Note to Longtime Readers: Publish on Substack?
Standalone web sites like this one are an anomaly in the age of Platforms and click-driven content management systems. Some make their living at it (me) and some for personal reasons eg the highly technical but excellent Kasson.com. Who and what will be left standing in 5 years, let alone 10? I don’t have the 'personal reasons' option—it has to pay the bills.
I gratefully thank my longtime subscribers for their support and especially the last three years, which were my life's greatest challenge*, and still in transition.
Contractions in both the photography and computing industries are exerting pressures everywhere including sponsors of this site like B&H Photo and OWC. Plus general user satisfaction with photo and computer gear of unprecedented capabilities slows interest and purchases. Various sources of my revenue have dried up over the years. In short, financial pressures are coming to bear even as the baseline costs rise of running a corporation and web site rise.
Most frustrating and bearing directly on subscribership, the pace of content production here stemmed from from trouble I never asked for* but nonetheless has disappointed both me and my subscribers.
* As most longtime readers know I am only just now recovering from a 2.5-year test of perseverance and the required cognitive commitment to passing through it. That period plundered my finances and degraded everything, including this web site's coverage. Hence my special thanks to loyal subscribers.
Wider audience?
Forward-looking feedback and suggestions especially from current and former subscribers is welcome, monetization being the nut to crack.
I would like to continue the present format and will do so for a time. High-res images, aperture series, etc that I publish on this site would be difficult to impossible to present properly elsewhere, let alone manage over time. I am reminded of that every time I view other web sites and their frustrating presentation. Furthermore, it would be difficult to impossible to have the curated and indexed topical organization and search seen here reproduced on any platform—they all invariably suck in that regard.
In a fantasy world, I would have benefactors that would allow me to eliminate all ads and even subscription fees, exposing all content to the world, and just do my thing.
However, I must necessarily look at other monetization possibilities at least as adjuncts. Well, unless I can dramatically raise the revenue on this site. And while often experiments fail, sometimes they bear fruit—fail until success is a good operating principle.
My main thought is SubStack (and even a modest subscriber base could work). But what focus, what to charge, and how many people would subscribe, and how to relate it to here? Substack is poorly suited to images and video, so it might mean some complementary thing.
An obvious choicer is YouTube, but YouTube is not safe for business, because arbitrary cancellation can happen overnight, as recent events show over and over—punishment for wrongthink starts with demonetization. While I’m not even a footnote compared to well known names, it's a real risk for anyone who speaks their mind.
