When people get money paid out, they can tip Tipit.to an optional percentage.

We agree that putting a button on a website is not going to cause a lot of revenue in and of itself, tipping is a social phenomenon with its own rituals. We are trying to take those to the internet by making it easy to publish what you have tipped and who has tipped you (we offer badges for both).

And yes, sadly, they come after you if you skip the bill: “This email will be sent once a month until the bill is paid or the account is closed.” (http://tipjoy.com/faq/4/#q16)

I was kinda hoping to get a second chance after I tipped everybody and everything, since they make spending money so easy…

There is a big free rider phenomenon right now. It’s called the web. We figure that payment rates might be low, but they will be something. Time will tell what the “tip through rates” and payment rates are. I don’t think anyone has a good model for that yet. <100% is pretty much guaranteed though.

@71, Chris: Customize & API

Yes, Yes, Yes! The API is coming soon. The Platform API will allow sites with user generated content or many authors to split tips between the platform owners and the content creators. That will be awesome.

Custom buttons are also on the way. The list of things we can do with this is very long.

Thanks for your comments, all!

In the meantime we are using it to have some fun!

Cheers!

Further, I have to finally go somewhere to pay for my tips, which requires additonal action/registration/payment on the part of the user. And I could see many people arriving and seeing, “$45.56?” How did I… ah…. hmmm. Maybe I’ll pay it later.”

Or never.

Go Martinis! I’m right with yah. If it was up to us , that’s the way it would be.

However, it’s not that simple. Here is what we say on our site to explain why, for the time being, you can only cash out via charity donations and amazon gift cards:

If we allow our users to withdraw money from their account, then we are technically a money transfer service, which requires registration with all 50 states and with the Federal government (in compliance with the Patriot Act). All of that registration requires a very, very large amount of money which we don’t yet have.

So please, help us grow! Use tipjoy, tell people about it, tell us what you want to see to make it even better. The more popular tipjoy becomes, the easier it will be for us to convince investors to give us the funding we need so that we can afford the required paperwork.

Very clever.

I love your comment! It made me spit out my coffee this morning. Thanks I needed that. hahaha!!!

@59 Did you for get about welfare?

I also think if someone is tipping a small amount then they are never going to have to payout.

One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now nothing’s yet been paid (except for a little bit we’ve put in ourselves), so the top tip list has begun to get a bit of spam in it. However, as people begin to pay for their tips (by hitting the ‘pay’ button in the upper right corner of tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to reflect what’s really worth money to people.

tim (comment 17): As we’ve just explained, one benefit to paying your tips is that you will be able to affect the tipjoy rank. However we expect that there will be some average amount of tips per piece of content which are never paid. As we collect more data, we’ll be able to tell content creators what percent of their total tips earned they can actually expect to collect. Since it’s free digital content, we think that a collection rate of less than 100% shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

yongfook (comment 20): We like your ideas about different ways to expand the tipjoy widget, thanks. Very good point about the differences between tipping in real life and tipping online. This is something we’ve thought a lot about. We feel that through blogs, you tube, and other self-publishing platforms, content creators are becoming more directly connected to their fans than ever before. Readers/viewers really hear the ‘voice’ of the person behind the content, and the interaction between the two parties is becoming more and more like a typical store counter interaction. In fact, these sorts of sites may even provide more of a ‘human connection’ than the typical Starbucks interaction - as you return frequently to a site you love, you begin to develop a relationship with it. We built Tipjoy to give people a meaningful way to expand on and validate that relationship.

Liz (comment 28) and dave (comment 30): Tipping is meant to be very simple - a tip transaction is completed with only one single click. The amount given is always the same, it’s very tiny, and there’s no checkout process, so the users don’t have to leave the page they’re viewing to complete the transaction. This is very different than current donation experiences, which take users away from the page they’re viewing, ask them to decide how much they want to leave, and take them through a checkout process.

Remember, the fact that tipping exists in North America is factored into minimum wage legislation. If you removed tips from our system then prices for many things would instantly rise (to compensate for increased compensation the employer would have to provide the employee).

So basically any douchebag who says he doesn’t tip as a rule, is getting lower prices on the backs of those of us who do tip (you’re welcome assholes). The fact that they try and masquerade their cheapness as some sort of moral righteousness only serves to amplify their level of douchebaggery.

Get a life scumbags.