This isn't feasible if people are giving $0.001 donations frequently and unironically. You'd need thousands of donations to buy a coffee.
Was this not what Flattr was all about? How is this service better/different to that one? I haven't tried using either service, yet
Flattr has to deal with credit card fraud though, and all the issues surrounding it. This means they need to spend a non-insignificant portion of their operational budget dealing with risk analysis for all of the payouts they make. And, as their userbase grows, the cost of dealing with fraud also grows. It also means they have to ask their users tons of invasive questions.
Changetip, on the other hand, can accept deposits and make withdrawals with 100% confidence that they will not need to eat the cost at some point in the next 6 months. The downside is dealing with the security cost of storing their stash of bitcoins - but this is a fixed cost that doesn't grow as their userbase scales.
Then they will run into the same fundamental problem everyone else who has tried this did: the current Bitcoin implementation cannot handle the transaction volumes required to make this viable. This is the elephant in the room with decentralized currencies, and nobody's come up with a good solution yet.
Advertising rates for content will eventually stabilize. If the ad rates for content don't make it worth producing, people would stop producing it. Consumer content microtransactions simply aren't going to happen at any scale: it doesn't matter how low the cost is, any time you attach a marginal cost to an activity, you make them aware of the value proposition and the fact that there's a transaction happening. Mere awareness of a transaction is too much friction when you're talking about fractions of a cent. Counting half-pennies is just not worth my time (ironically, half a penny is in the same ballpark of current advertising rates).
In order to solve the transaction cost problem, transactions MUST happen on the blockchain. Otherwise you just reintroduce the costs elsewhere.
Couldn't this be solved with some kind of automation? It would take some standardization but what if clicking the ubiquitous "like" button on a piece of content sent a configurable amount of btc to the content creator?
1. The fees can be collected on transfers which occur between two members of the network without funds leaving the wallet. That's clearly the long-term goal of any network -- to grow to the point where everybody is on it.
2. The stated goal of ChangeTip, as seen in their videos and materials, is to replace advertising and other indirect ways of monetizing content with a way to directly express support for creators.
Advertising is a model whereby content creators get vanishingly small amounts of money for views, while having to place their content next to third-party claims and pitches which they do not endorse. Historically this has been because the rates on payment processing have dwarfed the actual value that a single article or video view delivers to a single consumer, so asking for half a penny was not feasible. You can express that level of support with BTC however.