Bring non-profit fundraising to Twitter

We launched an exciting new feature on Tipjoy yesterday. We already made it easy for Tipjoy users to pay via twitter.

We just came out with a new widget that let's new users signup and tweet a payment.

This has been an effort with @wellwishes for a very good cause. Laura Fitton is trying to get her 12,500 followers to donate $2 to help bring clean water to people in need. Tipjoy and Betaworks will match up to $10K.

You can help by going to her blog post or using the widget below. If you already have a Tipjoy account without a Twitter account hooked in, you should login first.

Just put in your twitter credentials, confirm an amount, and then follow through via PayPal. This will tweet a message that your followers can see to join the effort. This kind of viral microdonation engine is very exciting.

You can also help by posting the widget to your own blog. Here is the code for it:

<script language="javascript" src="http://tipjoy.com/twitterPaymentWidget/?twitterUsername=wellwishes&message=Can%20we%20get%2012%2C500%20people%20to%20chip%20in%20%242%20each%20to%20save%20lives&extraTweet=for%20CharityWater%20to%20save%20lives.%20What%20can%202%20do%20http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F13xKO%20You%20can%20tweet%20donate%20via%20%40tipjoy%20too"></script>

If you'd like to run a similar campaign, you can use this widget with different parameterers. We'll make this available on our widgets page soon, but here are the parameters:
- twitterUsername, in this case it is wellwishes
- message, which sets the message at the top of the widget
- extraTWeet, will be appended to the twitter message after "p$2 @username". You should include the reason and a link

So if you want to give @wbur some cash, titled "help support WBUR" with the tweet saying "p$2 @wbur to show how to be like @wellwishes http://bit.ly/7tQF", the widget code would be:

<script language="javascript" src="http://tipjoy.com/twitterPaymentWidget/?twitterUsername=wbur&message=help%20support%20WBUR&extraTweet=%20to%20show%20how%20to%20be%20like%20%40wellwishes%20http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F7tQF" ></script>

Tip via Twitter

Tipjoy is happy to announce even tighter integration with Twitter.

You can now initiate payments via twitter. For example, tweeting "p @ev $1 because twitter is fun" would send $1 from your Tipjoy account to @ev.

'p' is like 'd' but for payment, not direct messages - get it?

This is an opt-in feature. To try it out, add your twitter username and password in the tipjoy settings page and click the checkbox to opt-in:
http://tipjoy.com/settings

Then start tweeting.

We'll count anything that has an @username, dollar amount, and a
payment keyword in the first three words in any order. So "p @ev $1"
and "@ev pay $1" both work.

The payment keywords are 'tipjoy', 'tip', 'pay', 'give', 'rtip', and
'p'. Case doesn't matter, so 'give', 'GIVE', and 'giVE' all work.

What is 'rtip'? It's a retweet and a tip. If you really like a tweet,
retweet it and send the author some love.

For example, @badbanana just tweeted
"My will to live is somewhere in that coffee pot."

Such hilarity certainly deserves a dollar in my book, so I just tweeted
"rtip $1 @badbanana My will to live is somewhere in that coffee pot."

custom tipjoy button code released

We've got a new tipjoy widget, and it's yours for the customizing.

With this tipjoy widget you can:
- completely customize the look and feel via CSS
- display who's tipped most recently, and who's the most generous
- allow givers to leave short messages

Get it here

To see some examples, check out our previous post.

PS - to all you CSS hecklers out there, be forewarned so your head doesn't explode: to ensure compatibility across all sorts of people's sites, no matter what crazy things they do to Ps and DIVs and other tags...everything in this tipjoy widget is wrapped in a SPAN. But I don't want to blame my users - they can do whatever they want to their CSS. I'm blaming IE for not supporting custom tags which would have been a much more elegant solution.
____

Just want a basic button? Or a goal thermometer? Check out all your options here.

tipjoy for your tumblelog

Tipjoy is working in a beta partnership with tumblr to help their users earn money from their tumblelogs.

We've got a new custom button on a few tumbelogs. The UI is completely customizable via CSS. The widget shows recent and most generous tippers.

Here are a few great examples:
matthewbuchanan.name
blog.davidchartier.com
flyingpizzakitty.com
147xxxx.tumblr.com

We'll be making this custom code available to anyone for any site very soon. In the meantime if you'd like an advance copy of the code, email us at: founders[at]tipjoy.com

Tipjoy starts giving out gold stars

We all enjoyed receiving those precious gold stars for good work in
grade school.

We at Tipjoy liked them so much that we started handing them out. If
you've ever followed through and paid your tips, you're a "verified" tipjoy user. You'll find a gold star next to your username when it appears on Tipjoy.

As an example, you can see quite a few verified tipjoy users at our popular tips page.

Now's your chance to get a head start on the forthcoming tipjoy leaderboard. Want a gold star? Sure you do! Visit tipjoy and pay your bill today.

recent updates to tipjoy: tip amount now customizable

The old way: a click on a tip button was always 10¢ unless the user went to their settings and changed it to another amount.

The new way: people creating new Tipjoy buttons can set the amount they want the click to be worth. The user-defined default setting has been removed.

We did this in response to the large demand from site owners to change the amount they receive from each person. Many, many users wanted to ask for more money. Meanwhile only a very small number of active users changed their default tip value setting.

All buttons made using the old system will not change. They will continue to be 10¢ per tip click.

New sites can choose to change the amount to anything less than $25 and at least a penny. The amount will be displayed in the widget, right by the button.

Furthermore, all Tipjoy buttons on Tipjoy.com are now set to 25¢, up from the previous default of 10¢.

As always, let us know what you think.

Tipjoy: "now you can!" (sell digital content)

We've found ourselves having to explain the differences between PayPal and Tipjoy several times in the last few days. Obviously we need to be clearer. How's this:


Tipjoy...
...lets you keep more of your earnings for yourself. We aggregate
payments and take a small fee, and so you get to keep a lot more of
your money when you sell through Tipjoy than if you sell through
PayPal.
...provides a much better experience for your customers. Buying with
Tipjoy is one click and doesn't take your customers away from your
page, unlike PayPal's 9+ click process which takes your users away
from your site.
...encourages your customers to share your content with their
friends, through feeds to social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed,
RSS feeds, and emails.


Here are some more details on PayPal's fee structure vs. Tipjoy's:
PayPal takes 2.9% of your earnings, plus $0.30.

The reason PayPal is structured like this is that it is designed for
selling very expensive goods, like cars, jewelery, and vintage toys.
If you want to sell a $500 necklace, you get to keep $485.20, or 97%
of your earnings. That's great!

But you can't charge $500 for MP3s, blog posts, and virtual roses.
Probably you're going to charge some amount between 1 and 99 cents.
And for that, PayPal really doesn't meet your needs. For example, if
you earn $2 with PayPal, you have to pay them $.36. You only get to
keep $1.64. That's only 82% of your total earnings.

Tipjoy is designed to sell virtual goods. Goods which cost how ever
little (or much) you want.

At Tipjoy, we do payment aggregation. Which basically just means that
people say they're going to buy a bunch of stuff from all sorts of
different merchants, and then they pay for it all at once, in a single
transaction. By grouping the payments together, the fees are divided
across a much larger amount of money, and each merchant's individual
fees get much smaller. So much smaller, that even with our 3%
commission, you still keep more of your money with Tipjoy than with
PayPal. The larger people's bill is when they pay it, the smaller
your fees are. Currently, the typical Tipjoy bill amount is $5. This
means that when you take $2 out of your Tipjoy account, you can expect
to actually keep 86.5% of it, or $1.73. And it only gets better from
there: as people buy more with Tipjoy, and their bills get closer to
$10, you'll get to keep 89.5% of your $2. When they're closer to $20,
you'll get to keep 91.4%.


Make great content and sell it for cheap. Make it easy for your
customers to buy. Make it fun and social. With Tipjoy, now you can.