Les Jones

E-commerce > Jason Kottke Ends Blog Sponsorship Experiment

A year ago Jason Kottke embarked on a plan to blog full time, or as he put it, to "revisit the idea of arts patronage in the context of the internet." That plan ended last week. Jason has stopped taking donations. Some people are disappointed with what they got for their money. Via Brittney.

I join the chorus of people saying that he really didn't live up to his end of the bargain after collecting the money. He took a ton of time off and, even accounting for all his vacations and personal life stuff, he appeared to put almost no time into the site. I can't believe that the sparse assortment of links and analysis he had could have taken more than an hour or two a day.

This is reminding a lot of people of Andrew Sullivan's fund drives. Sullivan used to have fundraisers and would raise as much as $80,000. The nanosecond his fundraiser was over he'd take a two week vacation to rent a hotel suite and roll around naked in the piles of money, which ensured that anyone who donated felt like a chump. (I donated once, and I certainly felt like a chump.) Imagine giving money to PBS during pledge week and then tuning to your PBS station to find dead air for several weeks afterwards. (Sullivan now blogs for Time magazine and no longer has fund drives.)

Part of Kottke's problem may be that he over-promised. I read his proposal last year, and it honestly sounded revolutionary, like a new approach to blog journalism.

The goal is to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much) better site. More time means there will be more content of a greater variety. Some days, that may mean more posts and more links. I'll be able to go to more (hopefully interesting) events in NYC (&elsewhere) and write about them. I'll have time do the occasional bit of real journalism, collaborate on neat projects like Dropcash, and do larger projects that require longer time scales to finish...dare I hint at a return to more 0sil8-like projects? (I dare.) And there are opportunities that I'm sure will present themselves as I settle into the luxuriant folds of full-timeness.

Kottke called his contributors "micropatron," which sounds like someone who made a micropayment - typically defined as a couple of cents, but that wasn't the reality

I didn't donate, but I do like reading Kottke. The only thing that rubbed me funny about this micropatron idea was the word "micropatron". I mean, the suggested "micropayment" was $30-- a subscription to Salon or Nerve or any number of other pay sites, magazines, etc. costs about that much, or often less than that. Something about using "micropatron" over "subscriber" seemed a bit misleading. But, he had the idea and the readership to pull it off, so more power to him.

I don't consider $30 - or even $10 - a micropayment.

I think giving money to bloggers you like is a good thing. I think it's probably a bad thing for the blogger to ask for a carte blanche sponsorship. A better idea might be to ask for sponsorships for specific goals, like covering the travel costs for a specific trip. That makes it easier for the blogger and his readers to know exactly what's being promised and what's going to be delivered.