All Posts Tagged With: "payyattention"

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.

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.

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.

Since much of my attention these days seems to be on how to get writers and media companies paid on the web, allow me to pass along the latest scheme I’ve learned of. Payyattention.com (2 y’s?) looks to be promising for bloggers and individual writers wanting their fans to voluntarily pay for their work. The social aspect of the service is what makes this more than your standard tip-jar web service.

Check out the video explanation. (Sorry, can’t embed video here; that ability has been disabled by video’s creator.)