All Posts Tagged With: "kachingle"

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.)

This is an interesting case of what I guess would be termed “guerrilla marketing.” Kachingle, an online user-donation network that aims to financially support many websites and blogs, has begun a campaign to “STOP THE PAYWALL” at NYTimes.com.

First, some quick background:

• NYTimes.com has announced that it will put up a “metered paywall” on the site in early 2011. That means that site visitors after viewing an as yet unspecified number of stories in a month will be asked to pay to subscribe to the site or otherwise pay to access more Times content. It is likely that web users referred via links on Google, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. will not be counted against the monthly free allotment. (In other words, it’s a porous paywall, unlike the “hard” paywall that’s on Rupert Murdoch The Times (UK) website; that paywall allows no free content, and only paying customers can see beyond the headlines.)

Kachingle’s founders don’t believe in paywalls for general news websites, and they think that they have a better idea: Get readers of news across many sites and blogs to band together, pay $5 a month to Kachingle, then have Kachingle distribute that money based on individual users’ tracked visits to sites and blogs that they like (and that display Kachingle “medallions”).

The Kachingle guerrilla marketing campaign has specifically targeted the 50-plus blogs published on NYTimes.com, by allowing Kachingle’s paying member (I’m one) to “Kachingle” or support any of those blogs — without NYTimes.com’s cooperation. (I regularly read some of the NYT blogs and have Kachingled the ones I like. So, when I visit those blogs from now on, some of my $5 a month will start going to NYTimes.com bloggers — that is, if they choose to sign up to collect it.)

Since the Times doesn’t appear to want to do business with Kachingle or support its donation scheme, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey had their staff create browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome that allow a Kachingle member to support the NYTimes.com blogs. With the plug-in installed, when you visit one of the blogs, a thin Kachingle medallion banner appears above the page, pushing down the rest of the NYTimes.com page. That’s how you can “Kachingle” a specific NYTimes.com blogger. … NYTimes.com visitors who do not install the Kachingle browser plug-in will not see the medallions.

There’s also an automatically updating “Leader Board” that shows which NYT blogs are getting the most Kachinglers (i.e., financial supporters). As I write this, Paul Krugman’s blog is leading the Bits Blog and David Pogue’s Posts blog. The numbers aren’t much, but the campaign was launched only last night, and paying Kachingle members and some journalists and bloggers were notified today.

We’ll have to wait and see what the reaction is from NYTimes.com executives. As I see it, they can ignore this innovative but perhaps annoying (to NYT) ploy by a small Internet donation start-up, and it will either catch on with web users who think it’s a good idea, or die quickly. Or the Times execs can make a stink and try to force Kachingle to halt the campaign.

My experience with big media companies is that they often can’t help themselves from the latter approach: Call in the lawyers and send out the cease-and-desist orders! That would not be wise, since it will turn Kachingle’s guerrilla marketing ploy into a David-vs.-Goliath saga that could get lots of attention in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

Hey, what better way for a small business struggling to catch on with the public than to get a boost by being threatened or sued by New York Times lawyers! And it will raise more questions about the NYTimes.com paywall strategy.

I should learn more later, so we’ll see where this goes. In any event, it looks like fun.

(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.)

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.)

One of my strongest interests this year has been news and content business models, and how to pay for content that’s given away free online. As a blogger (and my professional interest as a writer, researcher, and consultant on news business models), I’m especially interested in the wave of new solutions for websites and blogs to attract money from volunteer contributors.

This weekend, Kachingle, one of the first of this new wave of voluntary-pay solutions I heard and started writing about in early 2009, debuted its service in beta. (Disclaimer.) I’m excited to finally see this concept in action, and find out if my gut instincts are correct: that some websites and blogs can make a tidy revenue stream of voluntary user donations (a.k.a., crowdfunding).

Image from Kachingle.com

It’d be great if you would “Kachingle” me, which means that you like my blog and writing enough to monetarily support it (along with your other favorite sites and blogs that will start using Kachingle). Note the Kachingle “medallion” in the upper right of all my blog pages and sign up.

Here’s the quick version of Kachingle for the first-time user:

• Via the medallion, you’d sign up for a Kachingle account
• This will entail committing to a $5/month Paypal withdrawal from your account
• That $5 will be shared each month among all sites that you like most (and are Kachingle publishers carrying the medallion)
• Whenever you encounter a Kachingle-enabled site, if it’s one you like and visit often, mouseover the Kachingle medallion so it expands, then click “Kachingle website.com”
• Your money will be distributed only among sites you’ve “Kachingled” and based on number of site visits by you

So, now as a Kachingle paying member, your money (minus Kachingle’s admin fee) will be shared by the sites you’ve “Kachingled.” No money will go to Kachingle-enabled sites that you haven’t opted to support.

I’m in touch with several other companies also looking for monetary solutions for free online content, including several operating under the crowdfunding principle, and you’ll see me test them out on this blog. Currently I have alpha versions of SurfShare and Payyattention on this blog, but both of those are still in demo mode; no money is being accepted by them yet.

I’ve tried out a couple others but took them down due to coding conflicts. As those developers get things straightened out, I’ll experiment with their services, too.

This is going to be interesting to watch, across the web. Will voluntary user/reader support represent much money for websites and blogs that try it?

I don’t think that crowdfunding is going to save the news industry, though it could become a nice extra revenue stream for web news publishers. I think that for some bloggers, crowdfunding using streamlined donation solutions like Kachingle could be significant.

So Kachingle is off and running. Let’s see the rest of you launch soon, and see what happens!

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.

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.

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.

No, this post is not about religion, it’s about media and how to pay for online news.

So the debate rages on about “micropayments” for news and other techniques to get Internet users to pay for news content, so that newspapers and other news entities get a nice supplemental revenue stream and don’t go out of business as their legacy advertising businesses drop through the floor.

If you’ve followed my blog or seen my latest column at EditorandPublisher.com, you know that I believe any model that forces people to pay for website commodity news content and puts up barriers (no matter how small a payment might be) is not only destined to fail, but could bring down some already weakened newspapers.

But the voluntary pay-for-content model (I’m most impressed so far with the Kachingle network-of-content-sites approach) has a lot of people moaning, “Voluntary schemes will never bring in serious money and certainly won’t save faltering newspapers.”

My (perhaps unusual) response: Look to churches.

Well, I guess you can pray for business redemption if that’s your thing, but I don’t think that’s going to help. But what I mean is that some churches are financial machines that are supported by voluntary donations from their members.

• The Catholic Church is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Just in the U.S., Catholic parishes brought in total revenue of $7.375 billion in 2000.
• American evangelical mega-churches likewise bring in big money from collection plates. Houston’s Lakewood Church brings in an average of 45,000 worshipers each Sunday and has an annual budget of $73 million. (One church!)

If people can be convinced to voluntarily give that much money to their church (they could let those collection plates slide by), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that we can get news consumers to voluntarily pay a monthly fee — probably less than they give to those churches — to support their favorite news websites and blogs.

Why do church-goers fill the collection plates? And why do churches collect money in this manner? Obviously, there’s the peer pressure; you don’t want to embarrass yourself by putting nothing in the pot and having your pew neighbors notice!

So for a voluntary online content fee system to work, the news industry must apply similar persuasive techniques. If religious people value their churches enough to give regularly and significantly, I see no reason why we can’t get citizens who care about staying informed to voluntarily support the news gathering industry when they come to understand that advertising alone can no longer sustain newspapers and their websites, and other forms of news outlets.

My recent E&P column, “Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content,” generated a ton of conversation, blog items, and mentions in news articles around the world. I’m pleased with that, because a wave had been building of (mostly older) prominent journalists and publishers recommending that news organizations start charging for their content — and micropayments was seen as the most promising technology to achieve that.

That is SUCH a bad idea that I felt like the discussion needed to turn to alternatives. I had recently learned of one that I think shows promise.

The column and the overall debate about whether news companies can save themselves by all starting to charge for their content online (never mind the loss of audience and resulting loss of ad revenues), or whether that will lead to their demise, led to much praise for and some criticism of the concept behind a company I talked about in the column, Kachingle. A brief description of the Kachingle model and a lengthy comment thread debate can be found on my previous blog item.

I need to respond to some of the criticisms, so here goes…

1. Some critics interpreted my intention as saying that a contribution model covering and distributing money across many online content providers would save news organization budgets, alone. No, the Kachingle model is just ONE revenue source that newspapers and other news organizations using the Web should use. Many get money from participating in Google AdSense, for example; that has no effect on the rest of a site’s business model. The main way that most news websites will earn enough money to survive will continue to be advertising. A main focus for them should be on reinventing their ad models, because selling banner ads and classifieds advertising is broken. Kachingle is just another revenue source.

2. Charging for content is a dead horse. Most news content on the Web has been free for 15 years, and attempts to charge for commodity news content have failed again and again because what most news companies produce is easily replaceable, for free, with a few clicks elsewhere. Even if the network contribution model brought in a modest amount of money to news publishers, it would be better than the negative revenue growth that likely would result from trying to charge for Web news content.

3. I got notes from a few people calling the Kachingle model of online users supporting their favorite websites via a central, nearly frictionless system as “nationalization” of news publishers. What?!! I don’t even know how to respond to that crazy charge. See point No. 1 for why that notion is completely without merit.

4. The Kachingle idea gets a thumbs down from some people because they don’t like the idea of voluntary. Most people will be cheapskates and refuse to sign up for a monthly payment for content when they can get it for free, the critics say. Alan Mutter, in his blog Newsosaur, did a rough calculation of what a scaled-up Kachingle model might bring to publishers, based on a 2% take-up rate by web content consumers, and found that while it could bring in real money, it’s not enough to save the downtrodden newspaper industry, for example. He dismissively titled his blog post “Tip-jar journalism: Slim pickin’s for pubs.” (Actually, I don’t think Mutter understands the system, since he says he “assumed that site visitors would click the Kachingle button on 2% of the pages.” Kachinglers click a website only once to financially support it, then the site gets credit whenever a supporter subsequently visits on a single day; it’s not counting page-views.)

I take issue with the term “tip jar,” because many sites have tried putting individual tip jars on their pages, and success has been limited. A system that encourages every website to individually ask for money would be a failure. Who wants to feel like their getting panhandled wherever they go on the Web? I’m talking about something different, beyond the tip jar.

I think the challenge (and the solution) is in how Kachingle accounts are marketed. Forget the “tip” terminology. Tell people that if they want quality news content to continue to be available on the Web, they need to pay for it. Tell them there’s a system that makes it super-simple for them to assign $5 a month (or whatever amount they choose) to support just the websites and blogs that they like and would like to see continue.

Publishers could even provide incentives for Kachingle members (whether they support your specific site or not). If a site visitor is a Kachingle account holder, give them access to some online goodie (e-book, archive access, whatever). If a visitor is a Kachingle member AND supports your site financially via the system, perhaps there’s an extra goodie or service made available to them. (I offer this as an idea, but frankly I haven’t thought it through; there could be unintended consequences, for example, of rewarding Kachinglers who financially support you.)

Also, there an entire field of persuasive technology that can be applied to this problem of web publishers, bloggers, and Kachingle working together to encourage the behavior we want: Pay $5 a month or whatever you wish to support your favorite bloggers and websites. Notice how persuasive technology is described in the Wikipedia link above: “intentionally changes attitudes or behaviors through persuasion and social influence.” Perhaps the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab can be of assistance in tackling this problem.

Mutter’s 2% figure can be increased to a point where it means significant money for small and large online publishers. An important and effective marketing tool is “social proof,” where a website (and this applies to all sorts of products and services in the virtual and real worlds) brings in new customers by demonstrating how many other people are already using it. Kachingle builds in that social proof with tools that allow you to see how many people are supporting a site via that system. You can even see who supports a specific site financially (assuming a supporter has a privacy setting adjusted to allow that). A site can even show off how much money its fans are contributing via Kachingle (another social proof measure).

A Norwegian newspaper website columnist wrote about my column and explained the Kachingle concept recently, and posted a poll of his readers. Of the nearly 2,000 respondents, 22% said they would be willing to pay a voluntary monthly content fee to support their favor sites and blogs. Just to speculate, let’s say that that’s 100% overly optimistic, and 11% of online users would pay a monthly fee of $5 to support their favorite web content. I think Mutter is underestimating the number of people who would participate.

This whole idea will only work if Kachingle scales up massively. (Keep your fingers crossed for a Google acquisition or partnership. That could do it.)

5. My E&P column was too long. Yes, my critics are correct. Mea culpa.

Please don’t let that be the reason to dismiss this model. No one has tried the donation model applied in a user-simple manner across all manner of online content. If charging for news content on the web won’t work, and micropayment barriers will just turn legions of potential readers (and viewers of ads) away, why not put heart and soul into this “crazy” new model and see if it can work to adequately supplement web advertising?

Most news executives are so wary of jumping outside the box. C’mon, you’ve got a serious money problem and you need new solutions. Try something different!