schemes designed to charge for
non-pornographic content, leaves writers (and other sorts of artists who want to
share their efforts on the Web) back between a rock and a hard place.
For better or worse, we still live in an economic world, and the things
we cherish frequently come with pricetags attached. (A cynic will
say there’s always a pricetag somewhere, but I am not one
of those.) There are any number of ways to negotiate this imposition,
from the uneasy and distanced stance perfected by early Dischord
records (“We sell this record for $5”) to an embrace of
sponsorship so ecstatic that the practitioner winds up resembling
a Formula 1 driver, all slathered with a spoor of corporate decals.
the scylla of half-measures, the charybdis of greed
Well. Either way. No matter what your feelings are regarding this
fact, if you’re writing for the Web, there will sooner or later
come a time of reckoning. Very, very few people are capable of cranking
out insightful, articulate, even moderately well-researched prose
without some return on the investment in time and effort. Sooner or
later, many of us are going to have to pass the hat. The trouble is,
because of everything outlined above, there’s nothing anything
close to consensus regarding appropriate ways for independent content
providers to do so.
We’ve seen a wide variation in approaches. On the one hand,
timid, all-but-imperceptible affiliate links for the books, films
or musical releases that get mentioned in the course of writing —
which, should a reader click through and happen to buy something at
(say) Amazon, will eventually funnel a few pennies in commission back
to the site owner’s pockets. At the other pole is the ugly story
of Karyn,
a privileged young woman who ran up some $20,000 in credit-card debt
treating herself to designer shoes and spendy cappuccinos, and erased
it in a matter of months merely by throwing up a Web site relating
her “plight” and asking for a handout.
How to determine the most suitable method, should you choose (or need)
to add some request for compensation to your site? In usability, it’s
often enough pointed out that abstractions in user testing are useless:
you have to test your design against a population that resembles your
intended target audience in order to accurately gauge its appropriateness.
And all the reported figures I could find regarding feelings about
micropayments were just that: abstractions, vague summaries verging
on the completely anecdotal.
putting on the lab coat
So I thought I would try a little experiment. I thought I’d
ask people who did bear a strong resemblance to (and in some cases
were identical with) v-2’s audience: members of Web discussion
sites devoted to design, architecture, usability, and cultural theory.
I pointed out that I would never institute subscriptions or any other
form of financial gating mechanism on the site, but that after all,
I did spend a nontrivial amount of time and energy writing articles
I thought would be useful and enjoyable for designers, architects
and others.
What I wanted to find out was whether a plainly-stated request, made
without embellishment but with an explicit premise of some value
for money, would generate
- money;
- resentment on the grounds of betrayal of principles (i.e. “information wants to be free”);
- resentment on the grounds of tastelessness (“it’s tacky”);
- commentary on the nature or perceived motives of the requestor, rather than the request itself (“you’re tacky”).
Let me tell you, I got all of that. In the first week after the request
was posted on the boards and at v-2 itself, I heard volumes about
my mendacity, my dishonesty, and my hypocrisy. (The phrase “information
wants to be free,” or some variation thereof, was brandished
in protest some sixteen times.)
I also received just about $400 in direct contributions, on total
site traffic that has recently averaged 5,000 unique visitors weekly.
Just under one-half of one percent of the audience made some form
of payment in response to the request, although this “statistic”
is complicated by the fact that I also pointed to the request on discussion
boards with far larger audiences.
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