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This is what the future of online publishing looks like, according to a Pirate Bay founder and Adblock Plus

"Imagine if we could do this automatically, somehow!"
"Imagine if we could do this automatically, somehow!"

Two of the internet’s more notorious liberators of content have teamed up to make an unlikely proposition to publishers: a new way to monetize their content.

The team is comprised of Adblock Plus, which has been called an “extortion-based business” by the advertising industry, and Peter Sunde, who served five months in a Swedish jail in 2014 for copyright infringement as a founder of the Pirate Bay.

Their solution is something called Flattr Plus, which offers publishers a new way to get paid directly by users without erecting paywalls. Users would pre-set a certain amount of money that they would pay publishers. Flattr Plus takes care of payments automatically, and publishers get 90% of the proceeds. “We know there are a lot users out there looking for a model to help sustain the web,” says Laura Dornheim, who handles public affairs for Flattr Plus. “We don’t believe users are just freeloaders.”

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Quartz got a look at an early version of Flattr Plus today (May 27). It’s a browser extension that’s powered by an algorithm which measures the amount of “engagement” a user has with a given webpage. This includes measures like the time spent on site, user activity on the page like scrolling, and other factors that are still being “fine-tuned,” says Dornheim.

Screenshot of Flattr Plus engagement counter
Flattr Plus’ engagement bar (Flattr Plus)

A user’s engagement is represented by a green bar that appears in the top-right of the browser window. When the engagement bar is full, the page is recorded in the user’s account. At the end of each month, all the pages recorded in the user’s account receive a slice of the budget that the user has set. If a user had paid in €10 at the start of the month and visited 10 articles that the Flattr Plus algorithm recorded, then the publishers would receive €0.90 for each article. If the same user had 100 articles recorded, then publishers would get €0.09 for each article.

Flattr Plus says it plans to get 10 million users to set an average monthly budget of $5 each, which would pay publishers nearly $500 million annually. That’s a tough target, says Brian Kane, a founder of Sourcepoint, which helps publishers prevent ad-blocking. “I don’t believe we’re going to see publishers line up for this sort of service,” he says.

Publishers may be loathe to sign up because they would give up control of their revenue stream to the very companies that block ads and hurt their ad revenue in the first place.

Flattr Plus isn’t alone in proposing this micro-tipping model. Facebook is reportedly considering it, and the Brave browser also proposes an ad-blocking and tipping combo. But publishers have shown little appetite for this approach so far.

Flattr Plus says it’s in talks with “lots of publishers and partners” but won’t name any. Sunde, the Pirate Bay founder, says they’re aiming to sign up major publishers. They say Flattr Plus should be ready for public use sometime before the summer is over. “We want to get everyone on board,” he says.

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