Just Bru

Jason Kottke published a few days ago a review of the fund drive he made on last month, with the target of sustaining himself for one year as a full time blogger. Really recommended reading if you care about blogosphere economics, micropatronage and the like.
This graph summarize how the drive went, and the milestone it reached:

And here are a couple of my very personal highlights and considerations:

The most I got from any one individual was $500, with a couple more people giving $200 or more. The majority of people gave the suggested amount of $30, which demonstrates the power of suggestion but leaves me wondering what people would have “priced” the site at had they been given no suggested amount.

This says something about the market, imho. People have no idea how much value to assign to this kind of service: $30, that I think is in the low range of magazines subscriptions, seems quite reasonable for the frequent but “curious” reader, while could be far too high for the casual one, or far too low for somebody actually building up his business or skills on the content of the blog (I'm talking in general here, no reference to kottke content in particular).
Thus maybe could be interesting to try a fine-tuned suggestion, based on the purpose of the specific reader (are you an average reader? $30 sounds nice thanks, are you a student? Take it easy pal, are you an IT company? Well I could use some of that $15000 unassigned budget)

Looking at the numbers, less than 1/3 of a percent of my current average monthly unique visitors contributed to kottke.org...that's less than 1 in 300.
I expected more than that, but I think it's difficult to “sell” media in an environment where people are increasingly not paying directly for media.

Definitely, the idea of micropatronage still has to get through...

But here is my favourite. Jason ends the article with a few hints to full-time-bloggers-wannabe:

4. Keep costs low. Duh. I guess what I mean by this is because you can run most types of blogs from anywhere, if you live in Brazil, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, or India, you're going to have an easier time supporting yourself than if you live in a big city in the US...as long as you have reliable high speed internet access.

This put to evidence an interesting and too often forgotten perspective of the small office home office concept: if on one side it lets you workout your fancy job from home, on the other side obviously it lets you revert to a more enjoyable but probably lower-salary occupation by “simply” moving to a suitable (as for cost of life) location.<
Ok, I know it's not always that easy to apply, but ehy, it's a chance nevertheless!

• Posted in Business,MetaBlogging
• Tags: blogBusiness,fundRaising,microPatron
• Meta permalink, 1 comments