chipotle | The magic money faeries

First a minor clarification:

Submissions should be emailed to <watts#ranea.org> (change the ”#” to an at-sign, of course). The best format is straight ASCII, bracketing text with _underscores_ to indicate italics and *asterisks* for boldface, and separating paragraphs with blank lines. I can read HTML, RTF and DOC formats, but the marked-up ASCII is actually the format that Textile, the text formatter, I’ll be using expects, so I’ll be putting it in that format if you don’t. (If you know what you’re doing, you can use any of the Textile markup.)

Okay. So. If I’m going to be paying people, what will the expenses be? Well, assume I add one or two new features a month—call it eighteen a year—and manage to get each one illustrated. (Both of these, particularly the illustration one, are likely optimistic!) And, assume an average of a column a month, and for good measure, assume six poems.

Cost Item	Unit $	Units	Total
Fiction/Articles	$20	18	$ 360
Illustrations	20	18	360
Columns	12	10	120
Poems	10	6	60
Monthly Hosting	5	12	60
-----
Total Annual Cost			$ 960

(A note on hosting: I’m likely to go with Textdrive for a variety of reasons. Yes, I’m sure people can find better deals out there, but I’ve watched the responsiveness of the admins at TXD and really believe they’re second to none. And I suspect I won’t have any trouble staying within the modest limits of the $5/month plan for a while. Yes, these are the folks I once mused about getting the $199 lifetime hosting deal with. And, yes, part of me still wishes I’d taken it.)

By some measures, $1K a year is a steal: a single issue of Mythagoras ran about that much, most of it in production costs, and that much content would have been about four issues. Even an issue of Yarf!—which didn’t pay contributors—runs about $500, AFAIK, for an initial printing. Since the “production costs” online are essentially just hosting, more than 90% of the income goes to contributors. That’s cool.

By other measures, it’s a money pit. I’d need to average $80 in monthly revenue for it to break even. That’s less cool.

So how do I want to try and fund this? Through magic money faeries.

Well, okay, not really. But close. Bear with me a moment:

Subscriptions are tempting—at a pretty modest $15 a year, I’d only need 64 to meet that break-even point. But I’ve watched the web grow from its beginning and I honestly think required pay access is, in all but the rarest cases, a doomed proposition. The idea of the paid archive might have potential, but not until there’s an archive big enough for people to want to pay money for.

I’ll also look at the typical “put no effort into it and get money” ~~scams~~ programs like Amazon affiliates and Google advertising, but until you hit several thousand hits a day such things rarely pay enough to be worth the aggravation. I don’t have plans for daily content updates; even weekly content update would be pretty optimistic, unless I want to get goofy and add a “publisher’s blog” somewhere. (Did I say goofy? Don’t rule it out.) Google also files tax reports on your trivial income, which means I’d really need to get my ducks in a row as an “official” non-profit literary magazine before trying such things. I’d really rather not go through that aggravation until I’m confident Claw & Quill is not only airborne but has a good chance of remaining in flight for a while.

So, right, the magic money faeries. What I mean is that I want to try and fund this just with donations and sponsorships, and perhaps with branded merchandise down the road if there ends up being value in said brand—T-shirts, prints, perhaps softcover story collections. The model is sort of half public radio and half Kevin & Kell. It’s possible people will be able to buy “banner boxes” but the idea is still that you’re sponsoring some of the operation.

I’d need less than 50 people to give me $20 a year to pay for the whole thing. Is this unreasonable? Maybe. We’ll see. I saw one online magazine which was offering sponsorships for specific stories: send them enough and you got your name (and perhaps link?) affixed to the story permanently. That strikes me as kind of cool, I don’t know. Maybe there could be $5 for “brought to you this week” lines on the front page, $20 for a month long ad box, $50 for the permanent story sponsorship. A special “angels” page listing our big sponsors, whatever that criteria might be.

(And maybe six months after launch I can run a membership drive. Give me $60, and Carl Kasell will record his voice on your home answering machine! Um, maybe not.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm kind of sick of seeing Amazon links. I have five or six sites I read daily all pleading with me to click through on their links or replace "amazon" in my bookmarks with their referrer link, to "Help keep us running". Kind of hard to do anything meaningful spreading it around like that, and I don't even have them in my bookmarks anyway.

As for hosting, I have some space I can offer you for free. It'd have more resources than the $5 plan you're looking at and it's on a responsive host too. I've had minor things taken care of in the middle of the night Eastern time.

For Amazon-ish links I was more thinking of links from reviews or an "interesting books" sidebar -- essentially, targeted attempts to drive folks to a bookstore that gives me a commission, not please buy random stuff from this link, which strikes me as a relatively lost cause. :)

For hosting, while I'm not ruling out cost it's not the only consideration. I have two or three places I could conceivably host it for free. Part of the interest in TextDrive is simply an interest in supporting the people who create TextPattern (TXD is their actual business). As a current customer of theirs quipped, it's like having Linus on staff at your ISP if you have problems with Linux.

As an aside, most providers heavily oversubscribe bandwidth, simply because they can -- if you actually only have 33% of the guaranteed bandwidth available, that's only a problem if more than a third of your users on the same server hit the incoming pipe at the same time, which is statistically highly unlikely. TXD not only doesn't oversubscribe, they heavily undersubscribe, because ~~they do not understand marketing~~ that seems to just be their philosophy.

1GB is about 10,000-13,000 page views, depending on image weight, caching and phase of the moon. (This is assuming new images loaded with each view, rather than old ones being pulled out of cache; my Barking at the Moon weblog would be able to manage 40,000 under the same limit!) According to TXD's spec page, they only charge for overages in the case a whole server goes over, not a single account; frankly, if I'm successful enough to start worrying about overage charges, I'll be quite happy. :)

I'd use a username/password to access the site. Registered people (15$/year) have total access to current materials, archive materials, the RSS feeds and DOC downloads so they can read on their PDAs. Unregistered folks may see _half_ the current articles and that's all. This will provide enough "taste" for free and be lowcost enough that joining would be painless - 15$ a year is fewer than 3 hamburger meals in the course of a year.

One fun thing to add would be the writer rumble. It's a round robin storytelling where each writer has a character in the story, and everyone is trying to write the others into a corner.

This is one of those damned-either-way propositions, from my observations over the years. :) It's difficult to get people to donate without getting anything tangible in return, despite the seemingly obvious "um, you're getting THE WEBSITE in return" response. (Hence the "With every $30 donation, you get this NPR mug!" approach for public radio.)

Yet, if you require subscriptions, people will think -- not unreasonably -- that there's an awful lot of free content they can get out there, so why pay for yours? If you're The Wall Street Journal you can charge for your content, but on just a slightly smaller scale, bad things tend to happen. Several much higher-profile science fiction magazines, from Omni to TomorrowSF, have tried this approach and gone down in flames.

It's possible that being a "niche" magazine would peculiarly help in this regard, but the flip side is that I'm hoping the webzine will be something that appeals to folks beyond the furry fan base -- so it needs to be available to 'em as much as possible.

However, having some way to download things as PDFs or PDA files for a charge is a thought. (Although it'd require a carefully-written rights contract, I suspect.)

Having the additional systems like RSS feeds and PDA viewable content works. But the magic of charging 15$/year is that you can say "for the price of three hamburger meals, you can have a year of quality literature, discussion, debate and pure horesplay." Also, if you restrict all but a small area of the associated forums (and that being read-only for non-subscribers) then being able to join the magazine and its creators in discussion or brainstorming is an added draw.

And don't forget the idea of the writers brawl :) That would update every other day as the writers vie to trap each other. Reality TV meets the Intraweb!

Sell NON-EVIL advertising on the front page.

NON-EVIL means: banner ads, no flash, just a link to the site.

(I'm sure that Further Confusion would buy an ad...)

If I did ads, I'd try to keep them from being evil -- that was why I referenced "Kevin and Kell," which has understated but not invisible box ads. Like K&K, I would probably have a box ad in the sidebar, and the "sponsor line" is a kind of interesting idea, although the more frequently updated the content is the better off you are with that.

Check out Salon (http://www.salon.com/) for a good model, actually. You can either subscribe for ad-free access, or you can view a single advertisement to get a cookie that lets you access the site unhindered for one day. You can still browse headlines and the first paragraph or so of articles even without the cookie.

Alternately, Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com/) (and probably the other Plan 9 (http://www.plan9.org/) stuff) uses a simpler system, where either you view the site with ads on every page, or you pay to view the site without ads.

The more general key, I think, is to occasionally threaten to shut the publication down if people don't send you cash. ;D

I agree, getting people to pay is a difficult proposition. Your best hope seems to be selling merchandise. What about making a paper version yearly, and selling that at cons?

The magic money faeries

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