At his Dreamzone weblog, Mark Morgan points to a very good article by Julie Hayden on the role of independent web sites, Indie Exposure: It’s All About You.
The first part of the article describes perfectly what I’ve been trying to say about the web,
The fact is, with very few exceptions, e-business never packs the impact of the independent content producer. These are the people who are pushing the boundaries, harnessing the power of the web, and building the things people want and need.
No one throws large amounts of money at them, and the stock market doesn’t rise and fall on their pronouncement, but they are the heft, the substance, and the texture of the web.
They are what makes the web go. That hasn’t changed.
I couldn’t agree more. The only large e-business sites I tend to visit are those that aggregate content from the real world, such as CNN. But in many subjects that I’m interested in, I not only don’t buy the print version anymore but I don’t visit the web sites either. I used to buy a lot of computer game magazines. Don’t do that anymore, and I haven’t visited any of the web sites of the big game magazines in a very long time. The smaller sites are a lot better at getting me the news I want, and some of them are literally run by people in their spare time.
On the other hand, I completely disagree with Hayden’s view that independent web sites need to be non-commercial.
Being an independent content producer does involve some sacrifices. You’ll have to have the tools to access, use, and create for the net. These tend to require a financial outlay.
Since most of us aren’t independently wealthy, we need Real Jobs [TM] to subsidize this. This also means that you will have to spend some of your precious spare time on this. Consider it a public service.
I’m asking you to share your content with the world. No profit models. No subscription fees. No ca-chings. Just you, your passion, and your world.
I really hope that few of the independent sites I visit take her advice. I like sites that people do as hobby as much as the next guy, but on the other hand I notice from my own surfing experience that a lot of these sites tend to disappear over time. One might the coolest site in the world on Legos is out there on the net, usually on some free hosting service, and the next minute it’s gone. Or you’ll see an excellent site that has everything you could ask for — except the web master stopped updating it 8 months ago because he got burned out trying to keep up with the web site and her regular job.
Not only do I want to get paid for the things I put on the web, I want to pay others. Take Mark Morgan’s main site, VoicesOfUnreason. The site, like many on the web, publishes a wide range of fiction, poetry and essays. It looks great and while taste in fiction is often very personal, I’ve read stories there that were of equal or better quality than the ones I’ve read in anthologies or magazines that I paid real money for. As an example, I think Sean McMain’s The Head Fairy was one of the best short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time and reminded me a lot of the sort of stuff that Harlan Ellison writes (and to me, Ellison is the beginning, middle, and end of short stories).
I’m not a big reader of fiction, but I figure I buy maybe 8-10 novels a month at an average cost of $8 a piece (I buy a lot of scifi/fantasy paperbacks). Why should I be horrified or a fiction author or web site recoil in fear from finding a model to siphon some of that money to an author or web site I’ve found gives me a fix of the sort of short fiction I want? I certainly don’t want to spend the rest of my life working a McJob and writing my web site in my spare time, and I’m more than happy to do my part to help the independent web sites I enjoy get closer to leaving their “real jobs” behind.
Barring any unforeseen disaster, income and wealth around the world are going to grow as fast as, if not faster than, they did in the 20th century. The upshot of this is that the amount of wealth and income available to support leisure activities, such as reading a story on Mark’s site, is already higher than at any time in world history and only going higher. Somebody’s going to get that money — I’d rather have it be me, Mark, and other independent web site operators rather than Random House, Columbia Records and MGM.