I’m trying out a new beta service for this blog called IndieKarma. Don’t delay, the first 5,000 users who register get a buck worth of credits for free, so open that link in a new window and get registered now and quickly claim your free buck worth of credits. While writing this they added a couple dozen new members, so might want to hurry. Even if this service tanks, well, you at least get in early and get a free dollar worth of credits to spread around.

The concept of the micropayment service is for each visit to a site using IndieKarma the site owner will be credited 75% of a penny and IndieKarma gets the other 25% of a penny. You can juice your IndieKarma account using PayPal so a few bucks will get you hundreds of visits to participating sites. There is an account history section which shows what sites you’ve visited and that have been credited:

You can easily logout and then visit those sites without automatically paying them, so it’s not a system that requires paying every time you visit. For example above visiting this website you’d be giving me a penny for my thoughts each time, quite literally, if you signed up and were logged in. Since they give you a buck for just registering, you’d be giving me their money, which at the least doesn’t seem like a bad deal.

On the webmaster/blogger side, there are account stats as well:

You will be emailed the password to login but beware of the extra period added to the end of the email near the password. That period doesn’t belong as part of the password.

I’ve always liked the idea of micropayments, but never seen an implementation that made a whole lot of cents or sense. I’m not sure IndieKarma does or will either but it might be fun to play around with for a short demo.

In fact maybe you see the floating window at the bottom of the browser (it goes away after 15 seconds — configurable)? I’m concerned this might be annoying to readers so I’m very curious of your feedback. If you hate it, feel free to say so. I’m still experimenting with where to show it but for the time being you can find it on the blog post pages. It might not be available on the homepage.

Independent or not
There is also the issue of what type of bloggers/websites IndieKarma determines as being “independent” which they promise to check each site and then ask those sites they feel aren’t independent to leave the network. Here’s how they explain what they consider to be an independent publisher:

The whole point of the network is to provide a reasonable way for end users to support independent blogs and websites with little or no advertising options. If you have an advertising department (or any department for that matter), you’re not an independent publisher.

Payment is optional
If you don’t want to give me a penny for my thoughts using this system, then you don’t have to, so it’s still an optional thing, just like buying from the advertisers. I’m not crazy about donation boxes but have always liked the concept of micropayments (Ok, I said that already). Frankly, if you have a blog and give me a relative link then that’s worth much more than a penny to me.

NOTE: The IndieKarma bar will not show up in the full text RSS feed. If you are reading this in your RSS reader right now, might want to click over to the page so you can see what it actually looks like.

Not too proud to admit I’ll stop, bend over and pick up pennies off the ground, so why not pick them up from readers who enjoy Hmm? We collect these pennies and use them on our annual family vacation (arcades, snacks, etc). Perhaps IndieKarma could add to this fun fund. Again, this is just a demo and not necessarily something we’ll leave here long, but I would appreciate your feedback on whether or not you think this is a good, non-offensive, non-intrusive moneymaking idea and how you feel about this being used here at Hmm?

Maybe this is something that would make sense only being enabled during special events or high traffic times or something (like after being slashdotted or dugg) to help pay for the extra expenses?

(hopefully you can tell that I’m just pondering aloud here)

Your turn. Go ahead and tell me what you think? Like/dislike?

Update 8:15pm PST: The indieKarma site has been more down than up this evening. I just pulled the code from the site. Looks like another app with scaling woes at launch. Last I’d seen they didn’t even have 200 sites signed up.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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