Thanks for featuring Kachingle in your article.

At Kachingle we completely agree with your point that when contributors are visible it makes a big difference! Your point “highlighting the social, rather than the monetary, aspect of their appeal, they conveyed the fact that they meant business. Literally” is very important.

Perhaps you didn’t realize that Kachingle has implemented a completely financially transparent system where every contributor (we call them Kachinglers) is publicly listed (of course a Kachingler can choose to be anonymous). So Carta.info, which now has 75 active Kachinglers, also has a list of who these Kachinglers are linked to from the Kachingle Medallion on the Carta site: http://www.kachingle.com/mk/1017.

So the point you make above:
“the raw potential of a request-oriented, rather than a demand-oriented, approach to the pay-for-news problem. They hint at what might happen when we bring a little humanity to paid content’s practical, yet wholly impersonal, business proposition. Most of us, after all, are much happier to make donations than to pay bills.”
does seem to apply directly to how Kachingle works.

Addressing the issue of how much money Carta has made from Kachingle so far — please keep in mind that Kachingle just launched a few months ago! Facebook didn’t acquire 500M users in a few months either :-) Additionally, we only allow Kachinglers to put in $5/month — the reason being that we want to keep the initial decision to participate very simple.

The goal is initially to create awareness and a new “social norm” — not immediately be able to fund any particular publication, blog, content or application. This will take time but we are patient and willing to do an implementation in the short-term that is designed for the long-term.

I would be happy to discuss Kachingle and/or the whole new space of “social payments”.

Thanks.

Cynthia Typaldos
Founder, Kachingle
cynthia AT kachingle DOT com

Best, Ryan

I think it would be also interesting if people could “pay” with something that wasn’t money. So if you subscribe to the NYTimes you’d get 500 NYTDollars that you could “spend” on articles you like. Basically allow for a “Like” on articles that editors could use, but of course, wouldn’t have to. But by making it a limited resource, given only to subscribers, it would seem that the metric would be relatively valuable.

On the Panera experiment, that’s apples to oranges — or soup & salad to Tarte Fine with scallops & black truffle. 8^) Panera typically charges for its food; WashingtonPost.com gives its web content away free. They have little to do with each other, and Panera’s experience will mean nothing to PWYW experiments in online news.

I beg to differ on your conclusion. Just as if every news website puts up an individual news-access paywall, if every or lots of news websites put up their own “Kachingles,” there are simply too many sites that the average online user frequents. You need to take advantage of the network effect, and that’s why I’m more optimistic about the chances of initiatives like Kachingle and Flattr.com. It’s a lot like why most sites accept Paypal to collect money for whatever they’re selling, rather than rely each on their own proprietary payment system.