You will never catch us yawning at an airport gate. You won’t find us desperately rereading the in-flight magazine, and we never … ever … cross the thresholds of hotel business centers. We are the quartermasters in the battle to stay connected, productive, and entertained — and we do not travel unprepared. As wired gadget editors, we make it our mission to see every new product. As avid gadget-fiends, we make damn sure that the best of them end up in our personal arsenals. This is our current must-have list, the gear we reach for whenever an eticket pops into our remotely accessible inbox.
But why would people choose to pay for content when they don’t have to?
Cynthia Typaldos, Kachingle’s founder and chief executive, believes that the subtle peer pressure of seeing others donate will be a key driver. She cites that show people donate more to buskers if they see someone else give money first – eight times more, in fact.
“What’s missing on the web are these social signals that people are extremely sensitive to. We believe we’ve got a mechanism to take those social signals and put them online,” she says.
When the service launches in June, a Facebook application will let users share the sites they publicly support. For each site, donors can choose to use their real name, a pseudonym or to remain anonymous.
Typaldos believes that this declaration of support will become a significant part of people’s identity, in the same way as music playlists on Last.fm or bookmarks on Delicious.
When people give money, Typaldos says, “in return they get something: status, recognition and association that they can display to their peers or to the public. It says, ‘This is who I am; this is what’s important to me’.”
Kachingle is attractive to bloggers such as Simon Perry “I can’t see a reason not to be involved with it,” Perry says. He has tried a number of revenue models for his blogs, including Google text ads, donations, subscriptions, display ads and sponsorship, but without much success.
“Income is so hard to come by,” he says, “so why not? This idea of ‘Just run a blog and make a living’ is a fallacy.”
Even though VentnorBlog gets more than 85,000 unique visitors each month, advertising revenue isn’t covering costs. Google ads, he explains, are too general for a local audience and local businesses don’t yet understand why it is important for them to advertise online.
Typaldos says bloggers aren’t the only people interested in Kachingle. She’s had enquiries from a range of media companies, including newspapers, television and radio stations. But Charlie Beckett, director of the Polis thinktank at the London School of Economics, is not sure the concept will appeal to British media organisations. “It’s very clever,” Beckett says. “But the American market is very different from the British market, not just in the way that their media is structured, but people’s relationship with it. I don’t think we have the same voluntarism, the idea that you’re active with your dollars.
To stay connected, productive, and entertained — and we do not travel unprepared. As wired gadget editors, we make it our mission to see every new product. As avid gadget-fiends, we make damn sure that the best of them end up in our personal arsenals. This is our current must-have list, the gear we reach for whenever an eticket pops into our remotely accessible inbox.
