I would greatly appreciate it if you would consider contributing and supporting my work via my newly launched page on Patreon.
You can support at any level, but to receive my cartoons, columns, freelance illustrations, interviews, and sneak peaks at future projects, the minimum point of entry is five dollars per month. I’ll spare you the rhetoric about how much you spend on coffee and all that.
This move was prompted by the demise of Beacon. I hope that those of you who supported me on Beacon will consider doing the same thing at Patreon.
As I explain there, the conundrum is that the Internet has brought my work to more people than ever before. That’s fantastic! That’s why I got into this into the first place: to reach as many people as possible. The problem is, no one has figured out how to successfully monetize journalism on the Internet. And that’s doubly true when the content is controversial. It’s not to say that people don’t like controversial content online: to the contrary, it seems to do better than stuff that is bland and boring. The problem appears to be twofold. On the one hand, most big online media outlets are dominated by big corporate money that doesn’t want to hear anything outside of the Democratic Republican duopoly. And on the other, a lot of Silicon Valley start-up people don’t have much appreciation or understanding of politics or media.
I’m pretty sure that’s going to change in the not so distant future. But in the meantime, that leaves people like me having to ask people like you for support in order to keep producing a high-quality level of work.
Thanks for reading this and thanks for reading my work.
3 Comments.
Count me in, I was surprised when my contribution to Ted-On-Beacon was returned. Sorry to see ’em go.
re: The problem is, no one has figured out how to successfully monetize journalism on the Internet.
The way it was supposed to happen was micro-transactions. View a page, pay a penny directly to the author. Instead, we have the same model that polluted TV & Print journalism. The journalists aren’t paid by weduhpeepul, but rather the advertisers. What could possibly go wrong?
Marshall McLuhan once suggested that instead of making payments to advertising agencies who distribute these ads to a random mass (even if targeted by building databases of stolen customer information, which does not endear), payments might be more effective if paid directly to those who did the work of reading the ads.
Cut out the middleman (advertising agency) and replace him with an internet based credit and debit ledger.
I can see ways for this to go wrong, but credits paid for the work of reading ads could be forwarded to producers of culture, such as Ted, who could cash them in for money.
So if I’m browsing to buy a car or solar panels on the internet, I could be given credits by the producers of goods that I could assign to Ted to support his work as a producer of culture.
Video games seem to work on this basis when there is little to win but a game.
Maybe six months after the election. I’ve been disappointed enough in your coverage of that to stop following you on Facebook.