> Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics.
> Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do.
ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations.
But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.
> I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted.
> Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.
That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.
I have put a lot of effort into getting donations, but they just don’t come. It’s a dead end. Even if I annoyed my readers in the manner or Wikipedia, I still would not make rent, but I would make my website significantly worse.
In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience. You bring up Propublica and Mother Jones as if these rare successes mattered to people with humble readerships. It goes to show that you don’t have a tenuous grasp a reality I’m familiar with. You express desires, I express facts.
In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.
> I have put a lot of effort into getting donations, but they just don’t come.
What have you done, exactly?
If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into soliciting donations, it's quite predictable that that wouldn't work.
If by "I've put a lot of effort into getting donations", you mean that you've put a lot of effort into finding out the needs of your audience and producing content that meets those needs, it would be very surprising to me that this didn't get any response.
It's certainly important to make it easy for people to donate, but it's arguably more important to produce something people want to donate for. And, I don't want to underplay the fact that producing quality content is hard. But it's not impossible.
> In any case, it’s futile to argue with you. You have the luxury of judging from a distance what I’m constrained to describe from first hand experience.
Not the case--don't make assumptions about people you don't know. Perhaps you should read some of my comments where I gave numbers on what kinds of subscription numbers I was able to get when I was running a substack.
> In any case, why should anyone care about what you want? You get a free product and complain that it’s not free enough. The cheapest customers are truly the most demanding. It behoves any self-respecting person to ignore them.
1. I donate a significant amount to content producers, and pay for a few different subscriptions, as well as being willing to pay to purchase content. My point all along has been that people are willing to pay for and donate to the production of quality content. Maybe if you cared more about what content consumers thought, you'd get more of them to donate.
2. I don't think you can reasonably disagree that quality content is content that serves the content consumer. You want to produce quality content, right? If content consumers tell you what they want, it behooves you to listen.
3. If you're a sociopathic content producer, sure, you have no reason to care about people except as potential sources of income. But as a content consumer, and more importantly, as a decent human being, you probably do care about other people as more than just sources of income. You've said you could make more money on ads if you didn't have integrity, so you clearly have other motivations besides money. You probably aren't a sociopath. So if you set aside your emotions about this disagreement I think you probably do care about people even if they don't directly contribute to your bottom line.
> Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do.
ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations.
But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse.
> I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger.
You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted.
> Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table.
That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.