Time to Dust Off the Kachingle Model

Last month I read an article in the Chicago Reader proposing the Kachingle model for journalism. Kachingle is like a pre-paid card for the web: you put for example $5 per month in your account, any blogger or journalist can put a Kachingle badge on their site, and by clicking the medallion, you donate a tiny fraction of your $5 to support the blog.

Michael Miner writes in his column Hot Type:

Kachingle understands that so long as the Internet feels free, it won’t matter to a lot of people if it actually is. Sign up and “subscribe” to Kachingle—all founder Cynthia Typaldos is suggesting at the get-go is $5 a month, but the amount is up to the subscriber—and then go back to wandering the Web as you always have. Whenever you visit a valued site that has also signed up with Kachingle, show your respect by clicking on the Kachingle “medallion” there, and at the end of the month your $5 will be divvied up proportionally according to those clicks.

My objection at the time was, why pay for what you can get for free? It's a question of adding value. You already get the value of free content without bothering to top up your Kachingle account- there's no reason to start now.

Except that now all signs suggests publishers are moving towards paid content. Let's hope they don't move towards micropayments, which as Clay Shirky pointed out, will only be a nuisance. Subscription is always an option too. But both with both of these payments methods, we lose the highly valuable ability to link to other content. If paid content went into effect, I couldn't write this blog post in the same way. Essentially it would kill the conversation.

Kachingle could offer a solution, allowing for an online ecosystem with paid content that still preserves the ability to link. Tim Windsor from Nieman Journalism Lab calls for cooperation amongst publishers in the move towards paid content. Well, here's their opportunity. If newspapers across the country adopted Kachingle medallions on their websites, we could access paid content on any site by just clicking the medallion. Bloggers could also still link to other articles in blog posts (although they would start to link less only because readers don't want to click the Kachingle medallion at each link). As for how to divide up the revenue, well, here's the cooperation part. Newspapers execs would have to agree on one set of metrics possibly based on site traffic (haven't completely figured that one out yet).

This of course assumes that newspaper execs are concerned with preserving the value of link journalism- probably too good to be true.