I have been using IndieKarma for almost a month now and I have to say it is an interesting concept, however there are not enough users for the service to take off. I posted a short entry about how promising IndieKarma looked if only all of my readers used this service I would generate enough revenue to at least pay the bandwidth bills.

IndieKarma has a very small user base compared to the size of the blogosphere, at the time I am writing Technorati is tracking 41.9 million sites and IndieKarma only has 306 sites registered and 752 users. I am sure half of the users don’t even bother to login to their account when they go and surf their favorite blogs just to help out independent bloggers.

Another problem is the emergence of RSS feeds for consuming lots of information in a short time period, people read blogs mostly via RSS, and RSS doesn’t pay using the IndieKarma scheme. You must be logged in and click through to the site for the snippet of javascript inserted into each page to register you donation of one penny.

I have realised that IndieKarma can not pay the bills here at Lawsy.net, however the idea of indieKarma is interesting and if it could work in feeds, or accounts were included by default in blogging software like Wordpress or Movable type. If the team at IndieKarma established a partnership with Wordpress.com they could make a killing and really make blogging take off, if people were earning real money for posting their thoughts on the internet then they will continue doing so and IndieKarma will grow.

I have not made enough money to sustain myself or even pay for a coffee at Starbucks or the movie (Xmen 3) I am going to see today.