Pilot Medallion FAQs
We're excited to invite you to take the Kachingle Medallion for a test-drive on your site to see how it will work when Kachinglers visit and decide to contribute.
Here are the basics:
• What is Kachingle — How visits become income without subscriptions or paywalls
• How the Medallion works — What visitors will see when kachingling your site
• Placement of the Medallion — How to display your Medallion for maximum visibility
• Being a Kachingle Site Owner — How will this work when everything goes live
• Known issues — Display and functionality concerns already on our radar
If you have additional questions, please feel free to Ask a Question in our Community Forum, where Kachingle staffers will reply.
Or you can visit the Community Forum thread dedicated to this Pilot Medallion program to ask questions and discuss ideas with other Medallion testers.
What is Kachingle?
Kachingle is an effortless way for everyone to support their favorite sites, online publications, and blogs through automated micropayments based on their web surfing.Kachingle is also the easiest way for your site to monetize online content without resorting to paywalls, manual micropayments or other easily-bypassed (and traffic-killing) revenue collection methods.
Kachinglers choose to support your site simply through clicking your Kachingle Medallion (how it works is explained below).
From then on, each day they return, the Medallion will recognize them and count their visit. At the end of each month, their monthly Kachingle deposit will be divvied up between your site and the others they support, based on the frequency of the Kachingler's visits.
But what makes Kachingle the best model for online content-funding are its two most unique features:
- Kachingle is user-centric. It's a way for Kachinglers to centralize their support of the sites they use, rather than being forced to make payments to every site separately.
How the Medallion works
The Medallion is a small Kachingle widget created by javascript code you place in the HTML of your site's pages.
Kachinglers can start supporting your site just by mousing over Medallion to "unfold" it, then clicking "Kachingle [Your Site Name]."
The gray coin on the Medallion turns green, and the count showing your site's supporters with add one Kachingler.
The Medallion Coin will remain green whenever your Kachingler visits to confirm they're Kachingling and their visit has been counted.
When visitors mouse-over the Medallion, they see additional options, including the opportunity to see who else is contributing to your site (part of the social signals that make Kachingle unique).
(return to top)
Placement of the Medallion
Where you place the Medallion on your site is up to you, but Kachingle recommends it be placed high on each page ("above the fold") in a conspicuous spot to draw Kachinglers' attention.
The Medallion is 234x60 in its closed state and expands in a layer over existing content when in its open state, so you don't need to accommodate for its expansion in your layout. (Additional sizes, shapes and colors may be available in the future.)The Medallion colors are:
Background E3F1F1 KachingleLogoOrange F26722 Kachingle Tagline 749B9B Kachingle Green 81C441 Kachingle 'Link' 6BBEE
For maximum exposure and to make sure every contributor's visits are counted no matter how they enter your site, we recommend the Medallion be included on every page, and because Kachingle is a whole new concept in crowdfunding, we recommend not grouping the Medallion with advertisements, lest it be mistaken for one.
Suggested locations include...
- Opposite your logo at the top of the page
- Adjacent to headlines
- Textwrapped near the bylines of articles
- Between blog posts
- Near primary navigation links
If you have other suggestions you'd like to share, or would like to see what other Site Owners have done with their Medallions, visit our PILOT MEDALLION: feedback forum for Site-Owner experiments (hosted by GetSatisfaction.com).
DIFFERENT MEDALLIONS FOR DIFFERENT SECTIONS OF YOUR SITE?
Some Site Owners may be interested in creating multiple Medallions to place on different sections of their sites, instead of using the same Medallion code site-wide.
Why? Let's say your site has a dozen blogs on wildly different subjects, written by different bloggers. You may want to offer Kachinglers the opportunity to support each blog separately. We call this Narrow Scope, because it allows you to follow your Kachinglers' support of your content more closely.
Narrow Scope
The Narrow Scope advantage is that it could potentially generate more revenue. When each blog has a separate Medallion, a Kachingler who reads multiple blogs is counted separately by each one — and could end up contributing to each one independently, meaning multiple streams of revenue from each Kachingler.
A possible disadvantage is that a Kachingler must "turn kachingling on" (or "click the coin") individually for each blog, and this may require specialized marketing of your Medallions to your visitors.
Wide Scope
Having one Medallion (placing the same Medallion code on every page) we call Wide Scope. The advantage of this approach is that Kachinglers only have to "turn kachingling on" (or "click the coin") one time, from anywhere on your site, then anytime they visit any page with a Medallion, their visit will be counted toward their contribution.
How to decide
If you're considering both approaches, the question to ask yourself is this: Does the typical reader on my site consider the blogs to be part of a group or distinctly separate? A good example of the latter might be the highly-read blog of a famous newspaper (and TV) film critic, which may be read mostly by out-of-towners who have no interest in the rest of that newspaper's site.
When your Kachinglers contributions are included in their Twitter feed, for example, would they want show they're supporting your site, or supporting some more specialized content? That distinction may help guide your decision between the Narrow Scope and Wide Scope approach to your Medallions.
Keep in mind there is no limit to the number of Medallions you can manage from and that each Medallion can even have it's own separate Paypal account. (This makes accounting very easy if you are intending to distribute some or all of the funds to individual bloggers.)
(return to top)
Being a Kachingle Site Owner
As a Kachingle Site Owner, you will have access to many tools to manage your Medallions, track all your Kachinglers, and view statistics on their visits and payments, and our payments to you. Here's a peek at what the Sites I Own interface looks like:
(return to top)
Known Issues
- WordPress & BlogSpot - In some templates, the Medallion opens with the "unfolded" area appears behind other components on the page.- TypePad & Drupal - Similar issues with Medallion opening in a way that makes the "unfolded" area not visible.
- In some browsers, the closed Medallion is about 2px taller than it should be.
- In IE7, the open Medallion seems to have extra white space
All these issues are being addressed by our design team and should be resolved for the official launch of Kachingle.
(return to top)