Kachingle offers an economic model for news that is user-centric, voluntary, social and a little bit goofy.
One thing it's not is free. I think it's got a shot anyway.
When launched next month, Kachingle will enable contributions to Web sites in a way that avoids some of the problems of micropayments. It's also designed to exploit users' interest in sharing what they're doing -- and what they believe in.
Founder and CEO
Cynthia Typaldos said she got the idea for Kachingle in May 2004 but concluded it was too early.
"Newspapers weren't desperate enough," she said in a telephone interview. "About a year ago, I said things are changing and now is the time to get going on this." She plans to launch the service in March.
The precarious state of media finances may get Typaldos in the door in places that would have scoffed at the idea of charitable contributions not long ago.
Any Web publisher -- from personal blog to
The New York Times to Google -- will be able to invite contributions via a Kachingle medallion on its pages. But one of the Webbiest shifts Kachingle enables is to replace a pricing decision by a publisher with a user's behavior determining what that content is actually worth. This is not a business model that will generate the level of revenue newspapers enjoyed from advertising or circulation in days gone by. But it might just be
one of the models news organizations rely on.
With a tagline of "sprinkle change on the blogs you love," Kachingle sets up users to decide how much they're willing to spend on Web content. They go to Kachingle.com to apportion their contribution among sites they select, with monthly amounts shaped by the number of days they visit each site. Kachingle will deduct 20 percent of each contribution, with five percent going for vendor fees and 15 percent to Kachingle.
In a demo Thursday, Typaldos and one of her co-founders, Marc Verstaen, showed a Facebook app they're developing to enable users to alert Facebook friends whenever they've decided to support a new site.
Typaldos believes that a form of peer pressure -- "the good kind," she insists -- will be key to the site's success. She cites
research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review illustrating how individuals' decisions to contribute money -- or make eco-friendly decisions about the towels in their hotel rooms -- are influenced by what they observe other people doing.
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Kachingle screengrab
Participating sites will provide visiting contributors with several options, including withdrawal of their support. |
News execs may wince at the comparison, but buried in that journal article is an intriguing, if anecdotal, experiment tracking contributions to a New York City street musician. It found passers-by to be eight times more likely to drop some money into the performer's hat after observing one of the researchers "reach into his pocket and toss a few coins."
Steve Outing first alerted journalists to Kachingle in his
Editor & Publisher column Tuesday, as the debate over micropayments stirred by
Walter Isaacson and
Steve Brill raged on.
Typaldos says she shares the views of Nick Szabo and
Clay Shirky that micropayments are doomed by so-called mental transaction costs, "the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price."
Kachingle has been
compared to online tip jars, but Typaldos argues that the mental transaction barrier stands in the way of those as well.
And then there's this: You can wait until your server and fellow customers are watching before dropping those coins in the jar at Starbucks. But that social dimension has been missing from online tipping.
"People want to bring their persona online," says Typaldos. "We want people to know what I care about. It's not just that I did a good thing. It's about sharing the real me."
