Blogging is publishing, it is content, and that can be a video, images, text or all of these. Blogging is about niches and allows those that are passionate about their interests to start publishing and sharing online and through promotion drive traffic, eyeballs and then revenue.
Sure, the big blogs he refers to are going to be succesful like The Huffington Post with 37.6 Million hits for the month of March, 2010. Other big sites are
- Mashable – 5.16 Million views (Technology Blog)
- Nymag.com - 3.4 million views (Entertainment Blog)
- BoingBoing.com – 3.1 Million views (Cultural curiosities and interesting technologies Blog)
- Businessinsider.com – 2.8 Million views (Business Blog)
- Inhabitat.com – 656,000 views (Environmental Blog)
I definitely think blogging is the future of publishing. As a writer, I’m seeing print markets shrink and fold all the time now, and some excellent writers are skipping that whole route and going straight into blogging. And why not? No editor to cramp your style, immediate publication, direct interaction with readers, and the ability to create your own products. I don’t see this going away anytime soon.
and then this from Crosbie Fitch
Yup, blogging is the future. It’s journalists publishing their intellectual work directly to their readers – missing out the publisher, no longer needing to charge the reader for printing, distribution, retail.
But my question is in all this freeing up how does the writer get paid? How are they going to monetise their blogs to get a reasonable income?
Well, I did provide that answer in the rest of my comment you quoted from. ;-)
ReplyDeleteIf the writer has traditionally seen only a tiny fraction of a share of the total copy reproduction/distribution/retail revenue for their intellectual work, then if you only have intellectual work to be paid for with all other costs reduced a thousand fold, you can look to your more interested readers to pay you.
BUT, not for copies - for your work.
If copies are free, then your work is all that's left that needs paying for. Once you've been paid for your work you have no care who makes (or even sells) copies.
YESTERDAY: publishers commission you to write, and then sell copies of that work you have done.
TODAY: headless chicken
TOMORROW: your more interested readers commission you to write, and then you publish free copies of that work you have done.
You get your commission as usual, but the public usurps the publisher.
Hi Crosbie,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post and the explanation, much appreciated.
I love your description of today, most apt.
I take your point about the percentages the writer got, and so to get ahead, the income doesn't have to include all the publishing overheads. So how to get your interested readers to commission you to write if you then give away what you have written? Why would someone pay you to write if everyone else gets it for free.
Mike, you aren't giving away what you've written. YOU'VE SOLD IT.
ReplyDeleteInstead of selling it to a publisher for $1,000 you sell it to your interested readers for $1,000.
Once you've been paid, you then deliver it to your new 'publisher', i.e. The Public. They then kindly (at no cost to you) perform the extortionately expensive work that publishers used to do, i.e. making copies for you, distributing them, retailing them (covering those costs), etc.
Remember:
1) Your writing is expensive. It's your intellectual work, and you'd like paying for it.
2) Copies are so cheap to make these days that people make them for nothing and give them away.
So, unlike publishers still trying to charge people for copies that cost nothing to make, and still trying to pay authors as little as possible, the writers of tomorrow ignore the stupid publisher and sell their work directly to those who want them to write it, i.e. their most interested readers.
And remember, you don't charge your readers for copies. Copies are free. Your readers can make their own. You're not in the business of making and selling copies. No, you're in the business of writing and selling it to keen readers (instead of traditional publishers).
Do you have a mechanism whereby your keener readers can commission you to write more articles? You'd only need a hundred keen readers willing to pledge $10 each for an article and you'd end up with that $1,000 a publisher might have paid you for it.
Of course, this isn't a magic wand. If you don't have keen readers interested in paying you to write some more, then you'll have no-one paying you to write. But, the better you are, the more interested readers you will attract, and the more of them will be impatient to whet their insatiable appetite for yet more great writing.
Hi Crosbie,
ReplyDeleteThanks for continuing this dialog. I agree with nearly all of what you have written, but can you explain one thing? In your example, you have 100 readers prepared to pay $10 each for you to write something. So each of them gets the article for $10. But then you put it up on the internet and everyone else gets it for free. So what is the incentive for the first 100 people to pay for an article that everyone else gets for free? Or do you not make it available to everyone else without them paying a fee for the content too?
The $10 (or whatever price is arrived at) is a share of the price you'll accept as a commission (or incentive) to produce another article. You might produce one for nothing (as a promotional loss leader), but you propose a bargain with your readers that you'll write an article for $1,000 (or whatever will inspire you to put pen to paper). Then, when a hundred or so readers consider the bargain reasonable and demonstrate they're good for $10 each, you produce and deliver the article to them (NB copyleft). I'd recommend you also publish it on your blog, and as many places as will take it (you want your good writing to spread far and wide to attract more readers who'll commission you even more to write more).
ReplyDeleteRemember, if people didn't pay you $1,000 you might take far longer (if ever) to write another article. That commission is provided by your most interested readers who can't wait a year (or more) for you to write for nothing.
You won't get paid by people who don't want to pay you, so try not to get too distracted by the copyright inculcated mentality that no-one should receive a copy of your writing who hasn't paid for the copy (or shared in the commission of your work). That's 'old thinking', based on the idea that copies are valuable. Once you've been paid for your work, your objective is to get everyone on the planet to read it (you'd pay them to if you could afford it).
And by the way, you produce writing for your readers (or art for your audience). 'content' is a derogatory term that publishers use to describe the stuff they purchase in order to fill their containers with (their pamphlets, books, newspapers, CDs, etc.).
But how do the people you paid to commission you to write the article feel when other people get the benefit from it for free? Or alternatively paint a picture. Or is what you are suggesting more like a benefactor who commissions an artist to paint a picture. The artist is paid for painting the picture but then other people enjoy the picture when they visit the art gallery.
ReplyDeleteMike, you may as well ask how on earth Jukeboxes make any money when people other than the person who puts a coin in get the benefit of the music for free. This is only a conceptual stumbling block for those indoctrinated by copyright to believe that people should be prevented from obtaining value if they didn't pay for it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, 'paying for value obtained/extracted' is an aspiration of the unscrupulous. Economically, you pay for the labour of production, and then any value obtained/extracted thereafter is free. You pay for someone to make a basket for you, but you don't pay them each time you or anyone else finds it useful. The same thing applies to music. You pay someone to write a song, but each time you or anyone else on the planet enjoys that song (obtains value) there's no charge.
This is how it used to be before copyright, and now that the Internet has demonstrated how unnatural copyright is (and always has been), this is how it will be after copyright.
The free software movement has already migrated to this way of working. There is a free market in software and copies. Software cost money to produce, so coders are paid. However, copies cost nothing to make, and are free. People do still have problems getting to grips with the fact that the software that has already been produced is effectively free of charge, but software that hasn't been produced costs money (to those who want it produced - sooner rather than later).
So, yes, you may pay an artist to paint your portrait, and you get your portrait painted. But, what does the artist care if other people can look at it without paying? Or for that matter take photos and sell copies? Of course (you being in the position of a commissioning publisher), you may be very interested in a reproduction monopoly that would enable you to sell copies despite them costing nothing to make. And so copyright is revealed as a monopoly for the benefit of the publisher - not the artist. At this point many people say "Well, ok, we should keep copyright because it sounds lucrative". The trouble is copyright is no longer effective. We all have printing presses and we can't all sue each other for infringing our monopolies. The issue is not whether we keep copyright or not, but how artists make money without it. Publishers can't make money without it, sure, but that's not who we're concerned about. We're concerned about how the artist, the intellectual worker sells their work if there are no publishers to buy it from them. They sell it to their interested audience instead. And, remember, they sell their WORK. They don't sell copies. Copies cost nothing to make so you can't sell them (without a monopoly - which you don't have any more).
So, without copyright, you are commissioned by the interested members of your audience (aka fans).
The remaining problem is, there are very few mechanisms around today that enable fans to pay artists to work. http://Kickstarter.com is one of the few. I'm also working in this area (http://1p2U.com). Others have tried developing them for software (http://micropledge.com). There are various names for this, e.g. crowdfunding, micropatronage, subcription, etc. And the reason there are so few mechanisms is that all the money is focussed on saving the wealthy publishers (not enabling someone else to pay artists).
Crosbie,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me. It has certainly given me something to think about.
It's been a pleasure.
ReplyDeleteSometimes a paradigm shift feels like jumping off a cliff, but it's not that bad really. The Sun still appears to orbit the Earth, you're just join the ranks of the heretics cursed with the knowledge that it doesn't...