No doubt, you’ve heard me rave about Clicky, the Portland-based Web analytics tool that’s got a ton of cool features for a very affordable price.
Well, far from a one-trick pony, the Clicky team has just released their latest product Contenture, a service that hopes to help content publishers everywhere create some revenue from the content they’re creating.
[HTML2]How’s it work? Glad you asked.
Contenture asks readers to pay a monthly subscription to support sites that they love:
Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor’s monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
Or as MG Siegler at TechCrunch put it:
Contenture wants to sign up a bunch of sites to this model and have users pay one flat monthly fee to have access to all of these sites. That money would then be distributed to all of these sites. These sites could determine what Contenture subscribers get as a part of their subscription. Some may lose the ads, some may have special commenting ability, etc.
Subscription prices start as low as $6/month and go as high as $50/month.
To ensure that subscribers are getting value from their subscription, Contenture offers publishers the ability to give subscribers access to premium content—and the possibility of hiding ads altogether:
Installing Contenture on your site will be a simple copy/paste of Javascript, just like third-party analytics or widgets you may have used before. This will be for the basic install though. There will be many advanced options you can use to turn your site into the “Freemium” business model, by e.g. hiding ads or giving priority access to new content to Contenture users – but you don’t have to use those features right away or ever. Just by taking the 2-3 minutes of time it takes to register and put the code on your site, you will immediately start making money from Contenture users who visit your web site.
I’m going to give Contenture a test drive—and I’ll be reporting on what I find. If you’re interested taking it for a test drive, make sure to register for a Contenture account. You’re automatically approved.
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