ie - a "labor of love"
How do I pay for it? Well, I reach around to my back pocket for my wallet, and...
I don't have ads, I don't have a sponsorship, and I don't care - what I have and what I put on my website is strictly for myself and others to use or read as they see fit; I consider it a "giving back" to others out there for what the internet has given me over the years.
...and I am fine with that.
Other sites need to realize this too; not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. Like the internet used to be - everybody doing it for the love of networking and computing and knowledge and information transfer.
Not AOL spam making money crap.
I'm not famous, but I do love working on my own open source projects and I like writing tech posts. Last time I quit my job I lived for 11 months off my savings while travelling in over 10 countries. I got some OSS done, redid all my websites and wrote a lab manual for a friend of mine who was teaching a class based on the stuff I wrote.
My goal was to get into University and work on a PhD. I had attempted this a few years ago, but my grades for undergrand and grad school weren't all that great (2.5/3.2), and it pretty much killed my chances. I had some publications under my belt this time, but still very few professors would even talk to me about my work in sensor network research (BigSense).
I've spend over a decade in software. I do not enjoy being in industry. Even though I work remotely more now and less in the office, I still find my career choice mind numbing.
I'm going to try again soon, with more savings, so hopefully I can make it further before having to give up and having to find another software job.
To my knowledge, most people who make money on their websites are either big enough to monetise with sponsorship/subscription, or they'd run a number of smaller sites of no consequence nor unique content anyway. The latter has no real reason to exist.
I also have a personal site, and when Wordpress started shoving ads into their free blogs, I started paying a few bucks to host it ad-free. I recently published a book, and people can buy that if they want to thank me, or just keep reading my blog if they don't or can't. I will not sell out my readers (or "monetize my brand," or whatever you're supposed to call it), because I believe in the web as it used to be.
None of my favorite websites update very frequently, but I still check them all regularly. In aggregate, theres always fresh content, and it's better content because the author actually wanted to write about it.
Thumbs up man!
This doesn't make sense. It follows logically that we should all not love what we do for a living. That strikes me as an absurd conclusion.
Of course, it means one needs a day job, but such is life.
That just follows in a straightforward way. Now, this may not seem absurd to you, but I dare say it will to most people.
Signed, Captain Obvious
More specifically, market forces dictate that if a job is all sparkles and lollipops, you don't need to pay people to do it, because they'll do it for free in their spare time. Thus, every job has downsides.
I chose to switch employer and in the process got better control of the work items on my list -- to the cost of a heightened responsibility but also a better wage.
Of course that's difficult and not always possible, but it doesn't mean one wouldn't, shouldn't, or couldn't try.
> not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free
That basically says the art only worth caring about is art produced by artists who produce a large, consistent volume of work.
Any one who produces small things, or infrequent things, falls under the threshold where the perceived effort to set up a subscription or pay is greater than the value of the content. They'll get nothing. Granularity and transaction size really matters, especially for the bite-sized content people consume on the web.
Your suggestion of paywalls and subscriptions is like a market that only deals in hundred dollar bills. How well would that work for your average mom-and-pop store or independent musician?
And yes, the default state of art is for nobody to care about it. The art we care about tends to be exceptional. That's why we care about it.
But I do think with today's increasingly short attention spans, the granularity of consuming creative works keeps going down, which makes the transaction friction more and more of a problem.
I know there are a couple of people working on something similar to this on HN, because I've mentioned something like it a few times and they've replied saying they're working on it. ;) There was one in particular that I was following, but I remember when they launched there was a fatal flaw in their model (maybe it was bitcoin only? I don't remember). I don't recall the name now.
I'd be very interested in reading about the life of exactly not that kind of person.
ALL THE TIME when I'm researching topics, I'll think about how there is probably someone out there for whom it's their one true passion, and they have probably put up a little website on some corner of the Internet with more research and depth than 1000 well SEOd blog sites, but it's completely impossible to find.
Edit: I found the pizza website, it was halfway down the second page of google's search results. I only clicked it because it was the only one without a picture http://www.varasanos.com/pizzarecipe.htm
You can argue that this article is a case of the system working fairly well at surfacing high quality content. When I searched for "New York Pizza Recipe" this result came half way down page one.
Sure, there are other "high domain authority" listings on that page too, but this is an example of Google listing a well researched, in depth original post from a little known site on the basis of the strength of its content, even with quite minimal on page SEO.
You can argue about whether that's the right term to be optimizing for, but it's the term the writer chose to optimize for as it's the title of the page.
If you just want a blog or simple personal website, a hundred different services will host that for you for free, including Github, Wordpress, Tumblr, and others.
And also it doesn't happen. Turns out people who want to write/paint will write/paint.
The internet was around before advertising. We had free sites back in the day. We've got free sites now. And we can fight for taxes to pay for public libraries, access points, community groups, or even philanthropists to set up free servers.
It was actually a pretty cool place (i thought). I mean, I use adblockers to try to simulate it, and am horrified every time I use the web at work without one, but even my ad blocker can't remove the influence and draw of content and material pumped out by money hungry people vs people actually interested in writing/painting/expressing its opinion for its own sake, and the way that profit motive subtly influences the ratio of content produced, and the content and style of that material as well.
Its much more liberating as an author to just say "fuck them", rather than continually go "well, it slows down the page load/breaks up the article, but it will result in 0.01% more views/might piss off my sponsors/industry".
Not so naive as to say that isn't always an issue, but its pretty clear to me what side of the line advertising is on...
I'm all right with the paywall idea succeeding or failing in a well informed marketplace of ideas.
The ability to send interesting articles to non-subscribers with a special link is pretty nice but I understand that it probably wouldn't work as a model for large websites.
I agree. Most news sites just regurgitate the same articles with their own click bait title which takes you to some adware bloated page. I think there's plenty of money in online ads but the market is too saturated.
The criticism is that someone who doesn't have a large viewer base isn't in a position to get sponsors, so this approach is literally not viable until you're big enough that sponsors would even think about it.
Most people aren't that big.
Until recently OP monetized his blog with ads. Should he have given up before his blog was popular enough to switch to sponsors?
If my limited edition, 250-prints-per-month 'zine isn't making money, is that the advertising industry's fault, or is there an issue with my expectations?
People ask the "how do we fix dwindling ad-based revenue" question all the time. The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service).
The inevitable response to that is, 'but I don't make enough money off of that.'
Well, there you go! To me, that's where it should end. You don't have enough of a readership to support your website as-is. That means you can continue doing it as a labor of love, scale it down to something you can manage and that is profitable, or just, well, accept that your site isn't as great as you thought it was, and that you won't be making as much money off of it as you thought.
Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere.