Like it? Tip it!
In the US and some other countries, tipping is almost mandatory and represents the major income for waiters and several other professions. If it works there, why shouldn’t it work on the Internet?
Well, Alper and some friends decided to make it true and have launched recently their startup. TipIt.to is a simple way of donating whatever you want, even cents to some website. That way you could surf the web, express you tips to this and that website, and when it reaches some value like 10€, pay it all. It might look a small account to you, but website owners will certainly like all those small tips together.
I really like this system and that’s the way I could see the Internet flowing. I also like advertising, but in some cases it’s just too intrusive. I would like to set like 10 euros per month to spend on Internet sites that make my life easier (or happier!) and give them away per cents, according to how much I like the websites. It would be awesome for OpenSource projects and for Music Artists, since I may want to download their music from some P2P network illegally and be able to contribute to the author.
But working with money online is not easy. There are a lot of suspicious users that don’t trust their money to anyone. This might be a problem. Another one is the social culture. Tipping do vary from region to region and it might work fine in the US, in Europe it might not, we’ll see…
