If you’re someone that’s using Flattr primarily to make micropayments to others then you’ll soon have tons more blogs and websites to flattr.

If you’re using Flattr to both pay and get paid, you now no longer need to worry whether your Flattr button is active. Feel free to add money to your account and flattr others at your own pace.

I’m excited about the change, since few of the sites I read use Flattr, and the money I put into it either goes in one huge chunk to a single publisher or to charity. Hopefully more bloggers will try it out.

Opening the floodgates [Flattr Blog]

Google is finally doing the same with AdSense, with new asynchronous ad-serving code that is currently being used to load ads quicker in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. (They plan to expand to support other browsers after they’ve ironed the kinks out of the new script.)

The old show_ads did lots of work: loading additional scripts, gathering information about the web page it was running on, and building the ad request to send back to Google. The new show_ads has a different job. It creates a friendly (same-origin) iframe on the web page, and starts the old script with a new name, show_ads_impl, running inside that iframe. The _impl does all the heavy lifting, and in the end the ads look exactly the same. But there’s a substantial speed advantage: many things happening inside an iframe don’t block the web browser’s other work.

Publishers don’t need to change anything; Google took care of everything on their end. Supposedly it should shave off about 12% of the time it takes for the page to load, since the ads won’t hold up the page while they load.

Flattr’s premise is that you, as a user, choose a small amount of money to pay each month — anywhere from €2 to €100 — and split it up evenly amongst websites you like. Suppose you read an interesting blog post here and click my Flattr button, and do the same for nine other websites in the space of a month. If your monthly contribution is €2, each of those ten websites will get €0.20. The more items you Flattr, the less everyone gets, but they still get something. The general idea is that if enough people are in on this, web publishers could make some nice pocket change without putting a dent in their audiences’ wallets. It’s as easy as voting up a story or retweeting, but with a direct monetary benefit.

Anyway, I really like the idea, but it suffers from a lack of users. There are some large blogs and open source projects using it, but it’s not quite mainstream enough to be a big deal.

If you’re a publisher or open source software developer, add a Flattr button to your website. It’s a great way to get a small “tip” once in awhile. If more frequently-trafficked sites implement it, more users should surface. You have to be an active Flattr-er yourself if you want to receive Flattrs as well.

I think it’s a neat idea. It makes it easier for advertisers to find and buy ad space, which could potentially result in smaller publishers having their ad space filled.

If you do any advertising, or just like seeing how much publishers charge for their ad space, you can download the Chrome extension here. (And don’t forget, Webmaster-Source has BuySellAds banners…)

The results are in: Lord of the Rings Online is making three times as much money as it was before it went free back in September.

This is a big win/win scenario for game developers. They have the opportunity to gain more users, as the barrier for entry is lower, and potentially make more money than their usual monthly fee from their most hardcore users. (Imagine $12.99 a month becoming $20 a month in additional quest packs and emergency mana potions…) I’m still hoping Blizzard will experiment with this for World of WarCraft.

Now, if only Turbine would work on OS X clients for their growing MMORPGs…

Project Wonderful

I recently noticed that Reddit had a Project Wonderful ad zone in their /r/comics section, and the current bid was only $4.40. So I decided to seize the opportunity to try out Project Wonderful on a heavily-trafficked web property and promote my younger brother’s comic site a little bit. So I upped the bid by a couple of dollars, became the high bidder, and waited.

After enjoying my victory for a few minutes, and racking up a few impressions, I was outbid by a seller of geeky plush animals. I retaliated by upping my bid a few dollars, and my ad immediately returned to it’s rightful place in front of thousands of Redditors’ monitors. About a half hour later, my squishy nemesis had once again outbid me. Not only had they outbid me, but they had raised it about $10. So I slowly raised my offer until it was just over theirs.

They must have given up for the time being, as my ad remained up for the next day and a half, when my fundage ran low and the ad was finally replaced once again by my foe’s plush Cthulu banner. I ended up spending about $10 for over 50,000 impressions. Not bad.

I’m now trying out Project Wonderful from the Publisher side. I have some ad space on my fantasy book and movie site, where I’m trying to see how quickly a smaller site can start getting bids. A couple of free banners (because bidding starts at $0) are up right now, so I could see others’ bidding them up a few cents in order to get wicked cheap advertising over a few weeks.

How “awesome” Project Wonderful is for a small site, we shall see, but the service certainly lives up to its claims for advertisers.

The big news is just how amazingly successful the game has been thus far. In its first five days, it earned a stunning $1.64 million. Quite an achievement, breaking Cut the Rope’s record of $1 million in its first ten days to boot.

At $5.99 per copy, the sword-fighting app will thus have mustered over $1.64 million in sales for publisher Epic, whose studio Chair Entertainment created what is widely-hailed as one of the most technically impressive iOS titles to date.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, at least 274,000 copies of the app were sold to produce that figure.

This really shows how viable a platform iOS and the App Store are. There is a lot of money to be made, and the barrier for entry is very low in comparison to most other gaming platforms. At last, indie developers are finally on a fairly even playing field with the larger game companies.

Yes, that means BuySellAds is coming to the iPhone and iPad. Think about that for a minute.

There are now three major ad networks available for app developers to use in their products. Apple’s own iAd, with it’s fun and user-friendly interactive mini applications; Google’s AdMob banners; and now BuySellAds. The big difference between BuySellAds and the other two is that you get final approval before an ad is displayed in your application. Also, the advertisers pay a fixed amount to run their banner for a specific stretch of time, while Apple’s and Google’s offerings cycle different banners in using an automated targeting algorithm.

Choice is good, and some developers will definitely benefit from having BuySellAds as an option.

I don’t get it.

There is some really great software in the app store, but the developers aren’t making as much money as they probably should be for their efforts. Believe me, software development isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time and frustration to build an amazing application, whether it’s an iPhone app or a web application. It bothers me that developers can barely get away with charging $1.99 for anything but a game. Tweetie, back before Twitter bought it and made it their free official app, was well worth its $2.99 price tag. I might have paid more for if the price had been a little higher. Many users would not have. After all, there was a big “outrage” about 1.0 users having to pay $1.99 for Tweetie 2.

I don’t think most people fully appreciate what it takes to develop software. I imagine the same problem is true for other fields. (Auto mechanics come to mind. Everyone whines about how much it costs to get their car fixed, but the garages have to pay for parts and labor somehow…)

What do you think? Should developers be able to charge more without scaring away customers and/or sending them into an entitlement-fueled rage? Am I too biased? Or should all software be free and GPL’d and all that Stallmanesque craziness?

AdPacks is an exclusive invitation-only ad network split into three topical categories. Publishers display a single ad zone that randomly cycles through the network’s banners. Advertisers pay $399-$599 to advertise network-wide and each site in the network gets a cut of the money.

The basic idea is “less is more.” Instead of bombarding users with advertisers, the advertisers pay more to be the center of attention. If their product is the only one being advertisers, there’s less to distract from the one ad.

I would love to get in on this, but I’m probably not cool enough. It seems like AdPacks would pay better as well as creating less on-screen clutter.