We just sent the following email to hundreds of eager Kachinglers and Content Sites who were waiting for us to launch!

Kachingle

Hello,

As you may recall, you contacted Kachingle in the past about joining.  Kachingle just launched its innovative “social micropayment” service and I would like to invite you to now join our community!  An overview of the service is below along with instructions for joining.  Feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

Thank you,
Joe Eyre
Director of Marketing

Kachingle Overview:

Kachingle mirrors how most of us use the web. We’re not going to pay for subscriptions, or pay by the article. But most will consider financially supporting content sites if there is an easy-to-use and fair approach, and especially if we get recognition in return.  Kachingle provides this approach and builds user recognition through social media notifications (Twitter, etc.)

Kachingle has four unique benefits:

  1. Kachingle is the only content funding model that both encourages simple, voluntary user contributions  and benefits news, blog, and media sites with increased revenues, higher traffic, and a stronger user community.
  2. Unlike failed, producer-centric schemes — traffic-killing paywalls, subscriptions, or per-article “tipping” — Kachingle complements advertising, and is simple for both Kachinglers (users) and Site Owners to set-up and use.
  3. No other content-funding model creates viral growth of site traffic and revenue through social media  (Twitter, etc.).
  4. Kachingle is designed for all types of content sites (news, bloggers, etc.), media (music, video, etc.) and online service sites.

The Kachingle Medallion is now in place on 84* content sites, including many that focus on social issues.  A few of these include The Center for Investigative Reporting and Carta.info.
(*as of March 6, 2010)

How it Works:

  • Content Sites put a small Kachingle Medallion (a javascript widget) on their pages, which will recognize registered Kachinglers.  This takes about 5 minutes to do.
  • Users (“Kachinglers”) sign up for a subscription with Kachingle.  Then the first time they visit a Kachingle site, they click on the site’s Medallion to turn it on.   After that, every visit they make to that site is noted and then once a month, the money they’ve put aside in their Kachingle account gets distributed proportionally to Kachingle content sites based on the number of visits each month.

To get started with Kachingle:

  • If you want to become a Kachingler and support participating sites, simply sign up!
  • If you are a Site Owner and want to install the Kachingle medallion on your site
    • Sign up as a Kachingler yourself.
    • You can put the Medallion on your own site by clicking on the “Sites I Own” tab. The Medallion is a simple javascript widget.
    • Once you put the Medallion on your site, you will want to market to your viewers to become Kachinglers so that they support your site.  Some examples of Marketing text are on SteveOuting.com and The Center for Investigative Reporting.
    • Finally, tell your friends and colleagues to sign up as Kachinglers and to kachingle your site.
For more information, visit our website, and follow the latest developments on our blog.