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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I get why clickbait is popular and drives large, shitty media properties. At least for a while. Dumb demand is a constant. But I have to wonder about the supply side. How does someone who presumably enjoys writing choose to produce dreck rather than do almost anything else?
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
There *are* aspects of growth that attract me. Reading about Murdoch empire had me salivating at the thought of that much authoritah to boss the world around. Money per se is not that interesting, though it's nice to have a lot rather than a little.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1113491232452272128 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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