Writers are the easiest. They'll work for free for exposure (I don't pay people on my editorial board) or for a nominal price (I pay regular contributors $100/post). Good artists always require pay. Anybody else requires non-artist compensation based on market rates.
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It's not the $ equation. That can be solved. The operating budget for ribbonfarm, if I wanted to break even, would be about $3000/year (primary direct income attributed to affiliate sales, the only monetization I run, not counting ebook sales). That's about 1.5-2k after hosting.
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Subtract miscellany like Mailchimp ($90 a month right now), domain registration etc. and basically I'd have maybe enough in budget for 4-5 guest posts at most. Anything more needs capitalization and growth ambitions.
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There's occasional "random acts of revenue-generation" like the recorded longform blogging course we released last year, which added $4k or so to the warchest, but it's not a systematic renewable revenue source.
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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/ …
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