Send Me Your Money — Getting Paid and the Independent Web

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.

Starfleet Command II Demo Out

A demo of the upcoming Starfleet Command II game is avaiable at Gamespot. The original Starfleet Command is the only Star Trek game I’ve ever seen that was any good. On the other hand the game is extraordinarily complex. I messed around with it for a couple weeks and it was a lot of fun, but getting to a point where I was any good at the game would have taken a lot more time than I had — the game is loosely based on the Star Fleet Battles pen and paper game which was an accountant’s dream, and much of that complexity and depth is reproduced in Starfleet Command.

Pyramid: The Way to Do a Small Pay-To-View Online Magazine

The other day I was ranting and raving about how online publishers need to a) provide more services to consumers than traditional print, while b) lowering the cost, and it occurred to me yesterday that I’ve been shelling out my hard earned money for the past year for exactly just such a site — Steve Jackson Games’ online Pyramid magazine.

Okay, Steve Jackson Games publishes role playing and board games. Even if you don’t play those games you might remember hearing about them several years ago when they were raided by the Secret Service as part of Operation Sun Devil, which resulted in the company almost going bankrupt but also in a successful lawsuit against the government in which the judge had some pretty harsh words for the Secret Service’s incompetence.

Anyway, for many years the company published a monthly and later bimonthly magazine called Pyramid that featured articles on news in the gaming industry, game reviews, and, of course, articles supporting their games as well as games published by other companies. The short version is that publishing a specialty magazine like that tends to be very expensive with very low margins and SJ Games moved the magazine to an online web only version a couple years ago.

And they really did the transformation right. A subscription to the print magazine was something like $24-$30 per year for a monthly or bimonthly magazine. The online version is $15 per year and is updated weekly, every Friday. They put a lot more stuff in the online version than they could afford to do in print and still stay profitable.

Then they added more value. The overwhelming majority of people who subscribed to Pyramid or bought it in hobby stores when it was a print magazine were devotees of SJ Games’ excellent Generic Universal Role Playing System. Most of the articles in the magazine were devoted to GURPS-related material. The online version upholds that tradition, but also allows subscribers to play test and give feedback about upcoming sourcebooks and rule books for the game.

For example, one of the upcoming rule books is GURPS: Deadlands, a conversion of Pinnacle’s Deadlands weird west role playing game. I like Western-themed games, and at the click of a button can download the current draft of the game in HTML or text version. There are discussion forum set up to provide feedback, etc.

The result of this, by the way, is success. Last November the number of subscriptions hit 3,000 which as a note on the SJ Games site put it, “would be a drop in the bucket at a Hanson concert, but in the game biz, it qualifies as a crowd.”

Those subscription figures are only going to go up, too, as more people get online and as the support offered through the magazine adds value to the game which in turn increases the value of the magazine. I think this is an excellent case study of how to succeed in an online venture without spending millions of dollars in venture capital. No, SJ Games doesn’t have a billion dollar market cap, but they make money doing something they enjoy. Who could ask for more?

New Data Suggest Life Expectancy to Keep Increasing

An ongoing debate in the scientific community is just how far Life Expectancy can continue to climb. In the past researchers have made the mistake of setting a limit to life expectancy only to see their limits shattered. Now a new study of Swedish data suggests that the maximum age that people can live to is continuing to grow.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley examined Swedish records on age going back to the 1860s. According to a BBC report, the found that in 1860 the oldest people alive in Sweden lived to be about 100. By the 1960s, the oldest age people lived to was 105, and today the maximum age in Sweden is about 108.

U-C Berkeley researcher John Wilmoth told the BBC that, “We have shown that the maximum lifespan is changing. It is not a biological constant. Whether or not this can go on indefinitely is difficult to say.”

The team does suggest in a paper on their findings published in Science that maximum lifespan should continue to increase to at least 110 years, and maybe even higher since, as Wilmoth puts it, “We are changing the limits of the human life span over time.”

Given recent advances in the understanding of the biological underpinnings of age, it is doubtful that maximum life span will peak at 110. The 21st century is going to be an exciting time to be alive, especially for those who want to be alive longer.

Source:

How old can we get?. The BBC, September 28, 2000.

Charges Against David Barbarash Dropped For Now

Anyone who wants to understand just how far some animal rights activists will go for their cause should read this account of Canada’s investigation in the activities of David Barbarash and Darren Thurston.

The two ALF activists spent time in jail in 1992 for stealing 29 cats from a University of Alberta laboratory. Americans for Medical Progress in a story on the dropping of the charges, notes that although Barbarash likes to pass himself off as a mere information liaison for the ALF, he told a Vancouver Sun reporter this week that he had participated in numerous ALF actions since his conviction, “none of which I am going to tell you about because they were all illegal and I’ve never been convicted or caught.”

If the Vancouver Sun article is correct, however, the major thing keeping him from being convicted at the moment are Canada’s police reporting laws.

Barbarash and Thurston, it turns out, are the main suspects in last year’s mailing of razor blade laden packages to fur farmers and medical researchers in the United States and Canada. The Vancouver Sun, relying on court transcripts, documents provided to them by Barbarash and Thurston, and their own investigation sums up the evidence the police collected against the duo:

On Oct. 14, 1995, police tailed Thurston and Barbarash to the Lower Mainland Mini-Storage on Richards Street, where Thurston rented a storage locker and placed a brown file box inside, court was told.

A month later, on Nov. 7, police got a warrant to secretly search the locker. In the box, they found, among other things, brown envelopes that contained a card to which a razor blade was attached. There were also letters and communiques from a group calling itself the Justice Department, and photocopies of instructions on how to build explosive devices.

Two days later, police secretly marked the locker so they could determine if anyone had been inside. Then, in December, police got another warrant for the locker, and this time used an ultraviolet pen to mark envelopes containing the razor blades. The pen’s ink was invisible to the naked eye, but it would allow investigators to identify the envelopes if they were ever sent.

In January, the Victoria Times Colonist received a press release from the “Justice Department.” It bore the ultraviolet markings. Guides and outfitters later received razor blade letters bearing the same markings.

So why are the charges being dropped? According to the police, because the Canadian intelligence service was also investigating Thurston in connection with a series of pipe bomb attacks he was a suspect in. The police decided to cooperate with the intelligence agency investigation. Under Canadian law, however, since the police coordinated their efforts with the intelligence agency, everything about the intelligence agency’s investigation has to be disclosed in order for the case to proceed — a move which the intelligence agency has blocked for national security reasons despite the police desire to move forward with the case.

The charges could be reinstated at some point, but apparently that is very unlikely under Canadian law. This is certainly a very bizarre legal situation all around.

Source:

How a sweeping investigation went awry for the RCMP. Rick Ouston, Lindsay Kines, and Chris Nuttall-Smith, The Vancouver Sun, September 28, 2000.