranky person sues them for some nonsical reason.

And we don't know for real how much Amazon is charging them. Rumors are going, Amazon is charging them a hefty amount for servers, while other says AWS is irrelevant for their Service, so nobody knows for real, officially.

But the recent move to a different handling of video-streams is supposed to change this, as it reduce the costs on Twitch's side, and lets the Streamers pay for it themself. By which I mean AV1(?), where the streamer is encoding all streams in all resolutions, and only sends it to Twitch which then acts as a relay. Claim is, Video-Encoding was the biggest cost for them, after employees, which seems kinda strange.. But maybe it will change their game in the next years, we will see.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#84

Post by Workaccount2 »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #71
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percent…

Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to donate.

It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations come from 5% of users.

Trust me, everyone says they prefer paying/donating over ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if given the option.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#85

Post by Workaccount2 »

amelius wrote: post #70
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

Maybe adblockers could take the role of microdonation platforms. I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit, and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit most.

Google actually used to have this as a service. They canned it a few years ago though.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#86

Post by Mc91 »

TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

I donate monthly to five Patreons. One of them is LineageOS ( https://www.patreon.com/LineageOS ). Two of them are community spaces. Two are podcasts, only one of which I listen to. I really only get Patreon benefits from one of the five (I get each podcast). Some tech-related, some not.

I subscribe to one Twitch feed. Actually the main Twitch feed I watch is one I do not subscribe to. I also sometimes watch other Twitch feeds, like John Romero's, or notch, or another random programmer who livestream codes. Again, some tech-related, some not.

Generally I subscribe on Patreon and Twitch more to be supportive than to get something, although I do appreciate I get podcasts from one of the podcasts I subscribe to.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#87

Post by jerrre »

bot347851834 wrote: post #42
TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

I agree with your general point: people generally donate/buy/subscribe much more if there's a benefit tied to it. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that Twitch is still losing money so I wouldn't really call their business model "very viable". I'd say it's viable for the content creators, because there's very little risk in trying out Twitch streaming, sure the chances of making it big are insanely small but t…

It's important to make the distinction between:

- Twitch is losing money because the costs of running the platform are higher then the revenue

- Twitch is losing money because they're aggressively investing in growth

if you want to know about the viability of the concept, I'm not sure which one it is, video streaming and small payment processing could both be quite costly

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#88

Post by Quarrel »

plorkyeran wrote: post #68
jmyeet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $1…

Twitch runs its own data centers and does not use AWS for the video streaming platform. There are probably some incidental expenses which are actually Amazon profits, but they’re much smaller than you’re making them out to be.

Say what?

https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/

"Use the same live streaming technology and global infrastructure that powers Twitch."

Did IVS grow out of Twitch? Sure. That core is now a piece of AWS infra though, even though the team was initially built at Twitch.

(Obviously these things are weird to talk about in a vacuum, because all the pieces are 100% owned by the same parent. The splits we see can be changed with the wave of a CFOs pen, usually when they want to change how we view some overarching piece of the business.)

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#90

Post by gertop »

pvorb wrote: post #14
cleansy wrote: post #8

No wonder given the company that acquired the project is rather hotly debated for "removing ads from websites just to reinsert their own." Edit: Not reinsert their own, but having advertisers pay for the pleasure to not be blocked in their "acceptable ads" program.

I somehow link this practice to the Brave browser, but I'm not sure about it. Does anyone know more about it?

He's talking about Adblock Plus, they whitelist "acceptable ads" and vendors need to pay them to be classified as such.

Apparently Adblock Plus makes enough money from that practice that they managed to buy flattr in 2017.

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