TWIXA Blog

Benevote Covered by Steve Outing

We were just covered by Steve Outing in his article "Micropatronage with ads, no cash" on July 13th. Needless to say, he zeroed in on a key differentiator that addresses the current economic downturn: "No money is extracted from the user’s wallet."

Steve covers alternative funding sources for media. As some of you may recall, he's recently discussed complementary services such as Kachingle, Contenture, Inamoon, and Payyattention.

Thanks, Steve!

Donations 2.0: Will they save journalism this time?

I was thinking about donating to a political cause and ended up here. It turns out that while I could use PayPal, I can't use Amazon, at least until the site replaces the "old" Amazon donation system with the new one.

Back in December 2008, Amazon retired its Amazon Honor System, which it says was created to support disaster relief efforts. Operating at the same time, and still available, is the PayPal donations button. Until last December, these two methods were the largest and most well-known mechanisms for donating small amounts of money for general donations, tip jars, and micro-donations for political causes. Betanews has an article on how Matt Haughey of Metafilter collected $6,254 from about 450 donors in 7 years, allowing him to buy a new server and other operational necessities.

Voluntary cash donations clearly served a purpose and provided some benefit to Metafilter, but is it the end-all-and-be-all that will save journalism as a whole? Donations are one piece of the puzzle, and making the process even easier will be a key factor in enabling increased levels of donations for journalism. I look forward to easy, seamless, and painless ways to facilitate donations to sites and content owners for people with the cash and charitable mindset to donate.

But what about those without cash or those with more time than money? That's where our BeneVote service comes in. Publishers can use BeneVote alongside other revenue enhancement technologies, including any of the new voluntary-payment systems.

The Dawn of Voter-Directed Sponsorship of Content and Services

Welcome to the Twixa blog!

As our first post, we would like to introduce our Benevote service, which we call "voter-directed sponsorship of content and services." The core of the Benevote service is that readers can sponsor online content by voting. When a reader votes using the free Benevote widget, we track the vote for the article and publisher. At the end of our accounting period, we take the money from sponsors and distribute it to publishers minus our cut. It's that simple.

Voting is free, which enables readers, who may have more time than money, esp. in this economy, to reward publishers with feedback on article quality and sponsorship dollars.

At a highly trafficked site, the math might look something like this:

Articles from publisher/month: 10
Unique readers for publisher: 100,000
Voting rate: 50% (if voting becomes as customary as tipping at a sit-down restaurant)
Publisher CPM: $10
Revenue formula: 100,000 * 10 * 0.5 * 10 / 1000
Gross revenue = $5000/month

Obviously, these numbers are not typical,  will vary by publisher, and will be dependent on the quality of content, voting rate, typical CPM of the publisher, number of articles, reader base, article frequency, reader awareness, etc. However, if the readership were 1 million users, then the gross revenue might reach $50,000/month and cover several staff. So the long term potential of Benevote to help save/sustain online journalism excites us.

Near term, we're just getting started, so we're going to be a bit rough around the edges. Please feel free to give us plenty of feedback.

If you want to sign up as a publisher or sign up as a sponsor/advertiser, then be sure to join our private beta.