So, a year after he began his micropatronage experiment, uber blogger Jason Kottke has thrown in the towel, deeming the venture somewhat less than successful:
One year ago today, I asked the readers of kottke.org to become micropatrons and support my efforts in producing the site for a year. Over the course of three weeks, people generously sent in their financial support[1], giving me enough to pay my salary for the entire year[2] and not have to bug you about it every few days. So the year is up and I've been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months now, but I'm undecided even now. I guess I'll start with the important bit. I'm not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org...those things just aren't interesting to me.
His definintion of failure is rather interesting, though:
Since everyone and their uncle has been asking, about 1450 micropatrons contributed $39,900 over the past year...99.9% of that coming during the 3 week fund drive.
Now, I, inspired by Kottke’s campaign last year, launched my own micropatronage program at FlickFilosopher.com, my movie review site, and I’d have been overjoyed to have been Kottke’s kind of failure. I’ve brought in only a minuscule percentage of Kottke’s take, so little in the grand scheme, actually, that I wonder if my few micropatrons aren’t disappointed that I haven’t been able to do more for them.
Kottke’s readers? Plenty of them are plenty unhappy, as a Metafilter discussion thread makes plain:
I donated and I regret it. Maybe the error was on my part in assuming that Jason was going to do something different when his site became his job. Nope. The fucker took our money and headed to Europe, Asia, and other places, and did absolutely nothing different on his site. (I haven't had a vacation since 1997, and though I know that's not his fault, I know that many people were shocked at the amount of off time he took. I was one of them.)As someone who supported him when the payment scheme was mentioned on Metafilter--when others were slagging him--I've changed my mind, and told him so in an email a few weeks back when one of his entries angered me enough to write.
He's doing nothing innovative and what he does others do much better. I truly think he intentionally duped his patrons. He's now made it that much harder for anyone else to try the donation route. I know for certain I'd have to think long and hard about donating to someone else. That's the worst thing about Kottke and kottke.org. For that, he gets a big Fuck You from me.
posted by dobbs at 9:20 AM PST on February 22
Giving Kottke the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he was not, in fact, out to dupe his readers, I sympathize with him (though I remain mystified that he’s disappointed in his haul). How to make money online without resorting to selling porn or selling out remains a major issue for my FlickFilosopher.com, and for, I suspect, lots of other middling-successful sites. One hears about bloggers rolling in cash that comes in via BlogAds... could it be that easy? Or does it just come in fits and starts... like how Dorothy at the bitter and hilarious Web comic Cat and Girl collects it, trading a coupla bucks from readers for a custom cartoon via her Donation Derby?
It’lll be up to us geeks populating the Web with good content right now to figure out a way to make good money with moderately sized audiences, or else the whole shebang’s gonna end up being nothing but huge corporate sites and crappy little fly-by-nights. Because there’s only so long you can keep up the working-for-free thing before you collapse from the exhaustion brought on by additionally having to work at something else for a living.
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