We’re just pleased as punch to announce the launch today of Contenture.com, a new micropayment service from the same team behind Clicky Web Analytics.
There have been countless micropayment systems developed over the years, and they all have one thing in common: Serious Fail. They are too complex, both for a site to integrate, and for a visitor to use. But micropayments have become a hot topic again, with many major sites closing down because their sole revenue source – ads – just doesn’t pay the bills.
We saw an opportunity here and jumped at it. We already monitor sites with Clicky, and we got to thinking – what if there was a micropayment service that worked the same way? 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. All of these features are optional though, which brings up the question: Why would you not install Contenture on your site? By just putting a piece of Javascript on it, you will automatically make money from every paying Contenture user who visits your site, even if you never enable any premium feature.
Every new paying user benefits the entire system. For this reason, Contenture has an affiliate system, like Clicky does. For every new paying user that signs up through your link, we’ll pay you $1. But as a special promo to Clicky users, we’re going to offer you double that affiliate rate for a full year. When you register, just enter in “clicky” in the promo code section. The first 100 accounts that sign up with this code will get the special affiliate rate.
We plan to integrate Contenture fully into Clicky in the very near future, as an alternative payment method. We will also be disabling ads on Clicky for free accounts that sign up for a paying Contenture account.
So what are you waiting for? Go register for Contenture, and let the Micropayment Revolution begin!
