Michael Miner has published an analysis of Kachingle in the weekly Chicago Reader, Pay for News, Then Brag About It, summarized in his subtitle: “Kachingle, a smart combo of micropayments and social networking, has launched.”
Problem solved. Crisis averted. Revenue has finally begun to flow to Internet news sites directly from the heretofore freeloading public. Those of us who feared this day would never come can drink a glass of warm milk and get some sleep.
[E]arly returns don’t establish Kachingle, launched publicly just a month ago, as the wave of the future. They do show that the Silicon Valley-based start-up can function the way Cynthia Typaldos hoped it would. Typaldos’s premise is that most people will pay for the things they value that don’t grow on trees, but only—this is the catch—if the method of payment is fair and easy.
Red Ferret, a 10 year old ‘eclectic tech blog, covering gadgets, software, cool sites and tech trivia in a fun and offbeat way,’ has taken a look at Kachingle and like what they see. Nigel Powell, the Editor-in-Chief, wrote about us today:
Kachingle is a new micropayment system that relies on lots of people allocating small amounts of money to an account which automatically disburses pennies according to the places you visit often. It actually sounds as if it could work, but of course we’ll only know when huge numbers of people are happily using it.
We also believe that because it takes real time, money, and insight to create and maintain valued online content and services, a business model for sustaining them must be available. Advertising, freemium, product sales, and subscription business models are partial answers, but Kachingle is a more direct mechanism that can complement these forms of revenue generation.
In pre-Internet days, people used to buy newspapers either as their principal source of information or to complement TV sources with analysis and some regional/local news. Given the choice, one would buy the newspaper that best matched one’s political and cultural sensibility. Life was simple!
With the Internet, news have become available for free to the reader. This was not really a new situation, as free newspapers in print – living off of advertisement revenues and classified ads- had existed for some time. This is the business model that the world of electronic media initially embraced. It worked for some time; then the classified ads became available for free. And now ad revenues are not enough any more to cover the costs. Why? Because of the economic crisis? It certainly accelerated the process, but it is unlikely to be the real cause for this reduction in advertisers’ interest.
Initially we – the readers – have replicated on the Internet what we were doing with newspapers: we were visiting our favorite newspaper’s web site and read it. And the internet grew bigger and bigger thanks to low-cost user-friendly technologies, making our choice of free sources wider and wider. Attracted by this diversity, we changed our way to look for news, analysis, opinions and content in general.
We changed our browsing habits and now, every day, we visit 2, 3, 5 or more web sites to get informed and form our own opinions on what is important to us. This is the real change that “news people” have to accept to guide them to reinvent the way to attract us and get our attention span, hopefully, a few seconds every day!
Anything that can be digitized will be napsterized. Kachingle is a business model for the inevitable future of “free”.
Here’s the presentation on Slideshare…there’s also a large (70MB!) version with a narrative by me (Cynthia, the Chief Kachingler).
Posted in typaldos
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Tagged business models, digital, kachingle, kachingling, micropayments, monetization, napster, napsterization, news, subscriptions, typaldos
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