A postscript to my latest media column…
It’s about Kachingle, a new service that Internet surfers and Internet sites can both sign up for. It gives the surfers an easy way to send a little money to the sites they value. Says Barbara Iverson, who runs the Kachingling site ChicagoTalks, “We are looking to have a revenue stream that will allow us to pay our editors and contributors.”
An honorable ambition, one would think.
But where Kachingle might run into trouble is with its feature that lets the public see which sites are Kachingling and what they’re getting. That’s why HuffPo isn’t interested, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos told me: “They said the last thing they’d want would be a mechanism that showed they were making money. Their bloggers might want some of that money, and their business model is that they would never pay them.”