Mar 22
At TipTheWeb, our most important goal is to make tipping as easy as possible. In particular, people should be able to tip stuff they like while browsing the web, without disrupting their flow or distracting them from what they’re doing. That’s why we created the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet, a special link you can save to your bookmarks bar and which lets you tip the page you’re on.
A New Look and New Features
Until now, using the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet would just create a new “unfunded” Tip in your account. (Unfunded Tips are like drafts- only you can see them). To fund your Tips, you still had to go to your Tips page on your account and click one or more fund buttons. While this works okay, we found ourselves always wishing we could fund our Tips right away, and we received feedback from users that they want this too. So the new Tip Anywhere experience now allows you to choose to fund your new Tip right away, or wait until later:
The funding feature is especially useful for people who want their Tip Stream feed updated right when they tip.
Sharing Your Tips
If you like something enough to tip it, chances are that you might want to share a link to that content with your friends. So we’ve added a new feature directly to the Tip Anywhere widget where you can share your Tip (and the link it refers to) on Facebook and Twitter:
Not only will your friends or followers benefit from seeing the link, but they might be encouraged to tip it as well, which increases support for the publisher of that content, and helps spread the word about TipTheWeb.
Improved Mobile Experience
We’ve vastly improved the experience of using the Tip Anywhere Bookmarklet in the browser on your iOS or Android device. We’ve now included special instructions for installing the bookmarklet in iOS (which is significantly harder than in a regular browser), and on devices with smaller screens, we’ve changed the flow so you see the Tip Widget in full screen mode:
Let Us Know What You Think
We think every TipTheWeb user should be using the Tip Anywhere bookmarklet to create their tips- it’s so much easier than copying and pasting links, and it fits with our vision that people should tip stuff right when they’ve found it and gotten value from it. So we’d love to hear your feedback about the new bookmarklet, and any ideas about how it could work better. Let us know at feedback@tiptheweb.org
Like this post? Consider supporting us with a
Tip
Dec 7
We’re trying to build a better Internet by enabling community supported web publishing. Giving people a way to financially support the web publishers that create the best content online encourages them to continue creating high-quality, genuinely useful content while keeping it freely accessible to everyone.
To do this, we make monthly, monetary awards to the web publishers who receive Tips through TipTheWeb.org, these awards are for the full value of the Tips they receive, 100% of the money!
We want to explain exactly what an award from TipTheWeb is, how we determine the amounts and who receives awards, how awards can be redeemed, and how we process donations into awards based on user’s Tips.
Wait, donations and awards? Isn’t TipTheWeb a payment system?
Nope. We’re a non-profit organization that uses donations from users to support web publishers. When you tip something online, you aren’t identifying a specific person (like you do when you write someone a check), you’re identifying a specific link/URL and telling us how valuable that content is to you. We use that information to help us figure out which publishers should receive awards, and how much those awards should be.
How Tips, Donations, and Awards Fit Together
A Tip is not a payment; it’s simply an amount associated with a link/URL, think of it as a bookmark with an amount field.
We keep track of all the Tips you make while you’re browsing the Internet and tipping the stuff you like. You can come to TipTheWeb.org whenever you want and fund your Tips by making a donation to TipTheWeb. We use the money people donate to make monthly awards to the publishers of the web content that you (and other TipTheWeb users) tip.
Receiving an Award from TipTheWeb
Awards between $0.05$1 – $1000 USD can be redeemed instantly as an Amazon Gift Card for use on Amazon.com. What you get is a code which represents value stored as a digital Amazon Gift Card which can be applied to your Amazon account at anytime; the next time you make a purchase on Amazon, the money will be deducted from your Gift Card Balance first.
Awards of $100$10 USD or more have an additional option of being redeemed through a PayPal balance transfer; we will transfer the amount of your award, in full, to your PayPal account.
Why the $100$10 minimum for receiving awards through PayPal? TipTheWeb pays no fees when processing awards as Amazon Gift Cards, in fact our partnership with Amazon allows us to receive a small bulk discount, which helps cover operational costs. It’s especially important for us to avoid transaction fees for small awards. We hope this won’t be an inconvenience— we figure smaller amounts will end up getting spent on Amazon anyway :-) but we are very interested in how you feel about this minimum, let us know.
You Can Receive Awards Too!
To receive awards, you’ll have to sign-up for TipTheWeb and claim the places you publish online. We try to make this extremely fast and easy for you, and it’s totally free to sign-up and use every part of TipTheWeb.
We understand that not everyone owns their own .com domain name, so we’ve integrated with some of the most popular places to publish online, and we’re always adding new integrations. These are some of the places online you can claim and where people can tip what you publish:
We’re interested to hear about other places you publish online that you’d like integrated with TipTheWeb, just let us know.
Once you have a TipTheWeb account you can claim the places you publish online; you might even be pleasantly surprised to find Tips waiting for you from other users of TipTheWeb!
Like this post? Consider supporting us with a
Tip
Nov 23
The Internet is valuable.
The vast majority of content online is available to the public for free. This is one of the
defining characteristics of our time— unprecedented public access to the world’s collected
knowledge and creative works— and this access greatly benefits us all.
Good publishing is hard.
Although tools make online publishing easier than ever, creating valuable, useful content will
always involve time, effort, and resources. The amazing thing about the Internet is how much of
it is produced as part of a labor of love, community contribution, or personal endeavor.
Selling content doesn’t work.
Publishing online is often hindered by either the practical limits of an unpaid, hobby-level
effort, or the misaligned goals of incompatible business models. Pay-walls and paid subscription
strategies have mostly failed for web publishers, in part because on the Internet there is usually
a free alternative.
Advertising is not sufficient.
Online advertising has become the primary monetization strategy for web publishing, but while it
works for the very most popular sites, it isn’t fruitful for the majority of publishers. Most
advertising doesn’t give publishers very clear feedback about the value of their content to their
audience— it only tells them how well the advertisement matches their audience. Additionally,
while advertising can complement web publishing in tasteful amounts, many struggling publishers
choose to display so many advertisements that their audience suffers.
Community-supported web publishing can work!
We think creative works that benefit the public should be supported by the public, in a way
that can steadily increase both the quantity and quality of these works. A voluntary service that
lets users connect their donations with specific links to online content can enable such public
support, but only if it is transparent in its operation and has goals worthy of public trust. This
is why we’ve built TipTheWeb as a non-profit organization that focuses on helping the community
support publishers instead of maximizing profits.
So we built TipTheWeb.
At the end of the day, it comes down to this: we think something like TipTheWeb should exist.
Once we started thinking about it, we couldn’t stop— every time we found something online that we
liked, we couldn’t help but think “I really want to tip this!”. So we built it!
Like this post? Consider supporting us with a
Tip
