Credit cards suck for many reasons. (One that annoys me the most is the absurdly high late charges I’ve personally experienced for being a day or two late getting my bill in on time.) But in the physical world, and in certain situations in the online world (e.g., Amazon.com, which can store my account information), they are awfully convenient.

But for paying for low-priced digital content, credit cards largely suck because the fees are too high for online publishers to use them on small amounts without some sort of aggregation system to bill multiple small purchases together, as Apple does with its iTunes accounts when you buy 99-cent songs (and there’s no need for entering a card number more than once).

So it’s a pet peeve for me when I see some media website selling content or subscriptions, and the only payment option is using your credit card, and typing in all your information for the transaction to go through. My peeve is less about the cut that the credit card companies take form the site owner (though it is outrageously high, typically!), than about how much time and bother it takes the buyer to make a small purchase when the required payment method is a credit card.

Online users do not have a lot of patience, and usability experts who’ve studied this will tell you that to get lots of online users to do something (like pay a bit of money for some premium content, or make a donation, etc.), the process must be quick and simple. Typing in card number, expiration date, name on card, security code, e-mail address, postal code, and phone number is not something that you want to ask online users to do very often.

This little rant comes courtesy of me spotting this donation pitch (at right) from the Bay Citizen, the new non-profit online news enterprise covering the San Francisco Bay Area and financed by Warren Hellman, which launches on May 26 under the editorial leadership of Jonathan Weber (ex-NewWest.net and the Industry Standard). Pre-launch, Bay Citizen is looking for “founders” to commit either one-time or repeating donations, and it has this lengthy form for you to fill out.

The sole payment option: your credit card!

Especially for non-profits, those donation forms should be effective at collecting money. A long form like the Bay Citizen’s just gives an excuse for a potential donor to click away rather than spend several minutes filling out a form. But the same goes for for-profit media sites.

How about doing the obvious, web publishers: Offer some choices! Let your contributors or purchasers have multiple options: Paypal, Google Checkout, and more media-centric payment systems such as Zuora and others.

While I can buy a burrito at Chipotle and the counter person swipes my card and hands me a receipt (not even a signature required any more), too many media websites force me to spend precious time filling out long forms like the one on this page (click to enlarge it).

It’s got to be made simpler and faster in the online marketplace!

The other day I received two envelopes of coupons in my (snail-)mail box.

The first included the same kind of untargeted assortment of color-printed discount coupons from local businesses that I’ve received for decades. OK, not entirely untargeted; after all, they were for businesses in my area. But the sender knew nothing about me other than where I live, apparently, so flipping through the 1/4-inch-thick stack of coupons, all but one went immediately to the recycling basket.

The other, smaller package of (single-color) coupons was from one of the grocery stores I shop at: King Soopers. Because the King Soopers chain offers member discount cards, the company’s databases have lots of data on what I’ve bought from its stores; you pretty much have to use the cards (or enter your phone number as an alternate ID at the check-out), or else you pay significantly more by missing all the in-store sale prices.

While King Soopers has been sending my household product-discount coupons (which go beyond the member-card sale prices) for many years, this latest envelope got my attention. Of the dozen coupons in my envelope, every single one was for a grocery item and brand that I routinely buy. The company at last seems to have evolved its system to the point where I could use all those coupons.

If I was of mind to get upset about digital privacy, I might have been freaked out that one of the coupons was for a free pint of Haagen-Daz ice cream. You see, one of my daughters and I are both fond of that company’s Java Chip variety, and I must confess to having purchased quite a few packages. My guess is that the system tracking my purchases noticed that I’d bought a bunch of Haagen-Daz, and rewarded me not just with a discount, but with a coupon for a free pint.

You may feel differently, but I’m not one to freak out about this on privacy grounds. I’ll trade the occasional free item and ongoing discounts for a computer tracking my grocery purchases. In fact, I thought it was pretty darn cool that King Soopers has advanced the technology it uses enough so that I can get, in effect, personalized discount coupons.

Returning to the usual topic of this blog, none of the news brands that I use regularly know me anywhere near as well. Count me as one of those news website readers commonly afflicted with banner-ad blindness. I’m looking for news, so I seldom notice the ads, unless there’s something about them that hits my interest areas.

Google, on the other hand, knows me well, because it reads all my e-mail, as a regular user of its Gmail service. On Gmail, there’s a thin strip of text ads that run on top of the list of messages and above opened e-mails. I notice those ads frequently, because they are placed contextually based on the content of the e-mails in my Gmail inbox. I don’t try to look at them; they just catch my eye when they’re relevant to me. I’m surprised at the number of those Gmail text ads that I’ve clicked on through the years.

Back to news once more, there’s a similarity between when I visit a news website and when I’m using Gmail. In both cases, I’m task oriented: reading news, and reading and responding to e-mail. Yet with Gmail I notice more of the ads because many of them end up targeting me because they’re based on the content of the e-mail I’m reading. With most news sites, the ad targeting is weaker, and the advertising thus less effective in catching my eye.

That King Soopers and Gmail know me better as an individual than do the news providers that I frequent online is a problem for the latter. Sure, some newspaper companies have used targeting technology to track what a website user is reading, and perhaps if they have the data through required online registration, their systems can match that information with my age and location to deliver personally relevant ads on their websites and/or via e-mail or other subscribed services.

But I believe news providers online need to do a much better job or personalization and targeting of advertising. Local newspapers, indeed, might want to look at the grocery industry to pick up some tips. I find it intriguing that the most effective, personalized advertising that I’ve received lately came from a grocer.

Perhaps those member cards are something that news brands should consider more seriously.

I’ve had an iPad for a couple weeks now (sharing with my wife and two daughters; it’s a popular gadget around our house). And I’m starting to notice some patterns in buying apps for the new tablet. I’d love to know if any of you share my behavior. (Comment below, please.)

1. I don’t think much before purchasing a low-priced iPad app that is “permanent.” For instance, the Weather HD app looked cool, and even with its limited functionality (compared to the free Weather Channel Max for iPad app), I enjoy the quick look at the current weather and brief forecasts for the next few days and the app’s slick animated photo graphics. 99 cents? Sure, why not.
2. Family members and I have purchased a few more expensive iPad apps: Scrabble ($9.99); Crosswords ($9.99); Pages ($9.99); Starwalk ($4.99, and highly recommended!); and some more low-priced ones: Magic Piano (99 cents); Glee ($2.99); Set ($2.99). Again, each of those apps is “permanent,” as in they will stay on the iPad until we tire of them.

Buy a digital edition of Time magazine on your iPad! … For $4.99?

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news apps, all of them free. Frankly, the news publishers that are giving away these apps are leaving money on the table. Of the apps that I downloaded for free to my iPad, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying 99 cents or $1.99 for those from: New York Times, NPR, USA Today, BBC News. I would pay for these because they are permanent.

Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing. You can even bookmark, say, the NYTimes.com homepage and put an icon on the iPad screen permanently. The reason that someone like me would pay for an iPad news app from a specific news provider is if the experience is superior to viewing the news website on the iPad’s browser.

(At this early stage of iPad news apps, the websites as viewed on the iPad browser sometimes are as good of a or a better viewing experience than viewing the iPad app versions. NYTimes.com viewed on the iPad’s browser is quite nice, for example; in fact, it’s better than the only iPad app available from the New York Times currently, NYT Editors’ Choice.)

Within the news iPad apps I’ve used so far — and I’ll concede that it’s early, and publishers I hope will figure this out soon — the business model seems to be something that the companies will get to later. USA Today’s iPad app, for instance, has a banner ad on the homepage (Marriott Hotels at this writing), but ads don’t show up in much else. The NY Times iPhone app has ads from a single advertiser, at the bottom of the homepage (where banner blindness will make them mostly ineffective due to that positioning), and on the second screens of most news articles.

These apps are mostly “shovelware” from the news websites, and lack even web basics such as allowing user comments.

One nice ad technique used on the NY Times iPad app is an occasional “interstitial” full-page ad, which appears after you click a homepage or section-front headline and appears before you get to view your article. I don’t find this that annoying, but if I did, the Times would be smart to give me an option in the app to turn off such take-over-my-screen ads by clicking a setting and, say, paying a dollar to avoid seeing them for the next month,or maybe $5 to not see them for a year.

There are lots of ideas for “upsells” within an iPad news app to persuade (not demand!) people to pay extra beyond the initial, inexpensive download fee. Let’s say that USA Today’s iPad app had a setting where for $1 a month I could turn on a commenting feature and be allowed to leave comments on stories. This should be the topic of another blog post about how to make money from upsells in news iPad apps, so I’ll leave that for another time.

While major news brands are not taking advantage of obvious revenue opportunities with iPad apps yet, Time magazine, until this week, has been going about it wrong. Initially, an iPad user could purchase a single issue of a Time weekly edition, an enhanced digital edition of the print magazine, for $4.99 per edition. That’s compared to the street price of a printed Time magazine at $4.95.

It’s not just that the iPad single-edition price is a few cents more than the paper edition (which I think is ill-advised, considering the printing and physical distribution costs saved by Time with digital editions), but it’s also absurd that Time was selling each edition as a separate iPad app.

Getting back to my earlier comments, there’s no way that I’m going to pay for individual magazines as individual iPad apps! This approach completely misunderstands the device. First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted (since if I don’t and I continue buying iPad Time editions, my iPad screen will fill up with Time icons for various editions).

Time has now fixed this blunder and offers a Time iPad app for free. From within the app, the iPad user can purchase digital versions of the magazine for $4.99. Old issues are stored in the cloud for later reading, and there’s only one Time icon on the iPad screen. But pricing should be more realistic, I believe, and subscriptions offered. While I don’t think that this is the best iPad business model for Time, at least if its executives want to charge per digital issue, they should get a grasp on what’s likely to fly in digital-content pricing when there’s free content (like Time.com!) available on the iPad browser.

Count me as an iPad fan. I love the device, and more specifically I love the form factor of a tablet and can see it becoming an important part of my media life, taking much time away from my laptop. It does concern me that news publishers, out of the gate, appear to be missing the boat in working on an innovative business model for the tablet. Geez, I hope we’re not seeing the big news brands repeat the mistakes of their past when it came to adapting to new digital devices!

OK, I’m sold on the Facebook “Like” buttons that anyone can add to their site. I’ve added them to my blog items. Please Like them.

In an effort to integrate Twitter into my blog a bit better, I’m trying out Twitter’s @Anywhere, which adds a pop-up info box when you hover over an @ Twitter address (among other things). So, let’s see how this works with mention of a couple Twitter addresses…

@steveouting

@dmediakitchen

It’s pretty easy to set up. @Anywhere gives you a few lines of custom Javascript to add to your site or blog; I simply added it to the end of my Wordpress header.php file.

I like it so far. Notice the “more…” link in the pop-ups; they give you more info on the Twitter account that you’re hovering over. … I’ll explore and add more @Anywhere features later, when I have some free time.

When comments come into this blog, I moderate them before they are published. Like most blogs (or any web publishing platform that accepts user comments), this one receives far more comment spam than legitimate comments. Comment anti-spam program Askimet catches, I’d guess, more than 99% of my incoming comment spam.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of comment spammers getting past Askimet and into my comment approval queue. What’s both annoying and amusing is that the way these spammers are getting past my anti-spam measure is that they are writing personalized notes, which also include a link to some spammy website.

Here’s an example I ran across in my web travels today, on another site:

That one is of the generic “That was a terrific post! I’ve bookmarked your blog!” variety. Comment spam filters catch most of those, though not that one.

The ones that do get through to my moderation queue on this blog actually refer to what I was writing about. Someone (I’m imagining a low-paid Nigerian with at least rudimentary English skills working in a comment-spam sweatshop) is banging out inane comments but actually reading bloggers’ posts, or at least headlines, and tayloring the spam comment to the blog post it’s aimed at.

I’d post an example, but I usually click the “spam” button to delete them. I decided to write about this after twice today coming across on other sites these kinds of spam comments that got through to publication — because those site owners don’t moderate or vet comments before they’re published online, relying solely on a comment spam filter to catch this crap. But if the spammers are personalizing the comments to what you’re writing about, it’s unlikely that a filter will catch those.

So here’s my plea: Start moderating your user comments before publication. It’s a real turn-off to visit a blog or website and see that the owner is letting this happen.

At an increasing number of websites, this latest form of comment spam is adding to the chaos that’s already rampant in comment threads when site owners don’t require commenters to user their real names. So you end up with, as New York Times media reporter David Carr describes them, lots of stupid, often disgusting comments from the “low sloping forehead” crowd.

Here’s a second suggestion, and this one is aimed especially at newspaper websites, many of which are guilty of letting their user comments turn into online cesspools: It’s high time to start demanding that those who wish to comment on a story presented on a website or blog to use their real names and register their personal data (i.e., name and confirmed e-mail address). Those who abide by this rule can have their comments posted immediately and unmoderated.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons sometimes for an online user to post a comment anonymously. But that’s easy to handle, in different ways:

• Set up a “post anonymously” comment form, but have an editor moderate those comments
• Allow pseudonyms instead of real names on user accounts, but always moderate those comments

Too many untended user-comment threads, especially on news sites which are of course filled with controversial content and issues, are starting to really stink. It well past the time to start cleaning out the stench and saying goodbye to the anonymous trolls.

Face it, for many of you right now, your user comments suck. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Josh Stearns of Free Press called me out on Twitter yesterday: “@steveouting Would love to get your thoughts on Mutter… my response is here http://bit.ly/cVoWrc.” Well, I better not ignore that call to action…

Stearns is referring to Alan Mutter’s item this week on his Newsosaurus blog, “Non-profits can’t possibly save the news,” in which the news-media analyst opens:

“An amazing number of smart and sophisticated people continue to harbor the fantasy that philanthropic contributions can take over funding journalism from the media companies that traditionally have supported the press.”

Mutter cites figures that American newsrooms today are spending $1.6 billion a year less on journalism than in 2006, and suggests that there’s no way that foundation and philanthropic funding of non-profit news organizations will get anywhere close to making up for all that lost news coverage.

TexasTribune.org (a non-profit online news entity) founder John Thornton did a great job of refuting Mutter’s take on non-profit news, and I doubt I can do better. But to satisfy Josh, I’ll add my few cents. …

Of all that lost for-profit journalism that used to be published by newspapers, lots of it is no longer needed. Newspapers have lost plenty of movie and book reviewers; foreign and Washington, D.C., correspondents; sports reporters who travel across the country to cover every away game; and on and on. I don’t mean to belittle the loss of those jobs, but the Internet has made available plenty of credible replacements.

Is it necessary that my hometown paper have a professional movie reviewer, when I can read a wide range of professional and movie-goer reviews on my laptop or phone? I’m not the only person who’s stood in front of the multiplex theater deciding what movie to see by checking the reviews and trailers using Flixster on my smartphone. … That the local metro paper no longer has a correspondent in D.C. is lamentable, but there are plenty of replacements just a few clicks or finger-taps away. … Foreign news coverage? I’ve never had such a wide range of sources available to me, for free, no less.

In other words, plenty of that $1.6 billion in lost newspaper journalism is not going to be replaced; it already has been by other parties.

The part of that lost journalism that’s most important — and has not been replaced by new digital players because there’s no business model to support it — is investigative, in-depth, watchdog, enterprise journalism. You know, the months-long investigation by dogged reporters that uncovers the corruption by the county sewer board that’s led to poison in your drinking water. The stuff that wins Pulitzer Prizes.

Newspapers are doing less of that important work, and that’s unlikely to change. Non-profit news organizations like TexasTribune, ProPublica, Voice of San Diego, and many others can fill some of the loss — for a lot less than $1.6 billion a year.

Non-profit news will grow — it must grow — in order to cover that part of the news (the most important to our communities and society) for which a profitable business model no longer exists to support. I believe that foundations, philanthropists, individual donors, and development of non-profit business models that are sustainable without requiring unending foundation checks is achievable for a non-profit news eco-system to supplement the weakened for-profit news media.

Mutter, whose musings I often enjoy, is guilty of thinking too black-and-white, I’d say, with his blog post this week. Non-profit news will grow, prosper, and serve the public better than the sector has in the past. It will be but one part of an increasingly diverse news eco-system.

I can’t think of anyone in the media-criticism or industry-punditry space with views that fit into Mutter’s opening-paragraph description.

Here’s one way for newspapers to adapt, by Ted Rall. Enjoy…

 

 

The amount isn’t enough to quit my day job, but this, my personal blog, actually brought in some money today. It’s always been a side activity for me, where I write about digital media and news innovation (mostly), and it complements other things I do that do bring in money.

The $65.08 deposit into my Paypal account earlier today came from Kachingle, a networked crowd-funding service that officially launched on February 14. The payout today represents the four months since I signed up as an early beta tester, when money was collected from beta users ($5 a month), and payouts to sites that “Kachinglers” support and visit were tracked. Money started actually flowing out yesterday.

Kachingle kept 20% of my donation total: 10% to support Kachingle; 10% to pay for Paypal fees

I first learned about the company a year or so ago, and became a fan of the idea that you can get online users to voluntarily pay for the content you produce with a system that makes it simple and allows people to support all of their favorite sites and blogs, not just your single site.

In other words, unless you’re NPR or one of its affiliate public radio stations, the “tip jar” or “begging” model doesn’t stand much chance of success done solo. The demise of TipJoy, a convenient service that hosted online tip jars on websites and blogs, points to that truth.

Lots of people in the digital-media and traditional-media worlds pooh-pooh the idea that Kachingle or a similar service (e.g., its competitor, Flattr.com) can bring in anything more than pocket change. A friend who I consider a media guru some months ago told me, “I just don’t understand your enthusiasm” for the Kachingle model, where online users join Kachingle, agree to have $5 a month charged to their credit card, then do nothing except visit the sites and blogs they like — clicking one time only when they see a Kachingle “medallion” on a site they like to initiate some of their $5 a month going to the site.

I hope my skeptical guru friend will be proved wrong.

One modest payment proves nothing, of course, but the amount is more than I expected during the beta period. And I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t even blogged that much, so my blog traffic has been low (and earning money from Kachinglers is dependent on them visiting your site or blog). Looking at my Google AdSense earnings from this blog, for comparison, I note that the monthly figure is usually in the low one-figures.

While I have no expectation that Kachingle is going to send me large amounts of money each month, I do want to experiment and see if I can get it to work well for me. And if my little solo blog can bring in some money, then it might just give hope that the networked crowd-sourcing model has potential.

Kachingle’s founders have suggested that a good strategy for me is to ask friends and colleagues who produce websites and blogs on the same topic as I do (digital media and media trends) to sign up for Kachingle, and if they do so and “Kachingle” my blog (so I get some of their money when they visit SteveOuting.com), then I’ll agree to “Kachingle” them back (so they get some of my money when I visit them). I like that idea, and plan to do that as soon as I get a little free time.

Their advice is in line with the reason that they (and I) think this networked crowd-sourcing model can work: the social component. If you see that I’m earning money from this, then you might sign up in hopes of making money for your own site, and you might “Kachingle” me so my earnings will go up.

Founder Cynthia Typaldos recommends that for a local news website to get Kachingle numbers to take off, a good strategy is to encourage community leaders (e.g., the mayor, members of city council, etc.) to join Kachingle and then “Kachingle” the news site, as a way for them to demonstrate their support for the news organization’s work. Then as readers click the Kachingle medallion on the news site out of curiosity, they’ll see names they know who are financially supporting the news site via Kachingle. In theory, lots more people start Kachingling and everyone in the network (that is, who are producing good content) starts earning more.

I’ve never paid much attention to monetizing this blog, other than the simple step of adding AdSense. Others take it more seriously, such as venture capitalist Brad Feld, whose popular Feld Thoughts personal blog has a high readership (much higher than mine). While he’s stopped now, Feld for years experimented with different revenue sources for his blog (to see if they’d work; and sometimes they were from companies he’d invested in), and I know from past conversations with him that some of the ad and affiliate programs he’d added to Feld Thoughts brought in enough money to make the effort and webpage space lost to them worth it. (Hey, Brad, add a Kachingle medallion to your blog and I’ll “Kachingle” you!)

I still have a sense that this model can take off. We’ll see. I do know that individual tips jars on sites and blogs won’t be worth much; ask the Miami Herald.

(Disclaimer: I first ran across Kachingle when it was under development and wrote about it when I was an Editor & Publisher Online columnist (which I no longer am). In recent months I’ve served as an occasional advisor to the company and have a very small stake in it.)

Queue up the “eBay Song” by Weird Al Yankovic. … An eBay oddity landed in my inbox today in the form of a Google Alert e-mail that I have set to watch for when my name turns up in articles, blogs, etc. Included was a link to this page on eBay where an online bookseller has two copies of my 1996 trade book, “Newspapers and New Media,” for sale with a Buy-It-Now price of $118.64.

The amusing thing to me (well, actually, it’s just sad) is that the small advance and piddling royalty checks I received over the years from the publisher for that thin (67-page) title made it, I think, the single project in my past with the lowest payout per hour of work.

Thanks, Google Alerts, for reminding me of an ancient bad career decision. … It’s amazing, isn’t it? The crap you can buy on eBay?