That’s the main concept behind a new site monetization service called Contenture, which is owned by the good folks of Clicky analytics.* Essentially, Contenture is billing itself as a micropayment service that aggregates the income from all the users that pay for the service, and then distributes that money out to the websites that run its code. Here’s how they’ve described it:

Users pay a monthly fee into the Contenture pool, then we monitor what sites they go to, and automatically distribute each user’s money to those sites every month based on how often that user visited the site. This makes for a completely seamless experience, and we believe it’s one that will finally bring micropayments to the masses.

So why would a user pay for Contenture? That’s where the second feature of Contenture comes in – premium microservices. Contenture lets you offer exclusive features to paying Contenture members, such as removing ads, giving exclusive access to certain content (e.g. /archives/), giving priority access to new content, commenting privileges, and more.

I’m trying the service out myself, both as a site owner and as a paying user. If you aren’t a user, you’ll see a section to the right of this post called “Recommended” over in the sidebar that shows ads, with a green Support This Site ad included (which leads to Contenture). If you are a paying Contenture user, you won’t see those ads. That’s the only premium feature I’ve enabled at this point for this site, but I’m considering giving exclusive access to special content or some other privilege as well. Feel free to tell me what you’d like to get as a Contenture member when you visit this site, and I’ll consider doing that.

I love this concept, but of course, only time will tell whether or not it will actually fly. It’s cool that we, as users, can choose to pay one small fee in order to get special privileges at the sites we visit most (and are therefore appreciative of). But of course, those sites need to be participating in the program in order for us to receive those benefits. And from the publisher’s point of view, Contenture makes it easy to offer special privileges such as removing ads to their paying users, but in order for it to be profitable, there needs to be a large enough pool of users.

So both ends of the spectrum need to participate to make this service fly. Will it happen? I don’t know, but I appreciate the effort that Contenture is putting out, so I’m willing to be one of the first to sign up both as a publisher and a user. If you think this might be a good way for you to give your site users extra benefits and make some money as well, then you might want to check it out.

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Contenture, Contenture pool, site owner
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