[Gimp-user] 3 months of Flattr, a summary

[Michael Schumacher <schumaml gmx de>]

Moin,

three months ago, on 2012-07-16, the Flattr button on 
http://www.gimp.org went public.

Its corresponding Flattr thing had already existed a little while longer 
(since the beginning of June) to cater to a specific donation request.

We didn't expect much of a revenue. Not because no one would flattr 
GIMP, but the concept of microdonation itself: people can donate to as 
many things per month as they like, and the minimum amount to be 
distributed per user and month is only 2 Euros. So a few cents per click 
is what one can expect, and that would certainly fit the definition and 
purpose of 'micro'.

We were wrong.

In July, 76 clicks turned into EUR 56,40. In August, 192 clicks into EUR 
149,08, and September brought 168 clicks and EUR 178,13.

These amounts are quite a lot more than expected.

To put them into relation to our planned expenses, I looked up plane 
ticket prices from Germany to Madrid - the location for Libre Graphics 
Meeting 2013, 
http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2012/2012/06/lgm-2013-dates-and-venue/ - 
and found them to be in the 170-200 Euros price range.
So, about one month of Flattr revenue will pay for some contributors' 
tickets to LGM 2013 :)

There are 111 Flattrs for October, so far.

Many thanks to all users who donated, your contributions help a lot!



P.S. Some thoughts about Flattr

Our experience with Flattr has been an overall success so far. It is 
easy to use from an admin point of view, the inclusion of the button 
into our website was mostly painless, and the performance is beyond our 
expectations.

The button is going to stay on http://www.gimp.org and http://docs.gimp.org


However, our experience should not be generalized:

- we've only got one single thing, whereas the typical use seems to be 
lots of things - e.g. blog posts, podcasts, images, ...

- GIMP is already known and established, so it is not that surprising 
that there are Flattr users in our user base (no idea if new users 
joined Flattr due to our participation)

- three months is rather short, we do not know how this will perform in 
future

- we're not trying to make a living from the revenue

- we don't flattr other things yet (something that really should happen, 
maybe a set amount per month distributed to a few selected outstanding 
examples of art created with GIMP? [if we can decide about that 
efficiently ;)])


--
Regards,
Michael