I don’t get paid for any of the writings I do on my own sites. Nearly everything on The Musical Chairs from the hosting to domain name to manual labour of updating is all put in by me and the domain name for this blog was bought by me. Obviously this takes money out of my account (hosting, domains, going to gigs etc) and now that I do not have a part-time job to live on I have to budget enormously, especially in this age of recession. But I don’t the quality of content to lower because of it.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about adding an option to allow readers to donate money if they really like an article they read on it. However, I don’t want to do this in a way that sounded like either:
- Sounded like you must give me money for fear of feeling guilty.
- Sounded like it was a sympathy thing.
So in order to combat these issues, the donation box would simply be something on the sidebar, with a short explanation and a maximum donation limit of £1. This is done because, at the end of the day, that is nearly the price you would pay for a quality newspaper and under the price you would pay for a weekly magazine. So the option is there, if a reader wants to. I also find this way of money-making a lot more human and satisfactory than just dumping adverts.
This ultimately brings up the debate about paying for news on the Internet and Walter Isaacson was on The Daily Show recently to talk about his recent cover feature for Time, How To Save Your Newspaper, about whether or not we should pay for news on the internet.
