Yule Heibel's Library tagged kachingle →  View Popular, Search in Google

But in the middle of it all, the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. "If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer]," Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. "This is cheap and targeted," Pacheco explains. "Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads."

The idea is to reach out to new audiences, cut costs, and attract new kinds of advertisers.

This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content.

Content Aggregated from Other Sources

 

 Alternatively, some media companies, such as the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and NBC, are posting ads to their own sites, but are using others' aggregated content. They work with a startup called Outside.in that aggregates blogs and discussions around specific locations—by state, city, ZIP code—and serves the links up onto a map located on sites such as NBCChicago.com. There, users click on their neighborhood and find blogs and video related to happenings in the next block. Partly thanks to this feature, the overall audience for NBC's Web sites has doubled between December and February. "Our old strategy [of using only our stations' content] just had a limited growth opportunity," says Brian Buchwald, a senior vice-president at NBC. "Now, it's really about focusing on the growth of the market and being trusted by a particular user base." 

Newspapers probably can charge for some multi-platform personalized news and information services, if they're good enough and useful enough. But that's not charging for the content (the news), it's charging for the valuable service of individual customization.

Your once-powerful newspaper brand doesn't mean as much as it used to, and to get paid for newspaper content online, it must become part of a giant pool of content that's financially supported en masse.

Now what happens is that Kachingle tracks your Web site and blog visits over the month. If you visited NYTimes.com 30 times, Editorandpublisher.com 10 times, and the blog SteveOuting.com 10 times (but none of the other sites that you support), then NYTimes.com would get 60% of your monthly Kachingle fee, and Editorandpublisher.com and my blog would get 20% each. In other words, the money you spend on your monthly Kachingle account is allotted by how often you visit the sites you support, rather than every site you support getting an even split of your money. (You may click to support a blog, but then never return to it; that blog won't get any of your money other than for the initial visit.)

If you'd like to understand more about the problem with any content system having "mental transaction costs," read this 2003 article by Clay Shirky, in which he makes a solid argument why microtransactions for Internet content cannot work, and explains why so many micropayment companies -- going back to the mid 1990s -- have failed. (In response to the recent wave of calls to resurrect the micropayment model for online content, Shirky recently wrote this blog post slapping down the arguments of its proponents.)

The trick -- and this is the part that traditional-thinking publishers will have trouble accepting -- is that you are not just asking users to support your content, you are asking them to support all the news and blog content online.
 
But if this bothers you, think about it for a minute. When you get your users to sign up for Kachingle and start paying for content, you're helping lots of other Web publishers. And as all those other Web publishers and bloggers encourage their users to sign up for Kachingle, they are helping your site earn more money. Call it the power of the commons. The winners are the blogs and Web sites with the best content and that attract the most visitors and fans. Newspaper sites can win at that game, right?

Also, there's the social networking aspect of the Kachingle service, which will use Facebook and Twitter, for instance, to spread the word. Let's take an example in which I’m a paying Kachingler and I click the medallion on Editorandpublisher.com to support it. Assuming I've approved this in my privacy settings, Kachingle will note that "Steve Outing just became a financial supporter of Editorandpublisher.com via Kachingle" (or wording along those lines) and post it to my Twitter feed and my Facebook news feed, for my followers and friends to see and be influenced by it.

Typaldos strongly believes that that's the wrong approach, because it again puts up barriers to contributing. "Having two systems would be incredibly confusing to users ... and not user-centric which is the big paradigm shift that has to happen for this model to work," she says.

Typaldos argues it this way: "Every time a blogger signs up a Kachingler, that person is now a potential contributor to every other Kachingle-enabled blog/Web site/service. So as bloggers/Web sites sign up Kachinglers they are tapping into the economics of ‘increasing returns.’ If NYTimes.com tried to have its own system, it would not benefit from the millions of other Kachinglers that the millions of other Web sites/blogs had signed up. Yes, it's true, they have to share the dollars of those Kachinglers, but since the distribution is based on daily visits, it doesn't really matter which site signs them up, just which sites they truly love (and turn on contributing for)."

from what Typaldos says about her patent, that would mean a Google acquisition of Kachingle