The Miami Herald drops the ball

I originally started this blog because I was frustrated that I could not send a voluntary payment to the New York Times. Since that time, my views on the subject of newspaper economics have developed substantially, but I was still excited to learn that The Miami Herald started to accept online donations in December of 2009. While it seemed a perfect experiment for my project, I was deeply skeptical of their methods.

1. There are two ways to message a "voluntary payment": donation or pay-what-you-want. As for-profit businesses, I don't think that newspapers have any business calling it a donation (long associated with charitable non-profits and tax-deductibility). Steve Outing, one of the few people who I have found who has advocated for an optional payment system, calls this the "tip jar" model. Unless you are a public or non-profit company, these requests are extremely weak. Labeling it as a donation elicited this derogatory report from an NBC Miami correspondent. After researching this matter and surfing the comment logs, I assure you that the outrage was not limited.

2. Perhaps more importantly though, the interface was horrendous. In order to donate, a reader had to click a link, and then proceed to enter all of their credit card information each time! How annoying. According to... me... one reason that the Apple app store is successful is that it is so easy to just touch the buy button. Consumer behavior is something that cannot be ignored when executing a new model like the online donation system.

Full Disclosure: While I did initially assess the Herald's efforts as sub-par, I also knew (through HuffPo) that the "experiment" has been stopped. Unsurprisingly, The Herald's effort did not generate substantial revenue.

Kachingle has an interesting idea, although I have not fully assessed how profitable/widely used they are. They have users who register a payment method with them, and can contribute to participating blogs or websites quickly and easily. The Miami Herald could have used this service, or a similar service. One of the major benefits of to the Herald of using a third party provider is that the Herald would be conferring significant benefits to Kachingle (Users and exposure)... and could use this to bargain for better terms or even money back! The lack of imagination in execution is astounding.

So newspapers, please don't half-ass a roll-out again, or two months later the Huffington Post is going to gloat.