Frictionless

Two different payment models have really impressed me lately: Kickstarter and Kindle.

Kickstarter impresses me because it so potently shows the value of authenticity. Artists and writers and journalists talk about the cool stuff they’re working on, and their enthusiasm is simply contagious. On some pages, it’s hard not to contribute right away. In just the past two or three months I’ve supported Zombies, Run!, Last Two-Step in Texas, Lauren Ipsum and A Thousand Thank Yous, four very cool projects.

My credit card is suffering, but that’s a small price for that fuzzy warm feeling, the feeling that you’re a part of something bigger.

But there’s more to Kickstarter. Each project has a goal, the amount of money the artist needs to complete the work. You only pay once enough people have chipped in to reach the goal. If there’s not enough support, nobody pays.

As a commenter over at Hacker News said last month: Kickstarter is hacking the tragedy of the commons. I would have never payed twelve dollars to support Parallel Print Shop’s purchase of a big old letterpress without some kind of assurance that they’d actually use the money to pay for the press, and that they’d have enough backers to actually do that. And I certainly would never pay a random stranger sixty-five bucks for a book that doesn’t yet exist, but with Lauren Ipsum that’s exactly what I did. Sending money into the void is uncool, and Kickstarter cleverly assures you that’ll never happen. (Projects can fail of course, but nobody will ever just mysteriously disappear with your money.)

The cherry on top for Kickstarter is that, after playing to our sense of wanting to belong to something bigger, after making us all excited about the project, it makes things just a little bit sweeter by appealing to our selfish side as well: oh, by the way, if you sponsor this project you’ll also get one of these very cool rewards. And that seals the deal.

Kickstarter is superb social design and something news organizations, both non-profit and for-profit, can learn a lot from.

We’re used to doing the whole “without us, democracy is doomed” shtick, but scaremongering and overinflating our own importance rarely leads people to reach for their wallet. Telling people that they should pay, because content is valuable and they’re a bunch of gosh darned freeloaders, well, nope, that doesn’t help either.

Getting people to care about your writers and their work, that’s the first step. Make them want to pay you.

Authenticity. Good-natured fun. Being part of something bigger. Getting appreciation for giving. Excitement. That’s Kickstarter.

The Amazon Kindle and Kindle Store has a more traditional approach. They’ve made the whole purchasing and delivery process so frictionless that you’re bound to do impulse buys: an age-old marketing trick. The good kind of impulse buys, mind you, the kind you end up loving more than you’d thought.

Even though it’s based on simple impulse buying, Kindle is intriguing because the crucial second ingredient that it adds is that it gets you away from your computer.

Reading on a computer is either a harried experience or a part of wanderings across the web that go anywhere and everywhere, with constant distractions from your email, your Facebook and your twitter accounts. I’ve noted before that such a hyperkinetic environment isn’t conducive to getting people to buy anything at all, no matter how easy it is.

With a Kindle, you get the good old-fashioned reading experience of a paperback or a good magazine, which is the kind of relaxed emotional state publishers want you to be in when they are peddling their wares. It’s leaning back in a comfy chair that gets you buying, and it’s the great e-ink reading experience that keeps you buying.

Another way Kindle works (for me) is through vastly limiting my choices, but again: in a good way.

Let’s face it, even news curators don’t help us a lot with information overload, because we just end up using ten different curators in addition to a ton of “regular” content providers and then there’s those endless tweets to keep track of too. Curation adds to the overdose instead of making masses of information easier to grapple with.

Magazines and Singles on Kindle battle information overload with a good dose of retro: just pick a magazine you like (my favorite thus far is Slate), buy it for a buck or so, sit down, trust in their selection, read it from cover to back and feel happy that, despite the deluge of information out there, you’ve managed to read a very fine selection of stories indeed, and managed to finish them. (Finishability is the next big thing, I feel it.) Yes, those same stories are available online for free. Even more of them in fact. But that’s not the point. The experience is different, and the return to editors as gatekeepers, while it’d be a stupid move online, is a refreshing experience once you’re away-from-keyboard. Sometimes we do need to act like digital space is expensive, even though it’s free.

The Kindle lesson is: think about more than just the content you offer. Think of the experience you’re trying to create, and look for platforms that will help you create that experience.

The corollary to that lesson is that we, as an industry, are still clueless about how people are reading the news, when they’re enjoying it and when not. We need more ethnographic reports like the one the Associated Press did in 2008.

When we do research, we don’t necessarily need to figure out what people think they need or like. The very basics will do: how do potential news consumers act when at home, what do their days and evenings look like, and how could our products fit into those routines. We think we know but we’re often blind about our own behaviors let alone those of others.

Our websites and newspapers aren’t as good as they could be because we don’t have a clue how people read.

Kickstarter and Kindle are fascinating platforms that news organizations can leverage and profit from. But they’re also models that we can learn from. Make payment frictionless, think about the experience and not just the content you’re selling, make people feel a part of something bigger, don’t force people to pay but infect them with your own enthusiasm and passion so they want to pay, and realize that doing and offering less is a selling point.