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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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.
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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.)
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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.
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Replying to @vgr
Would you spell out for me a little more what you’re worried about? How would Patreon support distort your work?
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I've ranted about it in spots before. Too complex to get into. I might do a short bit on it later in my elderblog sutra thread of blogs I'm starting on ribbonfarm
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Replying to @vgr
I read the first of those and will be following the series. It made me miss blogging myself.
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Replying to @atduskgreg @vgr
Highly orthogonally, have you read Norman Klein’s Vatican to Vegas? Something about the undercurrents of that post made me think of it: https://www.amazon.com/Vatican-Vegas-History-Special-Effects/dp/1565848039/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549234001&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=vatican+to+vegas …
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