RSS
Twitter
Email
Has Kottke singlehandedly destroyed an entire blogging business model?
Last year, Jason Kottke decided he would quit his job and concentrate on writing his blog full time. A brave move. Especially as he was aiming to cover his next 12 months’ salary with just one drive for donations from his readers - NOT from advertising on his blog.
I don’t think he did too badly. In fact, he made almost $40k. After all, this kind of thing had virtually never been tried before.
Now, 12 months later, he says he’s not going to ask his readers to fund him for another year. Why?
“I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.”
He knows damn well that people won’t pay a second time. And they’d be well within their rights not to.
See, what Kottke didn’t do with that $40k was give his readers what they’d just paid for. Or rather, what they believed they’d just paid for. In his own words…
What might change on the site will be driven mainly by two conditions:
1. kottke.org is now my main professional priority. At long last, focus!
2. I will have available to me, for the first time in years, large uninterrupted chunks of time with which to produce creative works.
The goal is to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much) better site. More time means there will be more content of a greater variety. Some days, that may mean more posts and more links. I’ll be able to go to more (hopefully interesting) events in NYC (& elsewhere) and write about them. I’ll have time do the occasional bit of real journalism, collaborate on neat projects like Dropcash, and do larger projects that require longer time scales to finish…dare I hint at a return to more 0sil8-like projects? (I dare.) And there are opportunities that I’m sure will present themselves as I settle into the luxuriant folds of full-timeness.
Did we see any of that? I didn’t see much. I didn’t notice a higher posting frequency. I didn’t notice better quality writing (although, to be fair, quality was never an issue). And I didn’t notice more variety. What I saw was exactly the same as I’d been seeing throughout the 2 or 3 years prior to this. Oh, with a couple of overseas vacations thrown in. To tell you the truth, I even stopped subscribing to Kottke.org a few months in to the whole micropatron experiment.
The way I see it is that Kottke had an opportunity to do something special, something unique, something different, and something big. Something that would have justified the $40k his readers had just handed him. If nothing else, it was another opportunity to show the world that self-publishing can be a worthwhile option to support yourself financially through reader donations.
The reality is that he made $40k. The first time he asked. If he’d put the effort in like we all expected, he could have made $80k this year. Maybe more. But the effort and the commitment just weren’t there. And that’s the saddest part.
If I’d donated 12 months ago, I’d be pretty pissed right now. I’d honestly feel like I’d wasted that cash. Because if a bunch of people stuck me $40k, I’d damn well make sure they got their money’s worth.
So as far as I’m concerned, he blew it. But what makes it much, much worse is that he’s blown it for the rest of us, too.
You see, Kottke has become an icon for blogging. Whether he likes it or not, he’s in a position of responsibility. He has an influence. People listen to him. So now, why would the readers of any other blog support a similar micropatron scheme when it’s already failed in such a high-profile situation? Realistically, it’s just not going to happen.
And there goes another potential source of blogging income - and another potential career option for bloggers - right down the tubes. Even if it does come with a salary of just $40k a year.
Nice work.
Contributor profile: http://wurk.net/profile/admin
Website: http://barrybell.com
Find more posts across the network tagged with:
February 24, 2006 @ 11:58 pm...
Interesting take on this. I would agree that if more value wasn’t given than before, it sure would change the business model for anyone else who wished to try this. Good insights.
February 25, 2006 @ 10:25 am...
I seem to remember Jason remarking after his last fund raising weeks that he didnt’ think it’d work as well the second time for a couple of reasons.
1. it wouldn’t have the novelty value that the first time had
2. quite a few of his donators donated significant amounts and said that they wouldn’t donate a second year
February 25, 2006 @ 11:37 am...
I don’t think novelty value comes into it. I can’t imagine anyone forking out cash on the strength of that. I wouldn’t.
And out of those significant donations, who’s to say that if Jason hadn’t done something really amazing with his 12 months of full-time blogging, that they wouldn’t have changed their minds and paid again.
The real reason why it didn’t work is as he said in that first quote up there: “I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.”
I don’t think he tried hard enough to justify the money he was paid, and that’s what his ‘patrons’ would have based their decision on.
February 25, 2006 @ 11:45 am...
the other thing I get the sense of with Jason is that he’s bored and wants to do something else for a living. I guess blogging for a a job doesn’t fit with everyone’s personality
February 25, 2006 @ 12:19 pm...
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I saw it too. ‘Cept I know quite a few people who’d get over that boredom pretty quickly if they were handed $40k to blog full time (on just ONE blog, with NO advertisers to manage).
Easy life! ;o))
February 26, 2006 @ 4:33 pm...
I didn’t fall for his little ploy at all. His site was never all that interesting. Sure he had a couple of articles that caught my interest enough to get me to start reading his site, but after the “I’m making this blog my full time job, so give me money” post. I looked at what he had offered before the post. Nothing worth giving any money to.
His site didn’t concentrate on a specific topic like Engadget, or Daily Kos. It was just pretty much ramblings like my own site was. Nothing at all worth funding.
The fact that he took overseas vacations during this time is interesting. Nice to see someone taking an expensive vacation on someone else’s dime. Heh. Pretty ballsy really. :)
February 26, 2006 @ 8:15 pm...
Hmmm, I don’t think it was a failure at all. If anything, it proved what we already know: that paid content has been in a steady decline over the last ten years and it will continue to decline as advertising-supported content continues to thrive. I made almost as much on Mike Industries in 2005 as Jason did on Kottke.org… and I post less than once a week, didn’t ask for a single contribution, and didn’t even display a single ad. There are better ways to monetize content than micropatronage.
Jason is not in the “blogging business” to make a quick buck and shouldn’t be chided for trying out micropatronage. It was an interesting experiment in my opinion, and I’m glad that someone with as popular of a site as Jason has was the one to do it.
February 26, 2006 @ 8:43 pm...
>>What is also not mentioned (and I don’t read Kottke or have donated) is his perception.
His perception of what? His perception of what the funding would be used for? That’s “to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much) better site.” His perception of what actually happened? That’s “I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.”
The key words there are “those things just aren’t interesting to me”. So why ask for donations in the first place if you’re not interested in doing anything worthwhile with them?
Happy micropatrons or not - it’s a pretty subjective thing to measure. And if I’d been a micropatron who’d spent $100, I wouldn’t be particularly happy with where my dollars had gone.
And MikeD >>”I made almost as much on Mike Industries in 2005 as Jason did on Kottke.org… and I post less than once a week, didn’t ask for a single contribution, and didn’t even display a single ad.” You want to enlighten us? ;o)
I’m not chiding him for trying micropatronage. It’s great that he has the readership to be able to generate a reasonable revenue from it - and especially from a blog that has NO genuine niche focus on anything. Not many people are in a position to do that.
However, there was virtually no difference in his blog after he became a full time blogger. I just expected him to do something with a little more substance in return for the micropatronage, that’s all. Or, to put it another way, I wouldn’t want to pay $100 for something I’d had for free for 2 or 3 years.
And I doubt that I’m the only one to think that.
February 26, 2006 @ 8:53 pm...
… and that is one of the major problems with micropatronage in the first place. As soon as people lay out actual cash, the perception is that the blog is somehow “theirs”, even in a very small way. Most bloggers (Kottke included, I’m sure) don’t like this. They’d rather run their blogs as they see fit with nobody in particular to answer to. The absence of explicit payments from readers makes this all the more likely.
As for Mike Industries, ahh, that’s the beauty of it though, isn’t it? A way to monetize traffic in a way so unobtrusive that the monetization stays completely out of your way. It’s all right there, if you look hard enough. :)
February 26, 2006 @ 9:08 pm...
Nope. It’s still his blog as far as I’m concerned. Only he’s the one who promised “more focus” and a “(much) better site” in retuen for miropatronage. In my opinion, that didn’t happen. But again, it’s all subjective. It would be interesting to find out what the people who paid actually think about the whole thing.
But maybe the problem is that Kottke’s blog is a personal blog. I think that there’s probably a lot more scope for micropatronage with an industry or trade focused blog.
>>”It’s all right there, if you look hard enough..>” Don’t tell me - you make $40k from Dreamhost affiliate links? ;o)
And damn you. You’ve gone and broken my layout with that blockquote you snuck in there. I’ll have to bloody well fix that now.
;o))
March 6, 2006 @ 3:29 am...
Barry,
I don’t think he really ruined it for everyone, he just showed that even a popular blogger can’t sit around asking people for money and hope that the kindness of their souls gives him enough to make it worth his while. Look at daringfireball, he charged money, and got enough to sustain himself (he did give people tshirts though).
I think his site picked up for a couple months after the initial patron drive, but declined contentwise over the year thereafter.
March 6, 2006 @ 9:03 am...
Hi Brian - I think that because it was such a high profile blog to try that kind of model out on - and fail - people will be a little more wary of donating to other sites.
The key thing to take from this is that if you’re gonna ask for cash upfront in return for creating “a (much) better site”, you really need to work on delivering what you say you will.
Otherwise, it’s definitely not going to work a second time.
March 6, 2006 @ 4:02 pm...
Barry,
I honestly was surprised it worked the first time. I gave $30 or so, mainly because I’d been reading the site for years, and figured it was less than ten cents per day. If he had tried to get people to donate this year, then I would’ve been surprised, and probably not have given him anything.
I think that by asking people to be patrons, you are trying to take a model from the middle ages and apply it to today’s economics, and that doesn’t really work out in an age where people expect something for their money. If he’d just slapped one ad at the top right of his page, and had a company pay for it, I’m sure he would’ve made as much or more, and no one would’ve been left w/a sour taste in their mouth.
March 7, 2006 @ 3:46 am...
He and his patrons had a deal - donate so that you can see an even better site. By getting paid it should have freed his time to focus on exactly what he promised to do - he squandered a unique opportunity and he let his patrons down.