Archive for August, 2010

I’ve been in touch with Twixa.com and its CEO, Kurt Huang, for some time while he and his team have been developing a new revenue widget for online publishers. You can see it on this post, next to the Tweetmeme (“Retweet”) button at right: ThankThis.

Click on the button and you can financially support this site AND support a charity that you choose. But don’t worry: You will not spend a dime (or a cent) by clicking.

The money comes from sponsors, whose messages show up in a pop-up box after you click “ThankThis.” Money earned when a visitor to this blog clicks on an ad in one of these pop-ups goes into the system, and is later distributed among:

• The site publisher (in this case, me)
• The charity that the visitor selects when he or she has accumulated enough points
• Twixa.com (which collects a small portion to run the service)

ThankThis is in private beta currently, and the ads you’ll see are from Google, so for now we’re not talking about much money changing hands. But if the service takes off and is able to sell enough sponsorships (or better, targeted advertising), I think this could turn into a nice extra revenue stream for online publishers.

An important point to note is that when you click “ThankThis,” the ad is not the prominent thing in the pop-up. Rather, it’s a note that tells you how many points you just earned; the ad is below that. To the right you should see how many points you have accumulated by clicking “ThankThis” on various participating websites and blogs.

When you get enough points to be ready to donate them, you click the “Donate Points” link and are presented with several options for spending them on a charity listed. (See the image accompanying this post.)

I like this idea, because … well, most people are cheap. They don’t want to donate money to a website that asks for a donation, and they most often ignore calls online to donate to charities. But with ThankThis, of course, donating money — yes, money — to a charity costs nothing.

Charity giving for cheapskates … what could be better?! (Count me among those online cheapskates, for the most part; but I do pay $5 a month for a Kachingle account and €2 a month for a Flattr account. Those services similarly aim to support multiple online publishers with user donations, but they distribute website users’ money while ThankThis distributes money from sponsors and advertisers.)

Will this work? I don’t know, but I like the concept and think that it has a chance of working. It’s not likely to support large newsrooms or anything like that, but, again, it might provide some extra money for the budget.

I’m disappointed that Kachingle and Flattr haven’t taken off in a big way yet, and I fear that ThankThis may suffer the same fate. If some BIG web publishers implemented any or all of these systems for networked user donations and put some marketing smarts into them, I suspect we’d see more money flowing. (I mean the likes of you, HuffingtonPost.com, About.com, et al.)

Over on the website of the Digital Media Test Kitchen (I’m director of that program at CU-Boulder), I’ve posted an update on one of our projects, called “Slices of Boulder,” which we’re working on with a technology partner, Toronto-based Eqentia, using its semantic publishing and distribution platform.

Work is happening over the summer, including building a taxonomy for the city of Boulder and surrounding communities, and identifying all of the local news and information digital sources currently in operation and serving Boulder’s residents. The latter is a fascinating, if big, task; the number of online sources of local, niche-local, hyper-local, and neighborhood news and information sources has grown significantly in the last year or two.

If you head on over to the Test Kitchen site at the link above, you’ll see a table I created of just some of the varied online sources available in the Boulder area today. The breadth and scope of the list (and what I published is just a small sample) is impressive. There’s a lot of diversity in the digital media-scape these days, even within a single mid-sized city. (Try this for a bigger city like Seattle, and you’ll be even more impressed by the growth of the “5th estate.”)

The reason for this, of course, is both the ease and low cost for anyone to publish in the digital age, and the decline in our local legacy news organizations, which just like in most other communities have seen editorial workforce reductions that leave holes in coverage of the Boulder area.

We expect to have a working website, a deep local-news-and-info aggregator, ready by the end of the summer or early fall.

There. I’ve said it. Now that I have an iPad (and love it as a device for media consumption), I really don’t ever want to see a print magazine again. If I could, I’d happily convert all my remaining print magazine subscriptions to iPad subscriptions, and be a happy guy. (And yes, I’m willing to pay, of course.)

For now, I still have a handful of print-magazine subscriptions, though most of my reading is done online on my laptop, on the iPad, or on my iPhone. What’s left of print for me: Wired, Columbia Journalism Review, and some cycling magazines (Bike, Bicycling, Mountain Biking). I also receive a few unasked-for print magazine subscriptions. That’s it. I receive no print newspapers and haven’t for some time.

Wired for the iPad: For now, that’ll be $3.99 per iPad edition, or else go to print

My reasoning is simple enough:

1. I dislike the waste of trees and energy for physical delivery of my magazines; a digital edition delivered to my iPad is preferable environmentally.
2. Print magazines pile up in various places around my house and office, and often don’t get read. Having them all in my iPad would be so much more convenient, and I’m pretty sure that they’d get read more (vs. now, when many of them get tossed in piles for later reading, and then I find them again when they’re months old, at which point they often get tossed in the recycling bin unread).
3. Many digital editions are better, since they can include video, multimedia, interactive forms, etc.

Alas, the current state of iPad magazines is maddening. Apple, as has been reported recently, isn’t letting magazine publishers use iPad apps to sell subscriptions. Instead, we have the situation where Wired in print is $8 for an annual subscription (I just got my renewal notice). The Wired app on my iPad (free download) allows me to buy individual issues at $3.99; no subscription discount, courtesy of Apple’s resistance to permitting publishers to offer subscriptions. No thanks.

Ditto for Newsweek, but it’s even worse. The weekly per-digital-issue price on the iPad is $2.99 (no subscription offered), while a print subscription can be had for as little as $21 a year (54 issues) via magazine-subscription discounters.

Zinio offers a digital, save-trees alternative for many magazines. Via the Zinio app on my iPad, I can buy digital subscriptions for many magazines. Alas, the only one from my list of remaining print subscriptions is Bike, for $9. For the rest of my list: no option other than print. Wired, Newsweek? Not offered on Zinio.

I hope this is a temporary situation. It’s absurd for digital editions to cost more than print, considering the high costs of delivering print magazines to subscribers: printing, trucking, postage, direct-mail renewal reminders, etc. I’ll settle for the same price I pay now for iPad editions.

Here’s a tip for magazine publishers, once Apple relents on permitting subscriptions from within iPad apps:

• Low-cost digital magazine subscription for what is essentially a replica edition of the print magazine.
• Higher subscription rate for enhanced iPad edition with video and multimedia bells and whistles.

Oh, and those unasked-for magazines that show up in my mailbox? Sometimes they are publications that I’m interested in (such as our local city magazine), but please, offer me a free iPad or Zinio subscription; I don’t want print!

When is this going to get fixed?