Catchup & The Tip Jar

My new work digs.

Here is a picture of my new cube at work. I finally figured out how to get the picture into Blogger. They made it way to simple by hiding the important button in plain sight. I'm still working on getting everything setup the way I want it. I have a ton of desk space, although I would trade one of the side desks for a place for people to sit given that I have many people stop by to ask questions.

I have a new toy, a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra. Staples had these little (or, in reality not so little) MP3 player for $200 for a 40 gig unit. I am in the process of ripping all my music. I am still trying to learn how to use it and load it with my music. So far I like it. A little heavier and larger than an iPod, but for me it works pretty good.

The Tip Jar
Or should people charge for entertainment?

I have been reading/listening to a lot complaints against the RIAA, MPAA, TV, Clear Channel, and other corporate media outlets, and with good reason. Both the RIAA & MPAA are alienating customers by sueing them (not without cause, but still bad PR) and most TV sucks out loud. Clear Channel has pretty much sucked the individuality out of radio. DISCLOSURE: I do listen to a Clear Channel station first thing in the morning because they have a weather forecast at 5:30 in the morning, no other station has it. TV is even competing against itself with DVDs of TV shows.

Now I want you to take a minute and add up how much you spend on cable/satelite, satelite radio, TiVo, NetFlix, movie rentals, streamed music, purchased music, etc each month. Make sure you have someone around to give you CPR after you see the number.

Now instead of whining about how current entertainment options suck, could we maybe put our money where our mouth is and support some of the sources of independent entertainment on the internet? I mean after all the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer where the Davids could compete equally with the Goliaths. The problem is that the Davids still need to eat, have a roof over their head, and more importantly they need bandwith. Now a lot of people out there do their blogs or podcasts as a creative process. Although it would be nice to be compensated for it, they have a drive to create and this allows them the chance to get their creations out to the world. Either they do not fit the coperate idea of entertainment (such as Coverville) or they have too narrow a focus to be profitable in mass media, such as User Friendly.

Personally I feel that creative people should be compensated for their work. And I also agree it would be nice to have something other than what is programmed for the lowest common denominator. The problem becomes how to handle this. Here are some ideas I have seen around the net:

1) PBS style fund raisers. User friendly is the only place I have seen this used. Two to four (I can never remember how often) times a year he run a membership drive much like what PBS does, including stuff for various levels of membership. Although Illiad still runs ads on the website, membership earns you no ads, although he is very picky about the ads he allows in the website.

2) Selling useless crap. I actually am using the term from the .Net Rocks podcast, but other sites do the same thing (including User Friendly), and many from the same site. A nice idea, but probably not that profitable for the producers of the content. This is definately is not the only way to try and cover your bandwidth. Note that many people the "useless crap" maybe copies of their latest CDs. Many musicians dream of breaking even on their CD and actually making money is not usually even considered.

3) Ads. A lot of people have gotten on Dawn & Drew and other podcasters for having ads on their shows. Frankly Dawn & Drew's ad is very out of they way and is even in a style keeping with the show. .Net Rocks ads are in the middle of the show, much like regular broadcasting. At least the ads are more in line with the audience of the show. Google ad sense program has been up and running for awhile and many people don't seem to mind that. Why don't people whine about that as much as they whine about ads on podcasts?

4) Amazon associates program. I first heard the name of this program through Adam Curry, although I had seen it on various sites in the past without realizing exactly what it was. Clicking through gets the originating site a kick back from your purchase. No one is going to get rich on this, but face it if you provide a link from your site to Amazon for a book, movie, or (in Adam's case) coffee maker you talk about how many people would click through and buy the product? Every little bit counts in mybook.

5) The old tip jar. Coverville is probably the place I hear about this the most, although Dawn & Drew have one as well. Both, I think, use Paypal. Isaac Bonewits also uses a the Amazon Honor System, which is interesting and, hopefully, gets more money back to the authors than Paypal. Not a bad idea, but the problem is how many of us actually visit sites anymore? Serious. With aggregators we rarely know what is going on the main site. Besides, do you really want to go to even 10 sites onces a month or so to drop in a tip? (BTW I highly recommend Mr. Bonewits' articles on The Religous Reich and Adopt an Elder. The first is just interesting (and worth a few bucks in my opinion) and the later is very much like the problem in the blogsphere/podcast world. The Religious Reich was my introduction to Mr. Bonewits.)

6) Subscriptions. Outside of porn sites and more traditional media sites I have not heard of anyone getting a subscription to work. Subscriptions would solve the problem of having to visit sites to use the tip jar, but without a central place to manage your subscriptions it will get out of hand. What we need is some what to manage our subscriptions through a central server. Paypal is a thought, but do we really want Paypal becoming like Microsoft in computing, or Apple in the music download arena? Also based upon some of what I have heard sometimes getting subscriptions dropped is a major pain, requiring the sacriface of barnyard animals. Any subscription site/program would have to be able to EASILY handle the transfer of payments (Paypal) and be able to drop/add sites seamlessly and with no dead animals.

7) Creative Commons. Not so much a method of payment, but an idea that I really like. In a way Creative Commons allows artists of all types to release something under the same idea of shareware for computer software. This allows a try before you buy approach. Granted many music stores/sites provide short clips, but does a well choosen 30 second clip really give you an idea of what the song sounds like? There are various liscenses that a person can release a work of art under that maintains rights of varying degrees. In the wild digital world this maybe the future of copyright.

Truth is most sites are going to use some combination of the above. We as consumers though need to both keep our pie holes shut about the commercialism of sites (unless they start going overboard, obviously) and try to help out. We need to realize that most people have at least SOME cost involved in getting this content to you. Some people don't mind these costs sucking away at their money, but wouldn't it be nice if they could at least break even? As every PBS pledge drive I have heard of says - "What is entertainment like this worth to you?"

What about the possibility of big corporations getting in on the act? Dawn & Drew are probably some of the most popular podcasters out there today. Recently Drew had mentioned they had something like 60,000 downloads. Even at a $1 a pop we are not talking huge sums of money for business (although I know Dawn & Drew would probably be doing cartwheels if they saw 10% of that, possibly even 1%). Even if we could throw, as a community, $10 or $20 a month to a show/blog that the creator would be able to keep things running.