I have to congratulate the team at Autostraddle - they held a fundraising campaign and readership responded -- they raised $20K in a week!
Pam's House Blend is mentioned several times in the post, in the context of the difficulty of holding a full-time job (and a necessary second job thanks to Righthaven), and, that's right, the blog. Riese notes:
There's a consensus that readers will not pay for content.I have to say I've never held a real aggressive fundraising campaign at PHB, and reader contributions are quite meager (though welcome!) in relation to any revenue generated by ads. I don't do the quarterly or annual "asks" that some blogs do. No judgment on my part. I've considered what I do a labor of love, but when you hit the wall (or get hit by a copytroll), it's pretty clear you can't subsidize PHB forever. Riese hits the nail on the head:But Autostraddle has survived primarily on your donations and investments and hard work for two years now. So what gives?
I understand that our success in raising funds is due to a lot of intangible/specific elements of our readership which I don't know how to put into words yet. Sometimes I am so sure of a thing that I feel like the words I need to describe it haven't been invented yet.
But what I can talk about, what I do have wise words on regarding "The State of the LGBT Blogosphere," is that creating anything more than a personal blog, especially when you're reporting actual news, isn't feasible as a long-term "side project" with no goal/end in sight. Your facts must be impeccable, you must prepare to deal with trolls and bigots, you will be held just as accountable for your work as paid journalists are. There's an expiration date on that kind of energy. We need to demolish this misconception that something as awesome and reliable as Pam's House Blend can be anybody's eternal easy-to-accomplish "hobby" or that these semi-large projects will follow a "blog on the side until the money pours in and you can quit your job and dedicate yourself to your blog" trajectory if your blog is super amazing and you just work hard enough and manage your time properly.Um. Yeah. But I often get the "how do you do all of this" question, and I have to say "I don't know, but I'm running on fumes" after 7 years of this.
More below the fold.
Since no one has to pay for entry into the coffeehouse, it's pretty easy to sustain the fantasy that this is some sort of breaking news service when it's pretty clear that if this weren't a group blog we'd be woefully late on many stories, all dependent on who's online and available to do a story -- we're not doing this full-time and never sell PHB as a news service, but alas we still get the "why aren't you covering this" emails all the time. Riese:
Where does that idea come from?Therefore she aptly notes that if you have no start-up funds or a corporate backer you have to take a leap of faith and depend solely on ads and donations and aggressively encourage readers, if they care about the existence of a particular blog they like, to "subscribe" just as you would any magazine. However as mentioned above, most readers don't want to pay if it can be obtained for free. But there's always this feeling of impending judgment for those bloggers who take the risk and go without that full-time job:+ People don't understand how much time this all takes.
+ People assume that a blogger's "day job" will somehow involve earning a salary/benefits while sitting at a computer secretly operating a blog. (Which is classist and stupid! I've never had a job that demanded less than 100% of my consistent attention, and I've really only had one job ever that even involved a computer.)
+ Because blogging is THEIR hobby, they think it should be everyone's hobby. Anyone who can't blog and work full-time is just a bad organizer because look, they have a job AND posted 25 pictures of their dog yesterday on tumblr!
The biggest internet success stories start, like all print publications, like Gawker, HuffPo and Nerve.com, with start-up funds and full-time people. A sustainable model requires somebody's full-time attention, which means it also requires somebody's full-time salary.
Among many other expenses, a major place where your donations go is to sustain my LIFE and Laneia's LIFE. Yet we undervalue ourselves. We avoid financial questions 'cause we feel judged/insecure that we'll simply be written off as irresponsible for not somehow holding down another job on top of Autostraddle.And that's one reason why blogs can fold -- or flourish -- flourish being a relative word, since that some of us cannot take the risk. Bottom line is that I cannot quit my day job because I need the health insurance (thanks Obamacare, I'm not helped at all). So I hope the healthy younger lesbians at Autostraddle have figured out that problem, for their sake.Nobody asks the editors of AfterEllen or SheWired what they do for their "day jobs" or if they have "a trust fund or something" - it's understood that their work commands a salary and gets it.
In conclusion, the only sustainable model I can suggest to anyone not employed by Viacom is to be completely fucking insane, accept life at the poverty line, have really talented friends, and to love your readers in hopes that they will love you back.All in all, I was happy to see the subject of sustainable models for blogs tackled in a way that is crystal clear and blunt about what it takes -- and the responsibility we all have to preserve a fragile medium that brings news, commentary and culture to a movement.
In the end, I'm still torn about what to do about PHB, but I do have possibilities that I am considering that could keep the coffeehouse alive, perhaps in another form. But we're not going completely away. The baristas continue to churn out great brew, and even the bastards of Righthaven can't keep us down.