Press

Welcome to the Kachingle Press Section

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Factsheet

The Kachingle Fee

The Kachingle fee is approximately 7%. However we remove 15% because we also handle all of the PayPal transaction fees so that the user does not have to figure out how to keep them low. In systems where the user must manage the PayPal transaction fees, the total transaction fees can end up to be exorbitant at micropayment levels.
So we guarantee that 85% of the user paid money goes into the pockets of the producers, and that includes all financial transaction fees (PayPal or credit card).
The point is that we don’t leave this management of the PayPal fees in the hands of the users because:

• users need to be able to put in small amounts of money e.g. $5 and still have the producers receive a goodly portion e.g. 85% -- we believe social payments will only take off if the system is down to this micropayment level,
• users can’t access PayPal APIs to get lower rates,
• users can’t negotiate with PayPal,
• users typically don’t want to have to be managing their money carefully in order to get their transaction fees low – they have better things to do!
• users care about how much of their money actually ends up in the hands of the producers – this is similar in concept to “fair trade”,
• producers shouldn’t be forced to keep their money in the system until quite a bit of money accumulates in order to not get slammed by high transaction fees when they pulled it out.

The 5$

Given that we are user-centric, and users have NO experience with social payments and what the norm is, we didn’t want them to suffer “mental transaction costs” in trying to decide how much to contribute. Everyone has a choice of $5, or $5. Sort of like the Model T which came in black, or black.

We only enable our users to put in $5/month. The reason is that our goal is to bring in ordinary people – not just bloggers or other creators who are also putting the Medallion on their digital stuff. And ordinary people don’t want a bunch of choices because they have no social signals on what to choose. So at the beginning our goal is getting traction and participation, not delivering $ or € to producers. Once lots of people have decided that “social payments” are the new “social norm” then we will work on persuading them to put in more money!
It is rather complicated – dealing with and managing financial transaction fees always is! But we put a huge amount of thought and design into our implementation to make sure that even at very small amounts transaction fees don’t eat up much of the money flow.

Freerider Behaviour

There are always free riders whether they are “pirates” or people that choose not to contribute. However because the costs of digital production are much lower than the previous technologies, producers can survive, even thrive with free riders as long as a reasonable percentage (5%+) of people choose to contribute. Remember that in a social payment system people are not paying what the producer says it is worth, but what it is worth to them. Since Kachingle distributes funds based on usage, the sites that are visited the most by a particular user will get their fair share of that users’ contribution. We’ve done spreadsheet analysis that shows that sites that can attract 3%-7% of their loyal users can make significant revenue. Remember that the goal here is to not get everyone to pay, or some people to pay a lot, but to get millions of people to pay small amounts based on their own value system.
Paywalls simply encourage pirates if the stuff is any good, and if it’s not, no one crosses the paywall and they become irrelevant. What’s worse is that paywalls deny poor people access to information, which is this century’s equivalent of food and shelter.

Blogs / Conventional Media

We already have several newspapers – example are the Columbia Missourian and the Boulder, Colorado DailyCamera participating with Kachingle. And we have many many local news and investigative news and political news sites.
We are particularly excited about our recent partnership with the University of Missouri, Columbia, School of Journalism. They run the local newspaper, the Missourian, where the students are the journalists. And they have also set up a class project for four journalism and business school graduate students to work on marketing Kachingle to the users of the Missourian. The student team has just begun – it is exciting to work with them, the Missourian, and the Journalism School (considered to be one of the top three in the U.S. with graduates throughout the world). Interestingly our team of grad students has 1 American and 3 non-Americans. This is another example of the international appeal of Kachingle.

Videos/Music/Photos

We just launched the capability for Kachingle (with KachingleX our browser extension) to work on YouTube channels and Flickr streams. We will be adding additional capabilities such as Twitter user pages, Facebook fan pages, etc. over the next few weeks.