v-2.org

"Independent content provider."

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Feisty and incorruptible-sounding, along the lines of "indie record label." And yet professional, even clinical, in a crisp new-century way, like "primary healthcare provider."

What the phrase tends to obscure is the human beings involved are - not always, but frequently - nothing more or less than writers. Now, as an epithet for writer, the term is a distinct improvement on those which earlier ages offered up - certainly better than the unflattering “hack”; infinitely more accurate than “ink-stained wretch” for someone whose job may after all involve stoking an XML feed. But what it fails to address is how the individuals involved are supposed to maintain their vaunted independence, in a world where there are ever rents to be paid, college loans to be retired, dental bills to settle.

For centuries, at least since the emergence in the West of the literary archetype - that consumptive figure hunched over the spattered pages strewn across the makeshift desk of his garret, ink freezing in the well - there's been a general understanding that while the writer's role may well involve standing in loyal opposition to the culture in which they operate, there is some hope of financial reward involved. Only cranks, mystics, revolutionaries and wealthy dilettantes wrote without some form of pecuniary support, whether patronage, salary, direct sales, residuals, or the penny-a-word piecework compensation offered by pulp-magazine editors.

hacks and hackers

The Internet changed all that. The Internet, and especially its conjoined offspring, the World Wide Web, lowered or eliminated the traditional barriers to entry, making independent one-to-very-many publishing both technically feasible and popularly accessible. Even before Blogger, a writer whose fanzine scrawls might have reached a maximum audience of a few hundred had the ability to throw up a few HTML pages and thus reach a potential audience of tens of millions, worldwide. At the moment this became possible, two stubbornly deep-rooted cultures were set on a collision course, and ever since, those of us who write for the medium have stood in an uneasy relationship to the fruits of our labor.

In the famous terms of the hacker ethos espoused by those whose efforts gave us the Net’s theoretical and technical underpinnings, information “wants to be free.” Practically speaking, this meant not merely free-as-in-unrestricted, but free-as-in-zero-cost. You offered the community and the world beyond your “content” because you had figured out some particularly elegant hack; your reward was the incremental growth of your reputation, with guru status and net.godhead waiting at the summit. Someone expressing an expectation that he or she be directly compensated for whatever insight or point of view they might have developed was held to be acting in bad taste, at the very least.

By contrast, in writing and publishing, even the Whitmans and Selbys, the Pynchons and Ackers and Sterlings made bank off their efforts, and why the hell not? They might or might not have continued their output in the absence of a paycheck, but writing was acknowledged to be a way to make a living. How good a living, of course, stood in direct correlation to how many people reckoned with your work: you reached a hundred thousand or a million readers, you got compensated in like measure, however scruffy and disreputable you may have been personally.

These are clearly very different yardsticks by which to measure worth.

never the twain shall meet?

For a short while, it seemed as if the Internet and the almighty dollar had come to some sort of rapprochement. The dot-com boom of 1997-2000 - primarily driven by excitement around the high-speed, low-drag moneymaking potential of e-commerce, where all things Web came with business plans attached and a first round of VC funding on the way - did a lot to break the back of the original hacker purity of spirit. The term “micropayment” got its first airing.

And maybe somewhere in there, there would be room between the greedheads and the techno-Marxist ascetics for a hard-working, independent-minded writer to turn a buck without having to whore themselves out.

The massive collapse of the dreams of '99, and the utter and unlamented failure of most corporate schemes designed to charge for non-pornographic content, leaves writers (and other sorts of artists who want to share their efforts on the Web) back between a rock and a hard place.

For better or worse, we still live in an economic world, and the things we cherish frequently come with pricetags attached. (A cynic will say there's always a pricetag somewhere, but I am not one of those.) There are any number of ways to negotiate this imposition, from the uneasy and distanced stance perfected by early Dischord records ("We sell this record for $5") to an embrace of sponsorship so ecstatic that the practitioner winds up resembling a Formula 1 driver, all slathered with a spoor of corporate decals.

the scylla of half-measures, the charybdis of greed

Well. Either way. No matter what your feelings are regarding this fact, if you're writing for the Web, there will sooner or later come a time of reckoning. Very, very few people are capable of cranking out insightful, articulate, even moderately well-researched prose without some return on the investment in time and effort. Sooner or later, many of us are going to have to pass the hat. The trouble is, because of everything outlined above, there's nothing anything close to consensus regarding appropriate ways for independent content providers to do so.

We've seen a wide variation in approaches. On the one hand, timid, all-but-imperceptible affiliate links for the books, films or musical releases that get mentioned in the course of writing - which, should a reader click through and happen to buy something at (say) Amazon, will eventually funnel a few pennies in commission back to the site owner's pockets. At the other pole is the ugly story of Karyn, a privileged young woman who ran up some $20,000 in credit-card debt treating herself to designer shoes and spendy cappuccinos, and erased it in a matter of months merely by throwing up a Web site relating her "plight" and asking for a handout.

How to determine the most suitable method, should you choose (or need) to add some request for compensation to your site? In usability, it's often enough pointed out that abstractions in user testing are useless: you have to test your design against a population that resembles your intended target audience in order to accurately gauge its appropriateness. And all the reported figures I could find regarding feelings about micropayments were just that: abstractions, vague summaries verging on the completely anecdotal.

putting on the lab coat

So I thought I would try a little experiment. I thought I'd ask people who did bear a strong resemblance to (and in some cases were identical with) v-2's audience: members of Web discussion sites devoted to design, architecture, usability, and cultural theory. I pointed out that I would never institute subscriptions or any other form of financial gating mechanism on the site, but that after all, I did spend a nontrivial amount of time and energy writing articles I thought would be useful and enjoyable for designers, architects and others.

What I wanted to find out was whether a plainly-stated request, made without embellishment but with an explicit premise of some value for money, would generate

- money;
- resentment on the grounds of betrayal of principles (i.e. "information wants to be free");
- resentment on the grounds of tastelessness ("it's tacky");
- commentary on the nature or perceived motives of the requestor, rather than the request itself ("you're tacky").

Let me tell you, I got all of that. In the first week after the request was posted on the boards and at v-2 itself, I heard volumes about my mendacity, my dishonesty, and my hypocrisy. (The phrase "information wants to be free," or some variation thereof, was brandished in protest some sixteen times.)

I also received just about $400 in direct contributions, on total site traffic that has recently averaged 5,000 unique visitors weekly. Just under one-half of one percent of the audience made some form of payment in response to the request, although this "statistic" is complicated by the fact that I also pointed to the request on discussion boards with far larger audiences.

I know: compared to successful "real" writers, with their Oprah appearances and multi-city book tours, this isn't much. But importantly, it's not nothing either - the sum would certainly erase one's outlay on a domain name and underwrite a year or two of hosting. Nothing to sneeze at.

share and share alike

So this is what you can expect. There is, of course, some degree of Heisenbergian uncertainty regarding these findings: I posed these questions in communities and venues where I was already known, and had a reputation. It's impossible to tease out which of the negative responses (or the positive ones, for that matter) were directed at that persona, rather than the request itself. But the results were encouraging.

The experience taught me that resistance to an exchange of money for independent content online runs deep, but that after due consideration, some tiny percentage of the audience will indeed express their appreciation with a commitment of cash money.

This may be because there is another model, just as unassailable as "wants to be free" in its hacker authenticity, with its roots every bit as deep into the loamy prehistory of Internet culture. There always was a distinction - if one often enough muddied - between those developers who offered up their efforts for the pure pleasure and challenge of doing so ("freeware"), and those who released their works into the wild with an implicit expectation of some nominal compensation. We knew it as "shareware": you downloaded the program, and if you got something out of it, you sent along a check or money order in the amount that most closely approximated the value you yourself perceived in the offering.

This is the model I finally felt most comfortable with. I opted for a shareware-esque compromise: a small Paypal button buried two levels deep, where a user'd only confront it if they had followed a label explicitly referring to "support," thus setting them up for the potentially distasteful encounter. Nobody's going to stumble across it in the course of completing any other action they may wish to pursue on v-2, but if one is sincerely motivated to support the site, it's there to be found. (This is, of course, just where one wouldn't want to put it if one was genuinely interested in maximizing revenue, in which case you might slap it across the top and bottom of each page), but it just felt better to me that way. I'm just as acculturated to regard these requests as tacky as anyone else.)

Just like shareware, then, users then get to choose what level of value they attach to the product or service. They've been made aware that you aren't just doing this out of the goodness of your own heart, but any payment is purely up to them; they can freely disregard the request if it strikes them as burdensome or offensive.

Until there's a better way, that's what I'm going to continue doing on my own site. What's more, given the tolerable negatives and clear benefits of having a few bucks in the bank that were not there before, I can recommend something along these lines to other independent content providers with the nerve to suggest that their product might actually have some worth. Because information may indeed want to be free, but (as many a wit has pointed out) writers generally want to get paid.