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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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      Incidents like these, together with some thinking led me to a conclusion. If you want to hire people to do the boring parts, you need a proper magazine-style business model that can support people with different risk appetites and compensation expectations.

      4 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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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.

      2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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    10. Greg Borenstein‏ @atduskgreg 3 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @vgr

      You seem well positioned to cater those interested in discovery/exploration as your tribe, slipping between the two horns of the dilemma.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @atduskgreg

      That is an oxymoron. By definition not a tribe.

      2:30 PM - 3 Feb 2019
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        2. Greg Borenstein‏ @atduskgreg 3 Feb 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Ah you’re using Tribe in some semi-technical way here? (Regardless, my suspicion is you could build a sizeable-enough Patreon audience to change some of this math that would simultaneously demand experimentation and discovery from you.)

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
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          Replying to @atduskgreg

          Yes, and I think that's the only way to use it. The use of platforms like Patreon inevitably taps into true tribal dynamics.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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