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Jul. 29th, 2021 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
contrarianarchon I've been listening back to some back issues of the podcast of cortex (Episode 15 I think) while playing Minecraft, mostly for lack of better podcasts to listen to, and it was full of really poorly reasoned considerations about adblocker morality. So now I am going to lay out for the benefit of myself (because you all will try to correct me if I'm wrong) and maybe also other people, the set of obvious ways that exist to fund your website on the internet.
- Advertising: I think the thing that creators/pro-advertiser sorts forget a lot is that advertising is, from the perspective of the creator, a way to make your work worse in exchange for passive income from the number of views. It's also a super-low amount of passive income. From the consumer perspective, this is a mix of "actual genuine knowledge-spreading about stuff that you might want to know exists" and hostile memes designed to cause you to do things you don't want to do, packaged in a way that's often actively unpleasant. So one thing people need to remember is that if you don't have ads on your thing it'll make people like it more, if only in a marginal way, and given exponential word-of-mouth growth of knowledge about cool things, that means the same work, but it never has ads vs. it does have ads, might have different numbers of users and different levels of ambient total user goodwill, which are Important Resources.
- Hostile advertising - specifically, ads with tracking, ads which make consuming the media in question unpleasant, bright lights, NSFW content, etc. Only ever happens when the site in question is being served ads by a third party, I feel, because if left unblocked, they would be seriously hampering the experience. I would *like* to say they would surely drive most people away, but some content is good enough or lacks substitute goods (e.g. my main exposure to ads that render the user experience nearly impossible is trying to read lore wikis for fandoms online). Also some people just have weird minds and make decisions I don't understand.
- Boring advertising - I am not convinced this works at all just in terms of "are these memes virulent enough to get people to do things, or does a plain static banner provide enough information to permit people to decide that something is a decision that's worth making in terms of rational 'thank you for bringing your product to my attention' ways. The latter *can* I believe happen but it doesn't happen here.
- Sponsorship - instead it happens here! Sponsors, here defined in terms of the podcast/YouTube sort, where you get your creator to eat a chunk of your attention to explain to you exactly why a good, often a fairly obscure one is something which you will actually benefit from enough to spend money. I don't think I've ever bought something due to a podcast sponsor but I've *thought* about it, unlike any of the prior cases. Sponsorship which is actively deceptive (e.g. claims to be real content) is maybe more effective but also unethical and it spends out of your actual reputation/goodwill to an exponentially larger extent. there's a clear trade-off between "the best sponsorships are the people making informed recommendations" and "lying about the fact that you're making an informed recommendation in various ways makes you look bad and/or stupid (i.e. reading an obligatory script that contradicts other facts about your life, being thought a liar, being thought *a bad source of opinions*, which is bad even if you're not actively deceptive given what 90% of internet content is). Since this is I'm pretty sure the only kind of advertising which turns viewers into product consumers it seems like it should be the best sort (but it's relatively hard to do, harder to do well, and it's not actually the most pleasant form of ad to consume. To be fair ads become pleasant to consume in direct proportion to how little they exist so that tradeoff can't be perfect either).
- Premium Membership - this is the one I like the best! Ask for a regular subscription from your most hardcore fans, using e.g. patreon, discord nitro, similar methods, which permits them to have nice-but-not-needed shiny extras but which mostly leaves the experience unchanged. I think this is the most effective method of converting existing goodwill into money, it gives a relatively predictable and coherent income, it's nice. The main costs I think are that whatever features you're making premium-only *could* be for everyone. This isn't always true (e.g. high patreon tiers that get personal attention from the content creator). It's also untrue in that there's some stuff which only hardcore lovers of your thing care about; my favourite artist, for example, mainly stocks his patreon with "here's a source/interview I used when writing my book" and "here's a demo, either from ten minutes ago or from when I was 15". I don't think the lukewarm fan of that artist *wants* to be exposed to those things; it's not worth their time to consume anything other than the most polished high-value albums. But for me, a hardcore fan, this stuff is gold, and absolutely worth the 2 dollars a month I pay for it. So that's a good tradeoff. Bonus chapters on webnovels are a marvellous brain-trap, since they indulge the desire at the end of reading something to Have More Now, but at the cost of needing to subscribe forever (since unsubscribing means a period of time with no posts). There's also one (absurdly prolific) writer I know who boasts the terrifying claim that his patreons get two chapters for every one that everyone else gets, but they are way out on the right field in terms of "ability to produce volume of words" and thus not to be emulated. I'm not even sure it would be a good idea to do that if you could! People who dislike this option complain a lot about free riders, in terms of like (quote from the podcast) "what gives you the right to come on this site and consume content for free" but one patreon-dollar a month covers thousands of people's hypothetical ad revenue. (e.g. at random numbers I've found on the internet, you might be paid 50 cents per click and get 0.05% click through rates per ad. With 2 ads per page and 5 pages viewed per month (e.g. a weekly webnovel), one patreon-dollar is equivalent to, what, 2000 viewers-of-ads? And those are, honestly, optimistic numbers.
- Spot Payments - these are bad, I think, since they eat both attention (since you need to be regularly prompted to donate) and also money. They're also worse for your finances than any of the other methods, because they're unreliable as hell. You can quit your job when your patreon gives you more than your monthly expenses. I'm not sure you can if you get a month of donations that exceeds your monthly expenses; maybe not even after three months of that.
- Advertising: I think the thing that creators/pro-advertiser sorts forget a lot is that advertising is, from the perspective of the creator, a way to make your work worse in exchange for passive income from the number of views. It's also a super-low amount of passive income. From the consumer perspective, this is a mix of "actual genuine knowledge-spreading about stuff that you might want to know exists" and hostile memes designed to cause you to do things you don't want to do, packaged in a way that's often actively unpleasant. So one thing people need to remember is that if you don't have ads on your thing it'll make people like it more, if only in a marginal way, and given exponential word-of-mouth growth of knowledge about cool things, that means the same work, but it never has ads vs. it does have ads, might have different numbers of users and different levels of ambient total user goodwill, which are Important Resources.
- Hostile advertising - specifically, ads with tracking, ads which make consuming the media in question unpleasant, bright lights, NSFW content, etc. Only ever happens when the site in question is being served ads by a third party, I feel, because if left unblocked, they would be seriously hampering the experience. I would *like* to say they would surely drive most people away, but some content is good enough or lacks substitute goods (e.g. my main exposure to ads that render the user experience nearly impossible is trying to read lore wikis for fandoms online). Also some people just have weird minds and make decisions I don't understand.
- Boring advertising - I am not convinced this works at all just in terms of "are these memes virulent enough to get people to do things, or does a plain static banner provide enough information to permit people to decide that something is a decision that's worth making in terms of rational 'thank you for bringing your product to my attention' ways. The latter *can* I believe happen but it doesn't happen here.
- Sponsorship - instead it happens here! Sponsors, here defined in terms of the podcast/YouTube sort, where you get your creator to eat a chunk of your attention to explain to you exactly why a good, often a fairly obscure one is something which you will actually benefit from enough to spend money. I don't think I've ever bought something due to a podcast sponsor but I've *thought* about it, unlike any of the prior cases. Sponsorship which is actively deceptive (e.g. claims to be real content) is maybe more effective but also unethical and it spends out of your actual reputation/goodwill to an exponentially larger extent. there's a clear trade-off between "the best sponsorships are the people making informed recommendations" and "lying about the fact that you're making an informed recommendation in various ways makes you look bad and/or stupid (i.e. reading an obligatory script that contradicts other facts about your life, being thought a liar, being thought *a bad source of opinions*, which is bad even if you're not actively deceptive given what 90% of internet content is). Since this is I'm pretty sure the only kind of advertising which turns viewers into product consumers it seems like it should be the best sort (but it's relatively hard to do, harder to do well, and it's not actually the most pleasant form of ad to consume. To be fair ads become pleasant to consume in direct proportion to how little they exist so that tradeoff can't be perfect either).
- Premium Membership - this is the one I like the best! Ask for a regular subscription from your most hardcore fans, using e.g. patreon, discord nitro, similar methods, which permits them to have nice-but-not-needed shiny extras but which mostly leaves the experience unchanged. I think this is the most effective method of converting existing goodwill into money, it gives a relatively predictable and coherent income, it's nice. The main costs I think are that whatever features you're making premium-only *could* be for everyone. This isn't always true (e.g. high patreon tiers that get personal attention from the content creator). It's also untrue in that there's some stuff which only hardcore lovers of your thing care about; my favourite artist, for example, mainly stocks his patreon with "here's a source/interview I used when writing my book" and "here's a demo, either from ten minutes ago or from when I was 15". I don't think the lukewarm fan of that artist *wants* to be exposed to those things; it's not worth their time to consume anything other than the most polished high-value albums. But for me, a hardcore fan, this stuff is gold, and absolutely worth the 2 dollars a month I pay for it. So that's a good tradeoff. Bonus chapters on webnovels are a marvellous brain-trap, since they indulge the desire at the end of reading something to Have More Now, but at the cost of needing to subscribe forever (since unsubscribing means a period of time with no posts). There's also one (absurdly prolific) writer I know who boasts the terrifying claim that his patreons get two chapters for every one that everyone else gets, but they are way out on the right field in terms of "ability to produce volume of words" and thus not to be emulated. I'm not even sure it would be a good idea to do that if you could! People who dislike this option complain a lot about free riders, in terms of like (quote from the podcast) "what gives you the right to come on this site and consume content for free" but one patreon-dollar a month covers thousands of people's hypothetical ad revenue. (e.g. at random numbers I've found on the internet, you might be paid 50 cents per click and get 0.05% click through rates per ad. With 2 ads per page and 5 pages viewed per month (e.g. a weekly webnovel), one patreon-dollar is equivalent to, what, 2000 viewers-of-ads? And those are, honestly, optimistic numbers.
- Spot Payments - these are bad, I think, since they eat both attention (since you need to be regularly prompted to donate) and also money. They're also worse for your finances than any of the other methods, because they're unreliable as hell. You can quit your job when your patreon gives you more than your monthly expenses. I'm not sure you can if you get a month of donations that exceeds your monthly expenses; maybe not even after three months of that.
- Donations -. Wikipedia, for example. People hate this less than ads, but also it's done less. Basically requires ads for yourself. Notionally a great idea, but patreon/subscriptions seem to be a better way to get money out of people.
- merch sales - less efficient (costs money to do, requires work to do, requires infrastructure, etc), also costs the consumer more. But results in material goods! Are they worth it? It depends a lot! But it's def not a beginners strategy. People do so love having merch for the things they like though. If you have lots of subscribers at pointlessly high tiers, this might get more cash out of them.
- Paywalling - this works if you can sufficiently provide evidence of being compelling to people such that they will give you thier money for any access at all. I have no idea what this deal looks like to the insufficiently frugal, but I walk away a lot. It breaks my heart when people I love start to charge 10 dollars a month to get access to their stuff but I do not want to pay that much. But if enough people do, who cares? You've got it made if you can convince a thousand people to take that deal. The same is true of patreon, but the cliff is less steep. I think as a low-tier internet writer, putting your stuff behind a paywall is a death-stroke if you're not 100% confident you're going to get enough people who will pay, since it stops you growing your audience. This is how newspapers are trying to work, since that's how they worked when it involved buying a physical object. They do also spend a lot of time claiming they're dying, but I don't particularly think of that as evidence of that being true. I don't think the short-term gain of people in the margin between "will subscribe for perks and prestige and warm fuzzy feelings" and "will subscribe to have content at all" breaks even considering the massive penalty to growth? Esp since you probably have trouble selling the perks on top of that. - merch sales - less efficient (costs money to do, requires work to do, requires infrastructure, etc), also costs the consumer more. But results in material goods! Are they worth it? It depends a lot! But it's def not a beginners strategy. People do so love having merch for the things they like though. If you have lots of subscribers at pointlessly high tiers, this might get more cash out of them.
