Why Cleeng?

I get a lot of questions about the name Cleeng. So I thought I’d write a little post about it.

Where does the name come from?

Well, as you saw in our first post, we had to come up with something smarter than paywalls. And when you think, you know what happens?

Yep, you have an idea. A light turns on. A switch is flipped. It makes a “Ting”, “Kling”, “Cleeng” sound in your head. You’ve found something smart.

That’s a first part of the answer.

Second, we were thinking about content monetization. Anything over a dollar is psychologically expensive. People prefer to pay small amounts for content (remember Steve Job’s push to keep iTunes song at 99cts?)

So, paying pennies for the content you care about takes this:

Small change. And when it falls it makes the “cleeng” sound.

You might be thinking: that’s great for publishers, who stand to make money if our solution is successful, but it’s no great news for consumers. Content is mostly free today.

True, that’s why we also bring innovation for users:

1. Promote quality content & share the benefits: You buy content that you like, and you share it with your friends, who buy it and like it. When this happens, your word of mouth earns you pennies for referring content to friends. Isn’t that cool? Share a lot of quality content, and soon you’ll be making money from of it.
2. Everyone is a potential content producer: We all have great photos to share, nice stories to tell, amazing tips to give, in a blog, in video or whatever media. Cleeng makes it really easy for anyone to monetize their content. We’d want everybody to realize that creating great content, and collecting a bit of money for it, is a really rewarding experience — in every sense of the word.

So if this works, we might all start hearing the Vegas-esque Cleeng Cleeng Cleeng” noise of hitting the jackpot.

What do you think about it?