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Post details: How to micro-pay for blog posts you like

07/13/2010

How to micro-pay for blog posts you like

Some of you may have seen that I have a paypal button on my blog since a while (for several years to be honest) and I already received one donation from somebody who wanted to endorse my blogging effort with a dollar. After paypal had deducted their fees, I had about 50 cents left (the thought is what counts here).

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I don't expect people to send me money on paypal because hey like my work. I'd rather have them as my customers and then I'll send them an invoice for a finished project. People really like to pay if they get a problem solved. Anyway, there is some discussion in the blogosphere that reader would like to support bloggers for their hard work. Paypal may not be the best solution for small amounts of money, so there are some alternatives around that I want to present here.

The first one is something that you may have seen side-by-side with my paypal button. It's called kachingle and you can create a free account at http://www.kachingle.com/ - the basic idea is that you pay a larger amount of money via a paypal subscription and divide it between all the sites you want to support with a few cent. You deposit $5 per month in your kachingle account and visit for example 10 sites who have the Kachingle Medallion on their page. If you click on it, you will be counted as a supporter for the site. At the end of the month, your $5 will be split among the sites that you have supported. If it's 10 sites, each will get 50 cent, if it's 100 sites, each will get only 5 cent (actually, kachingle will keep 20% as their commission for the service, so it's only 40 cent or 4 cent in these examples)

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I like the kachingle system because I'm not obliged to put money in my account if I don't want to. I just can place the Kachingle Medallion on my site (or multiple of my sites) and see if my readers want to support me. If I want to give something back, I can decide that later.

Some weeks ago, another system showed up with a "me too" product. It's called Flattr and you can check it out at https://flattr.com/ - it's basically the same system, but I don't like it as much as kachingle. Their commission is only 10% but if you want to have an active account, you need to spend money. If you don't give, you can't receive. Apart from that, the system is very similar to kachingle.

A third one is pretty new and it's called goldhat at http://goldhat.org - It uses a similar idea but instead of placing a button on your website, you have to enter each article as a "hatlink" into their system. The main difference with the goldhat system is, that you can decide how much money you want to donate to each of the listed hatlinks. So if you think that an article is more valuable to you, you can even donate $100 if you like to do that. Goldhat also don't take money automatically from you like the other two. That means you don't pay a commission fee but if you add money to your account (this is be done by credit card, not via paypal), they ask you if you want to donate 5% to support goldhat. If you don't want to do that, you can select "no" and all the money is available for you to donate to whomever you want.