The flurry of interest around the NYTimes decision to implement a metered paywall has inspired me to explain the history of Kachingle. Way back in 2004 I was noodling over two content monetization schemes:

• SubscriptionPal (a metered paywall system) and
• DonationPal (now called Kachingle).

I rejected SubscriptionPal and put all my efforts into DonationPal (a.k.a Kachingle) at the end of 2004.

Let me explain why.

SubscriptionPal

Here’s my description of SubscriptionPal, written on September 1, 2004.  Note that it is a metered system very similar

to what the Financial Times later implemented, what the NYTimes has announced as their

future, and even more closely aligned with the scheme proposed by Journalism Online as it is a network system, not a single-producer system.  I was pretty enthusiastic about SubscriptionPal at the time, yet shortly after I wrote that post I completely dumped it in favor of DonationPal (Kachingle).

But why?

Just too damn complicated.  Kachingle is simple, SubscriptionPal is complex.

Other specifics:

• Consumers are the center of the universe now, not producers.  Given that consumers are snacking in thousands of places, this just won’t work – each content producer can’t all have their own systems (which is why NYTimes should have gone with JO if they were going to implement this).  For success, SubscriptionPal required most if not all valued content players to join in at the same time.  Forget it!

• Assume that there is a universal system like SubscriptionPal is built AND it can’t be gotten around, the biggest problem of all is that unless it captures the whole universe of content, it basically recreates AOL again…and look what happened there.

• People can pass around their accounts, copy the info and post it elsewhere.  Remember what happened to music?  This is the equivalent of DRM.

• It would put a real damper on tweeting and blogging and sharing in social networks (of course tweeting and even FB didn’t exist then!)

• 
• The back-end implementation is a nightmare.

The development effort was/is the real killer – not only would it have been a huge effort to build SubscriptionPal but then it would have to be retrofitted it into all parts of every participating content site and integrated with their subscriber system.  Not only would this be incredibly expensive, given the state of some of the content sites’ CMSs it wouldn’t even be possible.  I’ve been astonished that no one has pointed out the integration nightmare that Journalism Online customers would face.

Kachingle (DonationPal) is simpler in every possible way.  Simpler to build, simpler to understand, no site integration required, no barriers to social sharing.  So in late 2004 it was easy for me to shove SubscriptionPal into the trash can and move forward solely with Kachingle.

Sadly though, 5 years later, I see the world’s greatest newspaper, the NYTimes, contemplating a metered system which will surely fail.

The good news for Kachingle though is that our biggest competitor, Journalism Online, is also doomed.

Every cloud has a silver lining!