Make money

[eevee]

Would be nice for this thing to pay for itself, if it ever gets sufficiently popular.

Some ideas.

• Commission escrow: take the money from the buyer and give it to the seller once complete (as part of #76, commission tracking). Downside is that we would have to hold money, which is a big legal can of worms, and also would have to settle disputes, which is an even bigger can of worms.
• Prints: I think we know a few printers who could provide printing services and we could share ye cash. Could even do this with comics: upload the cover, link directly to checkout and let people buy the comic right there.
• Paywall: allow artists (subject to our approval) to upload art that can only be viewed by users who pay a few bucks a month or something.
• Paid accounts: this is the classic fallback but I don't know what neat thing we could possibly offer that anyone would care about and that I wouldn't feel guilty keeping from the rest of the userbase.
• Fake currency: THIS WORKS ABHORRENTLY WELL FOR DEVIANTART

I cannot emphasize enough that no ads.

[epii]

No idea how feasible this is, or whether it's more about making money for the site or for artists, but here's a "user story" (if you will) from my own experience as a consumer.

Several times I have felt the urge to throw loose change into a content producer's metaphorical hat (typically after reading an engaging piece of extended prose). When this happens, I face two problems:

1. Most submitters of content don't have a clear path by which to push money to them. Additionally, the desire to throw change at hats peaks immediately after consumption of the work and then rapidly dwindles; if I as a consumer can't donate within a click or two from the bottom of a submission, then it's quite unlikely that I will at all.
2. I am a bit sensitive regarding my flesh identity, especially under aliases other than epii, and would not generally be willing to part with money if it also meant parting with my pseudonymity wrt the money recipient.

The first problem points towards the integration of a micropayment/micro-donation system. I believe the de-facto standard in this space is Flattr? I'm not familiar with their platform, though they appear to have an (OAuth 2 -based) API for creating new "things" against which to lodge micropayments. The API appears to be rate-limited to 1000 request/hour, although if this is only per Flattr user/OAuth token that would be fine indefinitely and it seems that "partnering" with them is a trivial affair (just need to be a registered company).

I can think of at least one hidden problem: encouraging this sort of micropayment system for all art creates a financial metric that may degrade "volunteer spirit". I can't find any references just now, but I recall reading that individuals are likely to create lower quality output if they view it as paid work, as opposed to work voluntarily created & shared. I don't know the boundary conditions of this effect, so I don't know if it would emerge from encouraging micropayments, especially since they are opt-in.

And perhaps there are other problems with Flattr specifically? I think the idea seems pretty cool, but I'm not aware of all that many people using it (do they?) which raises the question: why not?

On the matter of pseudonymity, I'm not sure if there's a clear fix. Presumably Flattr does not reveal the real details of the donor, though that assumes that the donor is happy to trust Flattr to manage their identity. I for one wouldn't trust Flattr sufficiently, but then I am a bit peculiar about this sort of stuff. And what are the alternatives? Trust Squiggle? Most people would reasonably have greater trust in Flattr. Use Bitcoins? That just pushes trust out to either the exchanges, your laundering expertise (ha!), or I suppose your very expensive mining rig (ha! again). And I'm pretty sure there's a rule of thumb stating that any time your solution includes Bitcoins your cause is already hopeless.