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Would you pay to share publicly what kind of journalism you consume?

Kachingle, a Mountain View, California-based start up, and some other similar initiatives believe so.

This is how Kachingle works: A reader voluntarily agrees to pay five dollars a month to become a Kachingler, a user of Kachingle. For the five dollars, the reader can consume as much journalistic content online as he or she wants to. When a reader agrees to pay for Kachingle, his or her name appears on the publication’s website showing that the reader has supported this content. Kachingle will be launched later this summer.

But why would anybody pay voluntarily for news, if they can get same stuff for free?

“Because the reader wants to publicly share social signals about the content they read”, Cynthia Typaldos, the president and founder of Kachingle, says.

So in other words, by using Kachingle the reader is telling the world: “This is who I am in terms of what news I consume.”

“It is about pride and about building your online persona. In the offline world people are used to building their personas by the kind of car they drive, the places they travel, the books they read, and so on. Now people are sharing their personas online, and being a Kachingler is a part of that persona.”

Typaldos points out that a share of readers are willing to pay. She cites two polls. One poll is done by Der Spiegel, a German magazine, and the poll indicates that 30 percent of the Spiegel readers are ready to pay for journalistic content online.

The other poll was done by a Norwegian newspaper, indicating that about 20 percent of readers are willing to pay by using Kachingle. If that many people are ready to pay, and they do pay, according to Typaldos, the peer pressure will make the other readers more willing to pay.

For publishers, Kachingle is free. The sites that use it have a Kachingle widget medallion posted on their sites. The first time a reader clicks on the medallion to become a Kachingler, he pays the five dollars. Thereafter a Kachingler can support any sites using Kachingle by clicking on the medallion.

Kachingle gets 20 percent of the five dollars the reader pays. The rest of the five dollars is distributed between the sites where the Kachingler decides to click the medallion, depending on the number of days they visit those sites.

Kachingle has – at least in the beginning – a flat rate of five dollars, whether the reader goes to 20 or 200 news sites a month, and whether the sites are big newspapers or local publications.

“Kachingle doesn’t have any mental transaction cost, in other words, it is extremely easy to pay. When the rate is always the same, and there are no options for payment, the reader doesn’t need to think about how much he or she wants to pay”, Typaldos says.

That sounds smart. How many times, when making a donation, have you gotten stuck in the decision making process? Questions like “How much should I pay? Is this enough? Can I afford this?” can stifle the process.

The flat rate policy of Kachingle is changing the game in traditional payment policies.  Traditionally, subscribing to nationwide newspapers such as the New York Times has cost more to have delivered to your door than a local newspaper. Actually, Kachingle sounds like one of the principles in communism – same pay for everybody, whatever kind of work they do. In this context the idea goes: same pay, whatever kind of journalism they do.

Does Kachingle’s flat rate model really fit into the journalism industry? For example, investigative journalism is more expensive to do than some other kinds of stories, so wouldn’t it be fair to pay more for investigative journalism?

To this point, Kachingle might go towards differentiated payment options later. Kachingle’s goal is to raise the rate to 30-40 dollars a month. This would be done by communicating social signals about news consumption and payment to Kachingle readers. The readers would get messages such as “Usually people like you who read 30 news sites, pay 20 dollars a month. Will you to pay 20 dollars?”

One interesting aspect of Kachingle is that it could change the transparency of money flows to the publishing industry. On Kachingle, the amount of money the publications are making through Kachingle is going to be public too. For example, the revenue that a specific site makes through Kachingle can be discovered by viewing, and adding up, the Kachingler contributions for that site.

The increased transparency of the revenue might lead to empowerment of readers, as they want to have more say about how their money is used. The idea is similar to voting: when you vote for a politician, you want the politician to have a say inside a political party. If the mandate that you have given to the party by voting is not used the way you like, you complain, or take your vote elsewhere. With Kachingle, as each one of the publication’s sites has its own medallion, the readers can support exactly the content they value in the publication.  The opposite is the traditional and still the current “get it all, like it or not”- subscription model.

Let’s look at an example. A political blog on a news site has more Kachinglers than the entertainment site. The publisher lays off political writers and hires more entertainment writers. The readers may start to complain, and may even make demands for the publication to keep up with the political site because they have paid for that.

Kachingle is not the only payment system for journalism in the market. For example, there is Payyattention, Contenture, Inamoon and EmanciPay.

Can Kachingle, or any of the other options, offer a viable business model for journalism? Or could it provide at least one revenue model?

In order to answer that question, we should find out who will use Kachingle. Would I use Kachingle? Maybe, if my friends used it too. I wouldn’t want to feel like an outsider. That is one reason why I joined Facebook.

Nor do I want to feel like a free rider, who doesn’t bear the responsibility of supporting good journalism. That is why I pay my taxes and don’t take free rides in public transport – I want to be a good citizen.

Combining voluntary payments and pressure to be a good citizen is an interesting idea. Instead of setting up a paywall, where readers have to pay to access the content, Kachingle relies on a wall of conscience, where accessing the content without paying would insult the social norm. This may force people to pay for journalism. Nevertheless, combining good citizenship with paying for journalism requires education from the publishers, as journalist and media consultant Steve Outing points out in his article in the Editor and Publisher.

It sounds kind of unrealistic to think that a universal tip jar, as Kachingle has been called, could become a viable business model for journalism. Nevertheless, it is good to remember that donations is an old way to finance journalism in some countries, for example in the US. For example National Public Radio, a public radio network, gets part of its income from donations. In this model, the people who can afford to support NPR, do; those who can’t afford to are still able to access to the free press as democracy requires.