Putting the Kachingle into Micropayments
If you’re worried about an online future of constantly being nickeled, dimmed, dollared and euroed by content pay walls like what the New York Times hopes to put in place soon, Kachingle.com hope it has a nice disruptive micropayment model for you.
Micro payments for at least a decade has been next year’s Big Thing. Too many clicks, too many hassles for merchants and buyers, too much overhead to make it worthwhile has got in the way of adoption.
What about fifty aspiring ecommerce startups strutting their stuff at PayPal’s Innovate 2010 conference in San Francisco hopes is that the new X API’s will drop the number of clicks necessary to buy anything from an mp3 to help you sleep to a thousand dollar bed to sleep in below the “it’s too much of a hassle” threshold.
For Kachingle, where you pay five bucks a month and pick which Kachingled sites you want to get a slice of that with a single click, the new PayPal APIs mean two clicks sign you up for Kachingle subscription account, not four, and not on PayPal’s site.
“Our unmet need before the new API,” said Kachingle founder Fred Dewey, “was if it was at all hard, they would not sign up. Now if they use PayPal they can set up a Kachingle subscription and start supporting content they like in a couple of clicks.”
Not everyone is enamored with Kachingle – The New York Times has sued Kachingle to prevent the service from collecting payments from members to send to NYT bloggers.
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