On Wednesday, Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneers of the blogging Web, decided to end his relationship with The Daily Beast, and by the way, with advertising as well. His decision made quite a splash, in part because others wonder whether he is pointing a way forward at a time when advertising rates on the Web would not seem to support a gumball habit, let alone professionally produced content.
His site, The Dish, employs five people and two full-time interns and he believes it can be supported by a meter model with payments of $20 a year from his fervent readers, an audience he built up over 12 years of mad, two-fingered typing. We headed down to the West Village to watch Mr. Sullivan eat some gluten-free risotto (don’t ask) and talk with him about Angry Birds, free riders, and his hopes and worries as a re-hatched indie blogger. (This interview has been edited and compressed.)
Decoder: So you and your partners all held hands and jumped off a cliff together?
Sullivan: Yes. I guess we just felt, “Why not?” and we also felt the logic of the last 12 years led inexorably to this.
Q: So before you came here, did you check the meter to see what kind of money people are sending you?
A: I think we could be headed toward $400,000 by the end of the week.
Q: You’re making money sitting here, right now.
A: We figured to make this work, employing seven people for a year, we needed probably a budget of around $900,000, so we have raised a pretty good chunk of that, which is amazing. Many of the people who subscribed actually gave us more money than we asked for.
Q: So what do you think they’re saying? “You’re funny and smart, so I want to send you lots of money?”
A: I hope they’re saying, “We want to be a part of this community and keep this community alive and we understand at some level we’d rather pay for that.”
Q: Do you think the economics of advertising on the Web are broken?
A: We had been through many different peaks and troughs of thought about this. I think advertising could provide us a nontrivial amount of money, but we felt that we’d rather have less money and have a very pure, simple concept.
Q: You’ve been analogized to Louis C.K., who went direct with his audience on his last comedy special, a Kickstarter campaign that enrolls interested parties for funding, and also The New York Times, which has a meter. So which is it?
A: I think basically we’re a blend of Louis C.K., Radiohead and The New York Times.
Q: Radiohead? They put out their record, “In Rainbows,” as a pay-what-you-want download, right? Do you have any keyboard skills that I should be aware of?
A: No.
Q: But you can type.
A: I never learned how to type properly. I grew up writing everything longhand.
Q: Well, you must have some significant digital skills.
A: Well, I’m good at Angry Birds. I’m in the top 5 percent globally. Me and half the youth population of South Korea are vying to get that final concrete block smashed.
Q: How are you doing on the new “Star Wars” version?
A: That’s been tough. My husband is better, but he has an engineer’s mind.
Q: That’s what you tell yourself anyway. The decision to go back out on your own feels a little bit back to the future to me. I can remember when I was working in Washington 12 years ago and this big time writer-editor — that would be you — turned into this crazy man blogger guy. I thought you had lost your mind and I wondered how you would make a living.
A: I did a couple of pledge drives and then I changed my mind on the Iraq War between the first and second pledge drive. All these fire-breathing right-wingers just stopped paying for me, so it collapsed.
Q: That’s what you get for changing your mind.
A: Becoming your own thing is really what I did 12 years ago and everybody around me was like – what’s a blog? – and I enjoyed that. I love having a direct relationship with my audience, but now they’re not going to be able to read the whole Dish unless they pay me some money.
Q: So the free and open Web is an illusion?
A: No. The answer is not paid or free, the answer is this messy, leaky mix, with some people paying who read it a lot and others not paying anything at all.
Q: So if I sign up, I’m paying for all the free riders?
A: Yes. We are just being honest about that. If people really wanted to, they could spend a lot of time getting around the wall, so it is not so firm a meter.
Q: A year from now will be a nervous moment when you start looking at renewals. Maybe some people just wanted to date you, but didn’t really want to marry you.
A: And that’s O.K. If we weren’t meant to be married, then that’s fine. I’m perfectly prepared for this not to work. Our basic principle is we’re simply journalism going directly to a reader with nobody — no newsstand, no proprietor, nothing — in between. That is an honest free-market journalism, with journalists offering their wares on the street.
Q: You make it sound so tawdry.
A: There’s nothing tawdry about offering your wares on the street. It’s how magazines and newspapers started. It is a model where the people decide and no one is in charge of the velvet rope deciding who gets to write or who gets the big writing contract or not. In some ways we’re breaking up cartels and creating a true kind of journalistic capitalism. Those sites that readers really want to stay in existence will have to earn that.
Q: Journalism has always survived on various subsidies: rich people, legal notices or advertising that might or might not produce the desired result.
A: Well, it’s about time journalism got over it and started earning a living like everybody else.
Q: I’m fine with Darwinism until …
A: You get eaten.
Q: True that. Now you’re trying to own a piece of the Web, but in reading your site over the years and seeing the amount of work that you post, the Web sort of owns you.
A: Of course it does, but you let go after a while. It’s not writing so much as being a kind of D.J. of everything that is out there. I wrote a very serious academic book called “Virtually Normal” and if you are lucky, you sell 20,000 copies. I reach a quarter of a million people a day on The Dish, so you ask yourself, ‘What’s being a writer about?’
And after a while, you realize that all these layers between the writer or the creator and his or her audience are also a fee on the creator. Why can’t we get rid of that?
Q: Umm, because you’re a writer and you probably don’t know how to count and don’t know anything about business.
A: Well, we don’t and that’s going to be a big problem. But we think that if we do it openly in front of our readership, if we screw up, they’ll help us.
Q: Has someone who is smart about the Web told you they are really excited about what you are doing?
A: Barry Diller. [He owns The Beast and had been paying for Mr. Sullivan and his team.] When I told him I wanted to go independent, he said, “Good for you, go for it.”
Q: That might have something to do with the fact that you won’t have your hand in his pocket anymore. Now you are your own patron.
A: In the end we have to be. There’s no sugar daddies anymore.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/andrew-sullivan-on-going-back-to-future-as-an-indie-blogger/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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