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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Now, it’s not about the $... I could afford to throw another $1200/y at this without making it up in revenue, but that would feel like vanity publishing to me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to at least break even. I’m kinda vain about keeping the blog non-vanity 😎
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But frankly, that seems very dumb to me because I know of better ways to make money if that’s the goal. Even taking on a dull consulting gig is a more interesting way to make money than this kind of shitty media-business thinking
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Maybe I’m just rationalizing laziness. Maybe I’d think differently if I had to make payroll for even one full time staff writer. But I’m not *that* lazy. I think a lot of the problems with new media (are we still calling it that) is pursuing uninteresting growth.
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Replying to
ribbonfarm breaking "just about breaking even" is happy news to me – my instinct is that actively trying to change that will probably break or kill something in a bad way. the point of ribbonfarm imo is that the show must go on. not having to pay someone's bills is A+++ feature
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Replying to
Yeah it’s never not broken even. Occasionally I’ve had to front it short-term cash, but it’s always paid for itself, not counting my labor and that of other unpaid contributors. That gets compensated via second order opportunities, at least for me.