by Flemming Funch
IndieKarma is a good idea, but nevertheless, I've turned it off on my blog here.
The idea is that visitors to a website, like a blog, would automatically pay a very small amount (1 cent) whenever they visit the blog. That would create a sort of attention economy where, if you have many visitors, you'd also receive a bit of income from it, which maybe would pay the costs of hosting the site.
At an earlier point in the history of the Internet, that could have been a really big idea. Would be quite reasonable if it worked like that. Otherwise, if you put up some very popular content for free on the net, you might well get killed by the bandwidth costs.
But at this point the idea might not catch on. Yes, one can sign up to voluntarily participate in something like that, which is what IndieKarma offers. But relatively few people do. There are right now 1088 people who signed up for it as users, and 461 sites, and the users have given a total of 4778 donations of 1 cent. Doesn't really add up to much.
I started off with the $1 credit one would get automatically, and I put the javascript code on my site. And, well, there has been some 'donations' every day, but I'd also get charged 1 cent when I accessed my blog myself. So, anyway, after a few months, that has added up to a balance of $1.07. I made 7 cents. Great, thank you for the support everybody. But that doesn't really make it worth it to bug everybody with a pop-up message about joining IndieKarma. So, off it goes.
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