Conversation

I think I’ve been unconsciously negatively prioritizing traffic growth on ribbonfarm. The marginal cost of traffic (overages on my hosting plan) is not worth the marginal value of new readers. It’s a kind of stock buyback. Growth without a good idea driving it is a net liability.
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Growth for the sake of growth is the editorial ideology of a cancer blog. I wouldn’t mind growth, but only if it is also a genuine evolution in what we do on the blog. If we run out of new ideas, developing deeper conversations with old readers beats courting new ones.
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In a way, an idea space has a “capacity” of the number of minds that can usefully connect within it in a live conversation. Something analogous to Dunbar’s number but higher. Like 150,000 instead of 150. But it’s not infinite. At some point more minds don’t add more new thoughts.
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Right now we’re hovering around the half-a-million visitors per year mark (whatever the hell that means; I never really understood web analytics). If the next scaling step is say 1 million, it needs a different *kind* of meta idea-space that can hold that many minds.
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Operationally the blog just about breaks even. Hosting+paying non-editor writers = affiliate income. Editors aren’t paid. We average about $145/mo in hosting ($95/mo if paid annually plus $50 average overage). The next traffic tier works out to about $240/mo with no overages...
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So one interesting way to calibrate the growth challenge is: it’s only not a vanity project OR a grifting operation if the *idea* driving 1m uniques/year *naturally* adds the additional revenue without overt “monetization” tactics
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I mean it’s obvious how to grow revenue in a mercenary way. Forced product placement of affiliate links, reviewing high-value things like TVs, “premium” [mediocte] subscription content, saying yes to the dozen sploggy people who email me every week wanting to place shady ads...