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Sneak Peek at the Kachingle Payment Display – Feb 8, 2010

For those of you who can’t wait to see the Kachingle payment system working on beta (production) Kachingle site, here’s some screen shots from our development site.  Keep in mind the data is all fake here, that’s why the dates are all the same.

There are four main displays of payment information.

  1. Each Site’s payments from Kachinglers
  2. Each Kachingler’s payments to Sites
  3. Dashboard for a Site Owner to see the status of all of their Sites (Medallions) and drill down to add more Sites, manage existing Sites, or see further information
  4. Pay-Out information for a particular Site

Because Kachingle is a transparent system, all payments are visible to everyone in the world except for an important difference when a Kachingler has chosen to be anonymous.  That payment is marked as “anonymous” and is not linked back to the Kachingler.  [This will be explained in more detail in a later post once the payment system is pushed to the beta.]

Here are screen shots of each of the four scenarios mentioned above.

1) Each Site’s payments from Kachinglers (including anonymous)

This view shows all of the payments to the Site named “puzzelate”.  Anonymous payments are not linked to the Kachingler’s profile.

Kachingler Payments for Puzzelate

Kachingler Payments for Puzzelate


2. Each Kachingler’s payments to Sites

This view is of the frank the Kachingler’s “Sites I Visit”.  Frank is logged into the Kachingle site (thus as his default he sees the private view that includes the Sites he is kachingling anonymously).

Kachingler Payments by Squirrely

Payments by frank the Kachingler

3. Dashboard for a Site Owner to see the status of all of their Sites (Medallions) and drill down to add more Sites, manage existing Sites, or see further information.

All of frank’s Sites can be managed from this page.

Payments for all of frank's Sites

Payments for all of frank's Sites

4. Pay-Out information for a particular Site (puzzelate)

The Pay-Out dates will be once a month…here in the test data they are all the same date.  Payments from Kachinglers are continuously accruing however and shown the instance they occur.  On the Pay-Out date for the Site, an actual Pay-Out is made to the Site’s PayPal account if the Account Balance is $100 or greater.  Otherwise the amount is carried forward until the next Pay-Out date for the Site.

Pay-Out History for Puzzelate (only visible to Site Owner)

There will be enhancements to the payment displays as we evolve the system.

2010 02 08 Cynthia Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Kachingle Beta Update – Feb 6, 2010

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.

US Flag German Flag Canadian Flag British Flag Austrian Flag

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).

2010 02 07 Cynthia crowdfunding
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Kachingle seeks PHP Developer

Job description.  SF Bay Area.

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2010 02 06 Cynthia news Comments (0) Permalink

Kachingle is transparent and fair

I have been thinking about our company motto being “transparent and fair”.

Transparent because all financial transactions are visible to everyone – it is a form of outsourced auditing which we have invented and implemented.  Everyone, not only our Kachinglers and Sites, can see every single payment from a Kachingler to a Site.  This means that it can be proven that the monies have properly changed hands because the money a Kachingler paid had better show up on both sides of the transaction – the list of payments made by that Kachingler (the total of which must add up to their $5), and the list of payments received by a Site (which must add up to the total payments received by all of their Kachinglers).  

Of course Kachinglers can choose any Display Name ranging from their real name, to a different name on each site, to anonymous.  However the Kachingle system assigns a unique externally generated transaction number to all payments such that every Kachingler can clearly identify each of their payments, even if there are multiple payments from people with the same Display Name (including anonymous).

We believe transparency is not only important so that Kachinglers can see how much money Sites are making, but so that both sides, Kachinglers and Sites, can be assured that the monies are being properly distributed.

A side effect of being transparent is that Kachingle itself does not need to hire expensive auditors to verify the proper financial behavior!  The Kachinglers & Sites can prove it themselves.  (The Sites have a minor  limitation that their Kachinglers with the same Display Name are not bullet-proof on their side but are on the Kachingler side.)  Although this crowdsourced auditing has always been part of the Kachingle vision, it is especially important in light of the Kiva scandal.

Transparency is the new black.

A quick guide to the maxims of new media
30 Jan, 2010
Mark Coddington

“Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Where it came from: The phrase was originated by technology philosopher David Weinberger, who first said it in a lecture in Toronto on Oct. 23, 2008. He further defined the idea and put the phrase to writing in a July 19, 2009, post at his blog.

What it means: When Weinberger first said the phrase, he followed it with the statement, “We are not going to trust objectivity unless we can see the discussion that lead to it.” In his July post, Weinberger fleshed this idea out further, arguing that transparency is the modus operandi in a linked medium like the web, where we can easily see (and expect to see) someone’s connections, sources and influences. Transparency, he said, has subsumed objectivity: “Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.” The phrase picked up quite a bit of use in fall 2009 as a principle in the discussions over news media outlets’ social media policies.

Fair because the distribution of each Kachingler’s Pay-In is an algorithm which is a proxy for value received by that particular Kachingler – so it is fair for each person based on their unique behavior.

The distribution algorithm is predicated on the Kachingler adding a Site (by clicking once on that Site’s Medallion) and thereafter based on their number of daily visits to that Site.  Each Site’s allocation is proportionate to the usage by that Kachingler.

So if a Kachingler visits Site A every day of their month, and Site B every other day, Site A receives 2/3 of that Kachingler’s Pay-In and Site B receives 1/3.  Fairness is also all about the value perceived and delivered to the Kachingler, not an arbitrary value set by the producer.

By the way, some of you may be aware that the FTC has ruled on the issue of companies paying bloggers to blog positively about their products (the problem occurs if the blogger does not reveal this).  Kachingling for corporations could be the solution.  With Kachingle companies can still pay bloggers…but it’s transparent that they are paying them!

(Note: The financial system in the beta Kachingle site is currently accruing payments, in the next rev, coming in a week or two, all of the fields will be visible.)

2010 01 31 Cynthia about
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Why I rejected SubscriptionPal in favor of DonationPal (now called Kachingle)

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!

2010 01 23 Cynthia kachingle
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NYTimes metering plan – integration will be difficult

Today in the NYTimes Martin Nisenholtz and Janet Robinson discuss the metering paywall plan.  For the entire article (it’s short), click on the article link.  I’ve excerpted one Q&A and added my comments.

January 21, 2010, 10:07 am

Martin Nisenholtz photo

Martin Nisenholtz

Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online

Senior executives of The New York Times Company are answering questions from readers about the company’s decision to charge for frequent use of NYTimes.com, which will take effect in 2011. (For more details, read the company’s announcement and this article about it.)

Janet Robinson photo

Janet Robinson

Fielding questions is Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive of the company, with assistance from Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations.

Q: Congrats on the decision to charge. Its absolutely the right one. Why are you waiting until 2011? – Darnell, Los Angeles

A: Ms. Robinson: Thank you for your support. Ultimately we recognize that our success will be judged by how well we execute this effort in the months to come. That is why we are waiting until 2011 to introduce this new system. We are determined to make subscribing as smooth and easy as possible. We will be working toward integrating our customer management systems so we can ensure a frictionlessand engaging user interface for subscribers. It will take some time to build, test and deploy the right systems. It will take time to get this right.

I really believe that the technical integration is going to be extremely difficult.  They obviously recognize this already.  Journalism Online has the same problem, only worse since they are trying to do it for hundreds if not thousands of different CMSs most of which are old and cranky.

An article titled Does It Really Take a Year to Build a Pay Wall? in MediaMemo by Peter Kafka says the same thing:

But assuming the paper does go it alone and does intend to build this thing, would it really take a year? Yes, say two publishing sources with first-hand knowledge of both pay walls and big publishing companies.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that there are at least three different problems to solve: Authenticating current print subscribers so that they can get the online paper free; installing the “meter” that measures use for nonprint subscribers; and creating a commerce engine that can take orders, process subscriptions, figure out how to provide bundled offers–i.e., the cost of online access plus, say, a Kindle or Apple (AAPL) tablet subscription–etc.

None of this stuff ought to be rocket science, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard, my pay wall experts say. Even if the Times builds its new pay wall on the bones of Times Select, the newspaper’s 2005-2007 attempt, it could easily take it a year to assemble this thing, they insist.

It’s possible that my sources are talking their book a bit–if building a pay wall were easy, there’d be less work for them. But I’m willing to take them at their word until someone convinces me otherwise.

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Kachingle presentation to prospective client sites

Last week, Jan 11-15, Fred and I spent 5 days on the East Coast (3 in NYC, 2 in WashDC) meeting with prospective client sites and other influencers.  Back at base camp in Silicon Valley, Mike ran the show and Bill put together the demo pages.  Over the next few weeks we will be visiting with West Coast prospects.

Depending on how familiar the client was with Kachingle, we spent more or less time on the presentation.  In most cases we just gave a quick verbal overview and then jumped into the live beta site, using the appropriate demo that was prepared.

We closed some deals, got some maybes, got some no’s and learned a tremendous amount that we are going to use to focus our biz dev and marketing efforts and prioritize our product development.  More on this in a future post.

Below are the presentation and the revenue spreadsheet that we presented to these clients.

Kachingle Site Presentation 1.18.10

View more presentations from Kachingle.
Kachingle Site Revenue Estimate.Spreadsheet 1.18.10

View more documents from Kachingle.

2010 01 18 Cynthia crowdfunding
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Kachingle Examples Gallery

To give site owners a sense of the variety of potential ways to include the Kachingle Medallion and a related marketing message we’ve published the Kachingle Examples Gallery at http://examples.kachingle.com.

The Gallery includes six example pages showcasing different site types, narrow and wide Medallion styles and an assortment of positive positioning statements to encourage reader support. There’s also a quick start for site owners and a list of some good live Kachingle network sites.

Kachingle Gallery Example - Pulitzer Center

2010 01 10 Bill1 how kachingle works
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Kachinglers speak up: why I kachingle, by Jason

I am participating as a Kachingler in your beta program.  I currently do have paid subscriptions to online news sources – WSJ.com, Scientific American, and The Economist. I am also a donator to several non-profit investigative reporting organizations. I would love to see a viable business model emerge that would support both large and small scale content producers!

Jason L. Buberel
buberel.org

2010 01 09 Cynthia Kachinglers
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How Kachingle solves the “Paradox of Choice”

Sometimes I’m asked, usually by people with engineering backgrounds, why Kachingle doesn’t allow the user (Kachingler) to endlessly twiddle and tweedle with knobs and dials and drop-down menus to decide how much money to provide to a site, content provider, author, even a single article/video/music track, and so on.

At Kachingle we simply allocate automatically the Kachingler’s monthly contribution across all Sites they have selected based on a simple algorithm — the more days you visited a Site, the higher the percentage of money they get.

For instance assume the Kachingler has turned on the Medallion on SteveOuting.com and Carta and The Daily Bunny, and this month visited Steve’s site every day, Carta every other day, and Bunny only 5 days:

Steve.Outing.com

  • the total daily visits for all sites is 30+15+5 = 50
  • their $5 would be distributed as
    • 60% to Steve
    • 30% to Carta
    • 10% to Bunny

    Carta

So, here’s a real question from a Kachingler about our algorithm:

Have you thought about a model where customers can kachingle a specific amount?  If I’m set up for the current model of $5/month, I am always going to try to calculate how much I’m giving to a particular Site.    If I think a site is valuable, I might only do one contribution that month so the site gets my total $5 for the month.

Alternatively, I would prefer to have some kind of PayPal-like account where I could designate how much the site (or columnist gets).  For example, if I read a great article by Tom Friedman, I might want to give him $10 for that article.

If I get a valuable home maintenance tip that saves me a substantial amount of money, I would like to reward that site for that.  If I get advice on where to buy a product that saves me a lot of money, I would be happy to reward that site so they are more successful at that.  The idea of kachingling what I feel to be a random amount does not enable me to assign the value I would like to give to that site.

I know you say that having to think about a number slows or stops the decision process, but being a capitalist, I assign value to information.   With the Bunnycurrent model, I believe you may get some initial excitement, but it won’t be a long term model that will gain significant traction.

My response:

I have thought about this extensively and believe that allowing Kachinglers to specify a specific amount makes the system too hard to use.  I agree that what you want is to make the kachingling “fair” based on YOUR values, however giving you the choice of amount and when to contribute does not solve this as it requires you to now juggle in your mind what “fairness” means.

For instance, assume you read a great article by Friedman and somehow you are able to decide that $10 is the right amount for you to contribute.  Now, what if you read another article by him the next day that isn’t so great but still worth something?  Let’s say you figure out it is half a great so you give $5.  OK, the next day an article by him is pretty good, but was it as good as the others?  Now you have to compare.  Let’s say you figure that you aren’t going to contribute to that article even though it was good.  Time goes by, you read 10 more articles by Friedman and they are all good but not great.  But shouldn’t you contribute $10 again because the total value you got from the 10 was the same as you got from the first one?

Now compound all of this decision making of just Friedman’s articles with everything else you are getting value from on the web – other content, services, video, music, etc.  You are quickly overwhelmed with the inability to compare and be fair in your contributions.  Systems have been tried with micropayments at the end of each article and they have not been successful.

Even Digg, which is just a system to say if you like an article or not, is not successful in the sense that only about 1000 Diggers are doing all of the work, everyone else is just reading the Digg site!  This pyramid is inverted the wrong way.   So, what Kachingle does is create an algorithm that is “fair enough”.  So if you read Friedman regularly because some of his articles are great, some are good, and some are so-so, Friedman will get a “fair” amount of your kachingling payments over time without you having to decide all of the details.

There is no question in my mind that the barrier to making a contribution must be essentially zero.  People are surfing the web like banshees…they are not going to slow down to figure out how much to contribute to a site/author/journalist/article.  An analogy can be made between blogging and websites.  Blogs are just simply structured websites.  So how is it that until blogs came along very few people had their own websites yet 100s of millions of people (even dogs and cats) now have their own blogs?  It’s all about ease of use!

There is a terrific book that is one of our bibles called “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” (#116 on Amazon bestseller list).  The author discusses how too many choices result in paralysis and while people often say they want choice, that’s not what they really want.  What they want is something that is good enough that gets done the thing they want to do with the minimum of hassle and regret.

2010 01 07 Cynthia crowdfunding
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