Hi Tom,
Exactly, I am giving part of the answer in the last paragraph. Still, this does not change the basic question if the ones who have a “negative read-write balance” would continue to pay without having any incentive whatsoever. We’ll see, but a cash burning startup like flattr also doesn’t have time forever.
With respect to your “blogger read bloggers” analysis: That’s right. But it can slowly change with a changing culture and a changing perspective on what is “important”. Furthermore, I actually do not necessarily see a tool here that helps just “bloggers” but a tool that could really become a working business model for online journalism, “big” sites included, especially local big sites like austrian newspapers, IF they start to use it (and IF they give their readers a reason to register)
With respect to monopoly and company spokesperson. I don’t see that. From a technical perspective you can easily integrate many such services on a site and if you want to give your users some incentive (like e.g. no ads, maybe some other idea) to register with *one* of them of their personal choice, you are happy and they get their “bonus” feature…