o you wake up one day with some big new insight that people should know
about some terrible event in the news. And you should get paid for your time.
But how much? Let's do a calculation. (I'll resist the temptation to add
‘Shall we?’)
A typical book may contain about 267,000 words and sell for $15.73. That's 0.00589 cents a word. For that we get a physical copy that lasts forever. At that price, a website with six 500-word articles (which is the most you can typically read without getting guilt-tripped) should charge 17.7 cents. They want $25. That's 0.83 cents a word: 141 times more. The question is: is your content really 141 times better?
Here's the awful truth: if your content goes behind a paywall, you give up your chance to influence the dialogue. Which, for most of us, was the reason we started a website. Once people have to pay, the only ones who see your your eloquent prose and deep insights are the ones who already agree with you. Conservative sites will lose the libertarians. Liberal sites will lose the centrists. And people will start thinking all you really care about is clicks.
Preaching to the choir has never been a sustainable business model. The MSM's biggest weakness is that people have to give them money to experience their reality denialism, and so the only ones who do are the true believers and the naive who can't tell the difference.
Finding a way to pay independent websites is essential if you're going to reach those who think pre-emptively accusing their enemies of what they plan to do makes them immune from charges of antisemitism, racism, and hate, and so indulge in it with no pushback.
But you can't win arguments by complaining that they're teaching falsehoods as facts. You have to get into the science, understand it, and explain why some things are true and some things are not. If you do, you'll discover the reason the elites ignore political websites but go after sites like mercola.com that tried to explain the science, but got careless and published a few things wrong.
The other day I came across an article on a popular site saying that the IR absorption maxima of methane and water vapor are the same, and therefore methane cannot contribute to global warming. No evidence was provided, no spectra, no absorption cross-sections, not even a link. To find out whether it's true, I'd have to do some very complex calculations on my own (which I can do, but I suspect many readers can't). If I'd had to pay to read that article, I'd be mighty pissed to discover that all we got was an assertion and the proof was, as math books always say, left as an exercise for the reader.
Many sites don't tell you whether an article is behind a paywall until you start reading it. Readers who have to worry about being slapped in the face automatically hesitate to read anything at all. In effect, you're conditioning them to mistrust you.
I'll happily pay a website (and I have the proof in my bulging spam folder), even one that has no science. I just paid for one five minutes ago. A significant factor in my decision was their promise never to put up a paywall. Do that and you might as well be BBA (Biochimica et Biophysica Acta), a science journal that charges US$20,000 a year—a price that almost begs libraries to cancel them in favor of interlibrary loan.
To quote Tom Chivers at inews.co.uk (which is where one chatbot / plagiarization engine stole it from): It is time to move on from the idea of journals being the keepers of scientific record. How much more so for websites being the keepers of opinion.
Update, Nov 03 2023
An argument I sometimes see is that Google is demonetizing them, so they lose money with each article. I sympathize, but what they're really telling me is that if I gave them money in the past, it went straight to the world's biggest and most inaccurate search engine. This causes me to ask: is it possible the problem isn't Google, but their business plan?
There are many other ways to support one's website. Maybe write a book and give it a glowing book review every week. Sell a print edition. Or do what everybody else does: sell overpriced coffee mugs. But giving money to Google is plain nuts.
I'll donate—if they solemnly promise never to give my money to Google or any other political organization that hates them—but if anyone asked me, I'd say if your business plan is to give money to people who want you dead, don't be surprised when they use it to kill you.
nov 01 2023, 6:04 am. updated nov 03 2023, 5:11 am
