The company behind Adblock Plus is acquiring micropayment service Flattr

Eyeo, the parent company behind AdBlock Plus, announced this morning that it has acquired Flattr.

The two companies were already working together on a project initially called Flattr Plus, where users can allocate a monthly payment to online publishers. The money is then distributed based on users’ engagement with different sites and articles.

This sounded pretty similar to what Flattr was already doing, except that users didn’t have to hit a button to “Flattr” a website. In fact, this is now being pitched as an overhauled, “zero-click” version of the main Flattr product, and you can sign up for early access here.

“Over the past several months, it became very clear that we needed to go beyond a partnership and truly bring Flattr into the eyeo family,” said eyeo founder Till Faida (pictured above) in the acquisition release. “This allows us to go that extra mile and finalize our vision of enabling hundreds of millions of users to choose how they want to pay for the content they consume. This is a game-changer.”

Eyeo said that the Flattr team will continue to work out of Malmö, Sweden (eyeo is headquartered in Germany) — co-founder Linus Olsson will remain in charge of operations and implementation, while co-founder Peter Sunde becomes an advisor.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the partnership, eyeo had previously invested in Flattr, which also raised funding from Passion Capital and Federico Pirzio-Biroli.