All Posts Tagged With: "benevote"

Something I’ve been tracking for months now is the wave of new solutions for getting people to pay for online content, either through voluntary donations or mandatory payments. Some are in beta now; others due in the coming months.

Currently, I have a Payyattention donation box at the end of my blog items, and I’ve been playing with early versions of SprinklePenny and BeneVote (though they’ve been removed temporarily due to some bugginess). I’m anxiously awaiting putting a Kachingle medallion on this blog to be part of that voluntary payment network, and will certainly try out others as they go live.

And, of course, there are plenty of options for paying for content where money is a requirement, not a request: Paypal, credit cards, and upcoming solutions such as those from Journalism Online. (The latter also says it will offer donation options as well as various means for required payments and subscriptions.)

As author of this blog, I’d love to have lots of options for readers to send a few cents (or dollars!) my way if they like my writing or find value in it. But this blog could easily get overwhelmed with donation graphics from all the different services!

I’ve been looking for the solution, which is an obvious one: a ShareThis-like widget that aggregates all the solutions for payment and/or donation. The first such solution appears to be PayCheckr.

The concept here should be pretty obvious from the screen shots above. How I might use it to collect contributions on my blog is to have a PayCheckr icon or (ideally) something that says, “Please support this blog,” with a mouseover action expanding to what you see in the top image above — but in my case it would be populated with voluntary donation options — and place it at the end of my blog entries.

For paid content, a site or blog might use PayCheckr to aggregate all the forced-pay options that an online user could use to pay for content access.

You could also get creative. Perhaps you let Kachingle paying network members get access to a special piece of content or area of your site, but non-Kachinglers would have to choose another option, such as paying for a subscription or via a micropayment service.

Also, PayCheckr might aggregate all or most of the options; you still might choose to highlight some options outside of the PayCheckr widget.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for someone to come up with something like this, and PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving appears to be the first. Somehow he evaded my radar, since minOnline gave the fledgling service a write-up in late July.

I’ve got yet another “micropatronage” service to tell you about. But while the other ones I’ve written about in recent months have the online user voluntarily ponying up some cash to support the websites and blogs that they visit or like, or the articles they value most — Kachingle, Contenture, Inamoon, Payyattention — this one lets the user financially support a website simply by voting “like” or “dislike” on articles. No money is extracted from the user’s wallet.

BeneVote, a new service in beta from a Silicon Valley company called Twixa, describes itself as “The sponsored voting widget for newspapers, blogs, and more.” The concept is quite simple, yet for all the writing I’ve done and thought given to micropatronage or voluntary financial support for websites and blogs, my mind hadn’t yet veered into the territory of “the user pays nothing.”

Here’s how BeneVote works: Website or blog publisher installs the Benevote widget, which adds a voting box at the bottom of each article. The user mouses over the BeneVote box and selects either “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Clicking to vote then displays a small pop-up box that says, “Your votes help sponsor this site. Thanks!”, followed by an ad. (For now, it’s a Google AdSense text ad.)

You can probably guess the rest. Twixa counts the votes per participating site and takes the advertising money it earns from the pop-up boxes, subtracts its own percentage to operate the BeneVote service and earn a profit, and splits it among all the publishers based on how the vote-clicks are distributed.

BeneVote is touted as working alongside other micropatronage services. So a news site, say, could use Kachingle and earn money from “Kachinglers” who decide to financially support the site with a portion of their monthly $5 Kachingle payment, and also use BeneVote to earn money.

A side benefit, of course, is that BeneVote gives publishers feedback from readers about its content, though it’s pretty crude: A reader either “likes” or “dislikes” an article. Readers can see how other readers voted.

As with all the other micropatronage services I’ve written about, BeneVote is unlikely to “save journalism” or have website or blog publishers swimming in free cash. But it’s yet another revenue source to add to the stew. We’ll have to wait and see how well it works (as with the others listed above).

One last interesting tidbit about BeneVote: It’s being developed by the same team that created BitPass, the micropayments and paid-subscriptions service for digital content that’s been used by such companies as Microsoft, Disney, and Ziff-Davis.