All Posts Tagged With: "donations"

As I noted yesterday, web donation network Kachingle has launched a good-natured guerrilla marketing campaign to allow Kachingle users to financially support any of NYTimes.com’s 50-plus bloggers. The theme is “Stop the Paywall!” (as in, NYTimes.com’s upcoming “metered paywall,” set to debut in early 2011) … “Keep the NYT Blogs you love in the open web.”

And as I predicted yesterday, Times executives have decided to put their lawyers on the case and send a cease and desist order to Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey. So, rather than let an innovative marketing campaign by a tiny company run its course, Times executives are doing Kachingle a potentially big favor by flexing their legal muscles.

If this gets much press/Twitter/blogosphere attention, then Kachingle will benefit from a big boost in visibility. (Perhaps NYTimes.com could run a news story about the dispute!)

Typaldos today blogged about her encounter yesterday with Times executives: “But we love you The New York Times. My conversation with Mr. Digital and Mr. Legal and Mr. Paywall.” In her blog item, she recounted the discussion and reported that she would be receiving a letter soon:

“They said they were going to send us a legal document via FedEx called a ‘cease and desist’ order. I have never received one of these before so it’s going to be quite exciting. As soon as it arrives I will scan it and post.”

It doesn’t sound like Typaldos intends to back down:

“I told the three NYTimes executives that we have the same goal — saving the NYTimes Blogs from obscurity. Finding a new business model for news. At Kachingle we passionately believe that paywalls are truly bad … they cut off information from the open web, they dampen social discourse, they exclude people all over the world who cannot afford to be nickel-and-dimed-and-quartered-and-dollared for quality content. We believe paywalls are the enemy of democracy. We believe in our mission, and we will not back down.

While I can’t imagine it’s fun to be threatened by a huge media company’s lawyers (and there are financial risks in fighting back, of course), there’s clearly potential for an upside. I’m reminded of a former business partner (our company died in a bit less than two years from launch) who, when traffic to our websites failed to grow sufficiently fast enough, bemoaned that we needed something that would make a bigger splash. Getting sued by a big media or other company and the accompanying publicity and controversy would certainly do the trick, he said. I don’t believe he was joking. (He was a veteran of several previous Internet start-ups, and now is a partner at one that’s doing very well.)

I’ll keep watch on what happens next and report any interesting developments.

(Disclaimer: I have written about Kachingle in the past as a former columnist, and in this blog; I’ve also done a small amount of consulting for the company.)

If you mouseover the “PayCheckr” widget above, you’ll see an early version of a donation and payment model for digital content that I find intriguing. You can create your own beta PayCheckr widget and play around with it now, as I did with the widget above, though this is a “lite” version and the customization is limited.

The concept is simple enough to understand. I think of it as a payment and/or donation widget that is very much like the ShareThis widgets that you see on many websites and blogs; at the beginning or end of an article you mouseover a ShareThis icon which expands to offer multiple options for you to share a link to it with others via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail it to a friend, etc.

PayCheckr likewise expands to offer the web user multiple options — as chosen by the site or blog owner — for paying for or supporting a website or blog, or specific content (article, video, service, etc.). The site or content owner can configure the widget to contain multiple options:

• Collect money…
• for a subscription
• for a one-time purchase (say, to trigger a PDF or software download, or access premium content)
• as a donation from the user
• Ask for non-monetary support by…
• viewing a sponsor’s message
• viewing an advertisement
• taking a survey
• Point users to other sites that earn you money, such as…
• affiliate e-commerce pages (e.g., Amazon.com or an online store) where purchases by your users earn your site a commission
• a marketing-firm survey that you receive commissions for participant referrals
• a barter-exchange program

For now, PayCheckr “Lite” offers limited functionality. I can’t yet put my own logo or otherwise customize how the widget looks in its closed state, or change the default language of “Many ways to pay.” The fields to enter my options limit the number of characters too much, so that when I tried to put in the names of my “sponsor” sites, they wouldn’t fit and had to be shortened. But it’s enough to envision how it might be used once the PayCheckr service is fully featured:

1. Access to full article after user action – Let’s say a news website wants to encourage some form of “payment” before showing the user more than the first couple paragraphs of a story. Rather than a typical paywall (i.e., pay now to view more or go away), a PayCheckr widget (properly designed to explain its purpose) could permit access to the content when the user selected any of the options set up by the site owner. Let’s say, either (1) make a donation, (2) pay for a subscription for future premium-content access, (3) watch a 30-second video ad and then get access to the rest of the article, or (4) visit a sponsor’s page that shows as a pop-up while the rest of the article appears on the screen below.
2. Give payment options up front for a purchase – Let’s say that you’ve got an e-book that you want users to pay for, but you want to give them multiple options. Rather than require the buyer to fill out a credit-card order form as the only option, your PayCheckr widget could offer multiple payment options: PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon or iTunes account payment, direct payment from bank account, standard credit card form, payment with frequent-flyer miles, charge to mobile-phone account, etc. The benefit would be that if one of the choices is quick and convenient for the individual buyer, he or she is less likely to bail out of the purchase than if the only option is to fill out a long credit-card form.

Since PayCheckr is in early beta state without some of its planned features implemented, I can’t give it a good trial run yet. But it represents, to me at least, a softer approach to getting users to “pay” for digital content (especially news). If I as a web user I run across, say, an interesting research report that the publisher wants me to pay for, I might click on by if the only option is paying actual money. But if that valuable report can be viewed by non-monetary means — taking a marketing survey, or watching a 30-second sponsor video — then the report’s publisher is earning some money from me when with the money-only option I’d mean zero revenue.

PayCheckr also offers yet another model for soliciting donations. If I’ve got a special report online that I want everyone to see, but I’d still like to get some willing people to donate in thanks for the work I’ve done, perhaps a PayCheckr widget could offer multiple donation options — again, to make it easy for the potential donor to toss some money my way by selecting a donation option that’s simplest for him or her.

I also might want to put a PayCheckr widget in a permanent position on my blog, such as I’ve done with my Kachingle donation-network medallion in the left column of this site. (I’ll likely do that once PayCheckr offers more customization of the widget’s look and wording.)

Finally, since I work in an academic environment (University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism & Mass Communication, running the Digital Media Test Kitchen), I’m interested in PayCheckr from a research angle. I’m reminded of the Miami Herald’s website experiment late last year when it put a “donate” button at the bottom of all stories, but the only option for those wishing to donate money to support the Herald’s journalism was to fill out a long credit-card payment form. I’d love to know if a similar experiment would work better (the Herald killed its donation experiment quickly) if potential donors had multiple options for supporting the Herald, a la the PayCheckr approach.

(Disclaimer: I’ve been following the development of PayCheckr for some time, and have volunteered for solo focus-group sessions to aid the development team, led by PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving.)

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.)

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.)

I seem to be one of the few media writers who believes that there’s potential for newspapers to earn a decent revenue stream from donations by loyal website users (and even drive-by’s who want to reward journalistic excellence). It’s not that I think it’s going to save lots of newsroom jobs, but done right, asking readers to support the cost of professional journalists covering their communities could become one of multiple revenue streams that keeps newsrooms alive.

The Miami Herald has begun asking its users for donations to support its news operation, though it’s so subtle that I doubt many people visiting its website will even notice. Perhaps this is just dipping a toe in the water to see what happens, and a better-thought-out or alternative model will come later.

I couldn’t spot any call for voluntary donations on the site’s homepage, but at the end of each article is this small graphic, at right, which reads, “Support ongoing news coverage on Miamiherald.com – Click here.” That click will lead you to a donation page, which includes this:

There’s also a form with lots of fields to fill out, and you can pay whatever amount you want with a credit card.

Ugh. Talk about how not to do this. It’ll likely fail miserably unless the Herald changes its approach to asking for donations. Then Herald executives can dismiss the whole notion of asking for money as pointless.

First, here’s what’s wrong with how MiamiHerald.com is asking for reader support now:

1. Only alert is at the end of an article, and the graphic is small and competes against a bunch of other surrounding links and graphics. Eyetracking and other newspaper website readership studies demonstrate that few people reading a news website make it to the end of an article, especially a long one. And from my experience five years ago doing a website eyetracking study at the Poynter Institute, I can tell you that most people who reach the end of a story will not move their eyes below the last paragraph.
2. This approach is really unsophisticated. How about instead tracking frequent readers, and presenting them with a donation pitch after they’ve read a number of articles? And put it in front of their eyes, like between the headline and the first paragraph of, say, the 10th story they’ve read on your site.
3. The only payment option is by credit card! Not even Paypal? That’s dumb.
4. The rule on the web, if you want people to do something specific, is to make it easy. Heard of Amazon One-Click? People who can be convinced to donate something to the website should be able to do it easily, in as few clicks as possible.
5. I question the approach of an open donation amount. Better results will come by offering different specific donation levels. Or offer something back in the form of packages, with better goodies going with higher-priced donation selections. Listen to any NPR outlet’s pledge drive and learn form the experts.

I’ve written quite a bit in the last year about creative approaches to getting online users to support news websites and blogs. The “tip jar” approach begun by the Herald is pretty much the least creative option, and one that’s been rejected by entrepreneurs I’ve met this year who are trying to crack the code on online-content user financial support.

No one knows yet what will work. My gut tells me that a network approach, where web users can set aside money and easily give it to sites and blogs that they like the most with a simple click, will yield better results than every newspaper website separately begging for donations. Kachingle is one such experiment. (Disclaimer.)

It should be mentioned that a Kachingle competitor with a model which had similarities, Contenture, has gone out of business. A notice on its site says:

“Thank you to everyone who believed in our service by installing it on their site or signing up for a paid account. Unfortunately, we were unable to get any big publishers to use the service, which was going to be the key to our success. Without any large publishers, the economics just don’t work.”

Well, that’s interesting. Rather than try something innovative that just might work, big publishers like the Herald would rather try a lame donation experiment that is so unsophisticated that it’s certain to fail. WTF?

(Note: I’m writing this late at night, and haven’t spoken to or e-mailed anyone at MiamiHerald.com, so I don’t know their side of the story. They’re welcome to respond below in the comments, or contact me. If I can fit it my day on Wednesday, I’ll reach out to them to get a reaction and any information about their plans that I’m not aware of.)

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been playing around with alpha and beta versions of some content payment and donation solutions. Today I deactivated Payyattention, which added a widget at the end of article pages asking for a quick, voluntary payment if you liked what you read and want to monetarily support me. (This was a trial, and no actual money was accepted.)

The developers of Payyattention have been working on several concepts all generally revolving around the mission of identifying and funding the best online content. A tipping system, even if it’s simpler than previous ones that have come and gone over the years and containing a social-signal component, apparently isn’t the way to go, they’ve decided, so the Payyattention widget is about to expire.

According to Steve Farrell of Payyattention, he and his partners are moving in a different direction that might best be described as “emergent authority structures.”

That geeky-sounding description can be simplified. Farrell says that his team’s future direction will focus on providing or pointing online users to the highest-quality news and entertainment and bringing it to a wider audience. This will be selected by “aggregating the sum of thousands of individual decisions about who and what is worth paying attention to,” he says. (If that sounds akin to Digg, ponder that the two y’s in Payyattention were inspired by the two g’s in Digg.)

An example of this is HourlyPress, a project of Payyattention that uses the linking behavior of a selected group of influencers on a particular topic to identify, each hour, the most important stories published recently online. The first example of this is NewsAboutNews, which has been operating for a few months now and tracks the Twitter link behavior of seven thought leaders on news and media who are frequent Twitter posters.

NewsAboutNews lists the top 10 articles about news and media as determined by article links that the seven selected influencers (“editors”) have included in tweets, combined with tweets and retweets by other “sources” (people who the editors follow on Twitter). A more complete description of the process of best-story selection can be found on the HourlyPress homepage.

Farrell believes this is truly significant and points to the future of news:

“We see this approach as being the future, displacing the broadcast model that we’ve all grown up with, RSS news readers, and haphazardly finding things through your friends on social networks.”

If I’m understanding the direction that Farrell and company are heading, it’s in identifying the best content about any topic or area in realtime by using a combination of computer algorithm and the online behavior of a selected group of humans with a shared expertise or interest, and their like-minded colleagues. You might think of it as in between Google News, which selects news stories purely by machine algorithm, and a website like Digg where lists of top stories are ranked by the recommendations of a mass of self-selected online users.

In between, perhaps there’s not only opportunity, but a better way to identify the best online articles and content streaming through the vast, rapidly moving river of Internet news.

For Farrell, it’s about the belief that consumers faced with news and information overload online will begin to look for the best filtering mechanisms.

As for the financial model that can be layered on top of emergent authority networks, that’s the big thing to be tackled. You can ponder that challenge more deeply by reading this post on “retrospective news” by Lyn Headley, one of Farrell’s partners.

Some of the most popular content of the New York Times is (shocker) opinionated and biased. Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman … As op-ed columnists they get to report AND express opinions that influence readers. The Times felt that their content was so important that a few years ago it put up a pay wall around the op-ed columns (and some other stuff in a web initiative called TimesSelect), thinking that its star columnists’ work was so important that people would pay for it online. (Didn’t really work out so well.)

Not as popular: newspaper editorials and candidate endorsements. Yet they’re been with us for decades, and no doubt influenced many people who read them looking for guidance. Alas, some newspapers are getting out of the business of expressing opinions on such controversial issues as which candidates most deserve citizens’ votes. As Alan Mutter notes on his Newsosaur blog, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has decided not to endorse political candidates from now on. Mutter terms the AJC action “wimping out,” and I agree.

And I noticed some more wimpish behavior by a solid, quality old-media institution today, thanks to the non-wimpish Huffington Post.

Check out this significant and powerful story published by the St. Petersburg Times (which is owned by the Poynter Institute; disclaimer: a former employer of mine): “Nearly blind woman’s world grows darker as the medical bills pile higher.” Published September 28, it’s the story of a family going broke from medical bills despite having health insurance, and their insurance company denying further claims because the family has cost the company too much already (due to a rare genetic disorder that’s making the mother and her daughters go blind).

Great story; important. Reading it makes you want to help this unfortunate family. Alas, the St. Pete Times website, TampaBay.com, offers no way for readers to take action and directly help out with the family’s massive pile of unpaid medical bills. I know, as a long-time journalist, that putting up a widget on the website alongside the story, allowing sympathetic readers to directly donate online to the family, would be unseemly, under traditional journalistic thinking. “Heavens! Then everyone will be bugging us to raise money for their personal catastrophe! We’ll be seen as bleeding-heart liberals pushing the case for the public option on health care reform!”

Now take a look at what the Huffington Post did with this story. It summarized the St. Pete Times piece, embedded the video piece from TampaBay.com (as is allowed, and as I’ve done at the bottom of this item), and then added to its package a widget allowing anyone to donate money to the family’s PayPal account to help pay the medical bills. (This is part of a new initiative, introduced today, called HuffPost Impact.)

Hmmm. Well-respected Florida newspaper does dynamite article about a family’s miseries under our current health-care system. But it takes an Internet up-start to “break the old rules” and with a phone call and a few lines of code allow readers to help the family.

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? Newspapers are struggling, losing readers, losing advertisers to newer forms of media, losing relevance. Yet they stick to the old ways of doing things. And in this case, the local news institution that brought this family’s story to public light will not get the credit when caring members of the public help pay off their medical debt. The Huffington Post will get that credit, because it’s not afraid to take action to support a worthy cause.

What a sad story for the newspaper. It’s sad for the family involved, too, of course, but at least a new-media news entity decided that it didn’t need to live by the old rules, and asked its readers to take action.

“Tradition” lives on in the newspaper industry. Sigh.

Whether traditional news publishers believe that user/reader donations represent a viable revenue stream or not, entrepreneurs are hot on the idea, judging by the number of variations of solutions under development for getting people to voluntarily give money to support websites and blogs. I’ve begun using this, my personal blog, to try out the early versions of some of these upcoming and new services.

The latest to add to my list is SprinklePenny, a UK company that’s developed a service that is, frankly, very close to the model of Kachingle (which I’ve profiled previously).

The idea is that a user wishing to support free content made available by a variety of news sites, blogs, and other websites signs up for a $5/month (or a higher amount, if desired) SprinklePenny account, which is auto-billed to a credit card each month. Then whenever said SprinklePenny member visits a site that participates in the network (like this blog), the visit is counted and the $5 is split up at the end of each month depending on how often the member visited various SprinklePenny-enabled sites.

The primary difference between it and Kachingle is subtle, but perhaps important. Kachingle asks that Kachingle paying members click on a “medallion” when they see one on a site they like and wish to financially support. SprinklePenny credits every enabled site with a visit credit, and thus every site that a member visits receives some money from SprinklePenny members who drop by. But if you don’t want to support a site that you visited, you can remove it from the list of sites that receive some of your money.

In other words, Kachingle asks you to “opt-in” to financially supporting a site. SprinklePenny has you by default financially supporting every enabled site you visit, but you can “opt-out” for any visited site that you really don’t want to support.

It will be interesting to see which of these does better than the other. I suspect it will depend on the marketing plan of each company; the one that gets in front of the largest audience of potential members likely will be the winner.

I do see a potential problem with the SprinklePenny approach: Say, I am duped into visiting a site that I find offensive (perhaps by a Twitter recommendation) and it’s a SprinklePenny publisher; then I’ll have to actively turn off my support for that site.

With Kachingle, I’m in control of which sites I financially support; I have to click the Kachingle medallion to support a site. While I like that better, it’s an extra step that I don’t have to take if I’m supporting free content with SprinklePenny. So will I remember to click those medallions are thus start sending my favorite sites money?

Both companies will tell you their approach is the best one. We’ll see in time.