Kachingle is chump change for newspapers
Posted by Mediascaper on February 16, 2009
Remember Kachingle, the voluntary payment system Steve Outing touted as an alternative to micropayments, and which I wrote about here? Well, Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who touts a micropayment system, writes that the projected revenues from Kachingle wouldn’t add up to much except at the most popular news sites:
The tip system might generate revenues of nearly $3.7 million a year for the New York Times, the busiest of all newspaper sites with 7.4 billion page views in 2008. The $3.7 million would pay 24.5 journalists making an average of $150,000 per year. Although that sounds pretty good, bear in mind that the paper has a newsroom staff of about 1,300 individuals. So, Kachingle would cover the cost of only 2% of the staff.
In the case of the San Diego Union-Tribune, where web traffic last year was 110.3 million page views, the projected Kachingle revenue would be $55,154 per year. That’s enough to pay for three-quarters of a reporter making $75,000 a year.
