Making money on content

Seems like publishing-bits-for-money is pick­ing up. The debate on how to make money on blog­ging, whether blogs are good because of the inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism or bad because of the thou­sands of ama­teurs run­ning loose on our beloved inter­net has been there for as long as blogs have had just a bit of momen­tum. What’s inter­est­ing though, is that while not that many blog­gers are mak­ing money from any­thing apart from the odd Google ads, another approach is start­ing to emerge.

The last cou­ple of months I’ve noticed how some sites, mostly indus­try pro­fes­sion­als within the web devel­op­ment / dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­mu­nity have started to offer arti­cles as down­loads, either as ‘a sin­gle down­load for a fixed price’ or as part of a sub­scrip­tion plan.

Take con­trol of your Air­Port net­work offers insight on just that for a mere $5, Cre­ative mag­a­zine Design-In-Flight has over 40 pages of reviews, arti­cles and com­men­tary for $3 or four issues for $10. Sine­l­ogic Press had a week of free down­load of their Bud­get Design arti­cle before it landed af $9. There are plenty more out there and this model has been around for years. How­ever, it looks like it’s catch­ing on.

They all deliver in PDF, some as a down­load, some as emails. So it looks as if sub­scrib­ing to a whole weblog isn’t the most obvi­ous model after­all. But, Dar­ing Fire­ball is try­ing just that.

What’s most appeal­ing to adver­tis­ers is quan­tity. More read­ers, more hits. More traf­fic. More page views.

What most appeal­ing to you, the reg­u­lar read­ers of this site, is qual­ity. Atten­tion to detail. Appre­ci­a­tion of nuance. Depth.

An adver­tis­ing rev­enue model leads to try­ing to appeal a lit­tle bit to very many people.

He’s a good writer but doesn’t do 20-page arti­cles appro­pri­ate for down­load. But if you want his insight, you might wanna con­sider pay­ing a few bucks. Sounds fair, right?

What­ever the rev­enue model, I’m glad that peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that with weblogs and other forms of web based writ­ing, even though much have changed, the good writ­ers offer­ing rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing mate­r­ial will always come out on top. And just as every­where else, they can’t do it for free.

Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of peo­ple writ­ing for free, either in their own time or as an inte­grated part of their work. Peo­ple with love to the medium and a non-profit approach will always exist and as long as they feel they learn some­thing, can get their fund­ing from some­where else or just feel like mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, good, free stuff will be out there. This is in many ways what has dri­ven the weblog phe­nom­e­non. But imag­ine how much extra work can be put into writ­ing and invent­ing if just a few thou­sand peo­ple pay a buck or two each… If you find an inter­est­ing share­ware appli­ca­tion? Try it out — it’s not expen­sive. If some­one offers good stuff for $3 per down­load? Don’t even think twice — pay up and see if you like it…