I know: compared
to successful “real” writers, with their Oprah appearances
and multi-city book tours, this isn’t much. But importantly,
it’s not nothing either — the sum would certainly erase
one’s outlay on a domain name and underwrite a year or two of
hosting. Nothing to sneeze at.
share and share alike
So this is what you can expect. There is, of course, some degree of
Heisenbergian uncertainty regarding these findings: I posed these
questions in communities and venues where I was already known, and
had a reputation. It’s impossible to tease out which of the
negative responses (or the positive ones, for that matter) were directed
at that persona, rather than the request itself. But the results were
encouraging.
The experience taught me that resistance to an exchange of money for
independent content online runs deep, but that after due consideration,
some tiny percentage of the audience will indeed express their appreciation
with a commitment of cash money.
This may be because there is another model, just as unassailable as
“wants to be free” in its hacker authenticity, with its
roots every bit as deep into the loamy prehistory of Internet culture.
There always was a distinction — if one often enough muddied
— between those developers who offered up their efforts for
the pure pleasure and challenge of doing so (“freeware”),
and those who released their works into the wild with an implicit
expectation of some nominal compensation. We knew it as “shareware”:
you downloaded the program, and if you got something out of it, you
sent along a check or money order in the amount that most closely
approximated the value you yourself perceived in the offering.
This is the model I finally felt most comfortable with. I opted for
a shareware-esque compromise: a small Paypal button buried two levels
deep, where a user’d only confront it if they had followed a
label explicitly referring to “support,” thus setting
them up for the potentially distasteful encounter. Nobody’s
going to stumble across it in the course of completing any other action
they may wish to pursue on v-2, but if one is sincerely motivated
to support the site, it’s there to be found. (This is, of course,
just where one wouldn’t want to put it if one was genuinely
interested in maximizing revenue, in which case you might slap it
across the top and bottom of each page, but it just felt better to
me that way. I’m just as acculturated to regard these requests
as tacky as anyone else.)
Just like shareware, then, users then get to choose what level of
value they attach to the product or service. They’ve been made
aware that you aren’t just doing this out of the goodness of
your own heart, but any payment is purely up to them; they can freely
disregard the request if it strikes them as burdensome or offensive.
Until there’s a better way, that’s what I’m going
to continue doing on my own site. What’s more, given the tolerable
negatives and clear benefits of having a few bucks in the bank that
were not there before, I can recommend something along these lines
to other independent content providers with the nerve to suggest that
their product might actually have some worth. Because information
may indeed want to be free, but (as many a wit has pointed out) writers
generally want to get paid.
Adam Greenfield is lead information architect at Frontage-Razorfish in Tokyo, and far more interestingly, the guy
behind v-2 Organisation. He wasn’t paid a dime to write this article.
v-2 Organisation
01 | 02 | 03
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