All Posts Tagged With: "sprinklepenny"

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.