AdBlock Plus and Flattr Team Up to Pay Publishers

By admin On May 3, 2016

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AdBlock Plus has partnered with Flattr to allow online content readers to pay for the content they view. The initiative is called Flattr Plus and allows users to automatically divide a monthly budget between read or viewed content.

Unlike how Flattr works, users don’t have to press a ‘Flattr’ button on a website. A user’s browsing activities are automatically tracked and funds are distributed according to their involvement with a website.

Under the guise of ‘the internet has grown up, we don’t need it anymore’ where ‘him’ refers to advertisements, we can now choose a ‘real friend’ aka Flattr Plus. As a browser plugin, the service allows money to go directly to websites or creators, without an advertisement in between.

Flattr Plus ensures an automatic distribution of the invested monthly amount. Flattr Plus says they don’t request browser history, just transfer the final Flattrs to its servers for payment. Optionally, a user can also adjust his Flattrs to his own insight.

Flattr Plus is not available immediately but will go into beta soon. The platform is expected to be available worldwide by the end of this year. Payment is made to creators with a Flattr account. Those who don’t have one yet can set up a Flattr account later. Money that is for makers who have not yet registered, they could still get later.

The algorithm that keeps track of how engaged someone is with a website, or the ‘engagement and attention’ measurement, would not only focus on the number of page visits, but also, for example, how long someone spends on a site.

The goal is to earn $500 million in revenue for the publishers in 2017. Ben Williams of AdBlock Plus told TechCrunch. If users make $5 a month available to Flattr Plus, that translates to just over 8.3 million users. By comparison, Adblock Plus has more than ten million users on Chrome and 23 million users on Firefox.

Flattr Plus thus resembles a so-called ‘ethical’ ad blocker Optimal.com that charges users $5.99 per month and returns money to publishers.