The Kachingle Rev 1 Beta was launched in November 2009 and has been going extremely well. The system has not had a single failure!
There are over 50 websites/blogs participating in the beta program, and hundreds of Kachinglers.
We have learned a lot from the beta regarding usability and made some significant enhancements based on Kachingler input and usability testing — our “bible” for this efforts is the book “Don’t Make Me Think!“.
We have made usability enhancements already with more to come.
In the next few weeks we will be rolling out Rev 2 which will have further usability enhancements, and most importantly, the complete payment system installed and visible.
In Beta Rev 1 all payment tracking was being done, but not displayed. Beta Rev 2 implements the display and the actual monetary pay-outs. The payment display turned out to be intellectually difficult because all payments must be transparent, yet anonymous contributions must still be protected. Once Rev 2 is up and running I will write a detailed post on how this is accomplished.
The beta sites are from 5 countries: US, Germany, Canada, UK, and Austria. The focus of the sites ranges from investigative journalism, corporate governance, German politics and media, newspaper business analysis, local news sites in Minneapolis/St.Paul and Chicago, music and photography, to narrower niche topics such as shedworking, cats and their environments, romance, and even a dog blogger.
The size of sites ranges from tens of thousands of unique monthly visitors to the hundreds of unique monthly visitors. Languages represented in the websites/blogs so far are English and German.
Kachingle welcomes all quality websites/blogs to join our beta program. While we are especially interested in developing a core set of sites around:
- investigative journalism (everywhere in the world),
- German language news and information,
- hobbyist enthusiasts,
- local news,
…we welcome every high quality content or service site in any language or format (text, music, video, photos, applications — or a mix) to embrace Kachingle as the revenue platform to monetize free content (and services).
To find out more about including your website/blog in the beta program send an email to beta@kachingle.com.
For additional information about beta program or Kachingle overall contact me directly (cynthia@kachingle.com).