Micropayment Revolution with Contenture

If you want to make money from a blog you have a limited number of options.  The most popular approach is to run ads – typically using an ad network like Google’s AdSense.  Many bloggers also join affiliate programs and post links and banners for those programs – but to the visitor it is just more ads.  You can also charge a subscription fee – but you will have to have some truly unique content to pull that off and also the systems to handle the ecommerce.  So your primary options are to run ads and annoy your visitors or collect money from and annoy your visitors.

Next week, Contenture is launching what they call the “anti-ad network.”  The basic idea is that you would add a subscription component to your blog/website.  You would offer some type of premium benefits to visitors who are signed up with Contenture.  Those benefits could be priority access to new content, exclusive access to your archives, special commenting privileges, and/or an ad-free experience.

The twist to the subscription model is that the consumer only has to sign up with Contenture – not with dozens of individual blogs and websites.  Contenture plans to sign up bunches of sites to this model and users pay one flat monthly fee to have access to the premium services of all of these sites.   Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. You are paid a piece of every visitor’s monthly payment.  The amount will be based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.

Installation for the web site will be simple. Paste some Javascript code into your site, and then configure the premium services and content controls, if you choose. The setup doesn’t sound any harder than setting up affiliate links or AdSense.

The convenience, for both visitors and web site owners, is that there is only one sign up. I can sign up one time with Contenture, but in any given month my $5.99 might be paid out to 5, 10 or even a 100 websites.  It might only be pennies to each site, but for many folks AdSense is in the same ballpark on a per visitor basis.  If Contenture gets a volume of users it becomes interesting.

The challenge, like any network, is you to need to get a critical mass to sign up into the Contenture network.  Contenture is the team behind Clicky real time web analytics so they have an immediate base of over 100,000 web sites that they can market too.  They will pay websites $1 for every new paying user who signs up so all the member sites will have the incentive to advertise Contenture.

Contenture is launching what they call the Micropayment Revolution” on Tuesday, May 26.   So far no big names announced – but if they could land a social media site or two, Contenture could get interesting very quickly.  Without a big name – it is going to be hard to get the Contenture ball rolling.

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