I removed the Flattr plugin six years, yesterday I receive an e-mail announcing the service as I was using it is finally dead, and I was invited to pull out whatever meagre funds were still present there.

These days, flattr is some form of subscription model of ad-blocking – meaning the ads are blocked, but some form of revenue is passed to the publisher.

That model might make sense, but would need wide adoption to work, and it does not really solve the issue that content that is developed for an ad model is pretty different from content designed in a subscription universe, both in terms of format (many pages to show more ads vs a single page) or the content (sponsors within the content).