There is a class of content that is not interesting enough and requires too much work to be maintained by hobbyists. Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics.

Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.

Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.

> Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics.

> Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do.

ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations.

But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.

> I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.

You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted.

> Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.

That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.

I have put a lot of effort into getting donations, but they just don’t come. It’s a dead end. Even if I annoyed my readers in the manner or Wikipedia, I still would not make rent, but I would make my website significantly worse.

In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience. You bring up Propublica and Mother Jones as if these rare successes mattered to people with humble readerships. It goes to show that you don’t have a tenuous grasp a reality I’m familiar with. You express desires, I express facts.

In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.

> I have put a lot of effort into getting donations, but they just don’t come.

What have you done, exactly?

If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into soliciting donations, it's quite predictable that that wouldn't work.

If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into finding out the needs of your audience and producing content that meets those needs, it would be very surprising to me that this didn't get any response.

It's certainly important to make it easy for people to donate, but it's arguably more important to produce something people want to donate for. And, I don't want to underplay the fact that producing quality content is hard. But it's not impossible.

> In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience.

Not the case--don't make assumptions about people you don't know. Perhaps you should read some of my comments where I gave numbers on what kinds of subscription numbers I was able to get when I was running a substack.

> In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.

1. I donate a significant amount to content producers, and pay for a few different subscriptions, as well as being willing to pay to purchase content. My point all along has been that people are willing to pay for and donate to the production of quality content. Maybe if you cared more about what content consumers thought, you'd get more of them to donate.

2. I don't think you can reasonably disagree that quality content is content that serves the content consumer. You want to produce quality content, right? If content consumers tell you what they want, it behooves you to listen.

3. If you're a sociopathic content producer, sure, you have no reason to care about people except as potential sources of income. But as a content consumer, and more importantly, as a decent human being, you probably do care about other people as more than just sources of income. You've said you could make more money on ads if you didn't have integrity, so you clearly have other motivations besides money. You probably aren't a sociopath. So if you set aside your emotions about this disagreement I think you probably do care about people even if they don't directly contribute to your bottom line.

I think donations would work, if there was not all the spam content to sift through. Imagine if all that spam was not financed or pushed by ads and marketting, how many more users would feel the need to find good content, rather than sheeply accepting whatever is pushed into their faces. If there simply was not so much of artificially pushed meaningless or generic content, then their need would move to other content. If that need was not fulfilled, then the demand would outweigh the offer and more than enough money would be available for donations.

Perhaps an example, not sure if that one works well: I have my personal music collection. I choose music to listen to based on mood. I do not own a spotify account and I do not want to own one. I go out to my music collection and choose music for myself or I go online and search for more music of some genre or fitting my mood. I actively seek that out. On spotify people let stations play some music, based on algorithms. The content is pushed into their faces (ears). If there was not so much of music "to fill the gaps", then more people would go on an active search, instead of relying on it being pushed to them. They would maybe discover some music from some composer and seek out their website, shop, bandcamp, whatever, and buy their music there. I have done so at least and found great music this way. Basically cutting out the content pusher middleman, that has nothing to do with the actual creation of content, but merely acts as a publisher. More people being actively seeking content themselves, less people relying on publishers.

I guess it is a continuous fight of donation financed content creators against the generic artificially marketted stuff, that is financed in different ways. We can however see, that there are content creators out there, who do make due on donation basis. Personally, I hope that we will see more of that and less affiliate marketting pushed stuff.

People have repeatedly shown that they are not willing to pay for the content they consume. They might pay 10€ a month for Spotify or Netflix, but small independent creators are lucky to get an occasional donation.

Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.

They similarly finance many people whose content saved me time, money and stress.

They also finance lazy people, some of which steal my content. However killing their income stream kills mine, and it still leaves you with far more prevalent first-party blogspam.

In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.

> In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.

Agreed!

Unsurprisingly, search engines funded by advertisers surface content which is effective at serving ads, rather than quality content. Do you see how this might be a problem?

> Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.

My guy, what do you think "selling out" means?