This is a decision with consequences. Managerialization is kinda like going from amateur to pro in sports. On the other hand, keeping amateur status, doing it all yourself, or with a coop of others who primarily write, with some automation has non-obvious advantages.
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If I wanted to grow to a stable, non-loss-making site of say 2m visitors/year, I'd probably need an op budget of around $25k to do the managerial staffing up with a mix of direct pay/rev-share incentives. It would also mean more systematic/better compensation for writers/editors.
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This equation does NOT balance in the valley-of-death between top-end of the "amateur" range of operations and the bottom-end of the magazine scale (where you have a whole different host of problems cf. Buzzfeed/Vox/Vice). The way people in the zone force a balance is: Patreon.
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But the bigger problem is, whether you navigate the valley of death with crowd money or VC money, you're beholden to some source of other people's money (OPM) for growth capital. People who are NOT interested in writing as a frontier act of discovery.
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VCs want ROI (hence Buzzfeed etc), which means giving up on a discovery/exploration mission for chasing a slice of a shrinking advertising dollars pie, while crowdfunding capital demands returns in the form of Tribal Capital. It is no accident that Patreon is a set of tribes.
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This leaves the "stay amateur" option. Which means expanding and growing operations ONLY at the rate at which automation increases your leverage, without having to deal with creeping managerialization. A sort of slow-food, never-run-a-deficit bootstrapping mentality.
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This is not about minimizing financial risk. It's about minimizing risk to creative processes. Maintaining the freedom to be in discovery mode, and maybe write/publish stuff that only 4-5 people will get. It means never having a "sales quota" mindset of "3 viral hits a month."
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This is why I can afford to publish stuff for no other reason than that I personally like it and think it explores interesting new thought spaces. Like this piece by
@nolangray_ that is one of my favorite pieces to come out of the blogging coursehttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/02/07/shift-register-code-breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ …Show this thread
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