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.