Recently I undertook a personal project to convert a website from Flash to WordPress. I didn’t do this for any reason other than I wanted to do something nice for someone who has, in a very strange way, been the reason I am who I am within WordPress. She’s an artist, which means her website was very media heavy, and back in the early 2000s, the way to do this was Flash.
I hated it.
Oh I loved how it looked, but really that was it. It made her content slow, and it made it impossible for me to say “Hey, check out the new content!” without also saying “To get there, click on Sputnik, then on the fourth star, then the fifth box…” It’s just really bad UI, and no matter how pretty it is, the barrier between reader and content was nigh insurmountable. Also it doesn’t work on iOS these days.
My father, similarly, had his old site as all PDFs, so when I redid his site for his birthday (which he loves, and yes, WordPress), I copied his PDFs to text, with a lot of LATex in there for the math, and he complained. “People will steal my content.” I pointed out they could do that anyway. In fact, I had, in essence, done what they would, downloading the PDF and copying out the text and images. He grumbled, but as soon as his peers remarked that they could finally read his work, he calmed down.
I understand the fear of theft. You want to show you work to draw people in and then sell yourself. My father is a consultant and speaker, and his fear is that people will take his work and plagiarize him, or worse, make it seem like he endorsed them. If you think libel is a rough road on the Internet, try the endorsement shenanigans. Some people will do anything to make themselves seem more appealing.
At the same time, I agree with Cory Doctorow that giving your books away isn’t bad. The reason my ebooks are pay what you will is that I want people to find me, and find value in me. You can argue I wouldn’t have my job if I didn’t do that. My ebook profits paid for a brake repair and help keep my webhosting fees under control, but I sure don’t make a living off two ebooks. But again, the point is not that the website, directly, makes me money, but that it allows me to make money.
It seems counterintuitive. How can I make money giving things away? A website is like advertising. You don’t make money directly on an ad. You pay around $3.5 million dollars to have an ad in the Super Bowl not because you think someone will drop what they’re doing, run out and buy Doritos, but because you are trying to make an impact. The best Super Bowl ads, the best ads in general, are the ones we watch and want to share with our friends. We talk about them, and when we’re at the store and spot Doritos, we have a positive association with them, and are inclined to buy them. Sneaky ain’t it?
The website is the same thing. You read a lot about WordPress here, so at a certain point you start to associate ‘Ipstenu’ and ‘Half-Elf’ with WordPress. You see me on the forums, posting and helping people, and you get positive reinforcement of that association. Then you see I have an ebook about Multisite and you buy it. So why are the ebooks also pay what you want? Because people come to these things the other way, too. They find the ebooks, wonder about my qualifications and merits, and later come back and pay. And yes, I’ve gotten money that way too. After a while, when you build up your cred, you don’t have to mess with that and you can just sell, but at the time of my ebooks, I wasn’t someone who could say “My job is WordPress” so I couldn’t afford to just sell. I probably could today.
By why keep giving things away? WordPress (the code) is free, and my content is technically free here. You’re not paying me to read this, after all. It goes back to positive associations. If you get a good association with something, you keep using it. Newspapers, back in the day, were the only way to get news. You paid for two things: the information and the reliability. The radio came and changed the game, letting you listen to news, but the papers stuck around because unlike TV and radio news, you didn’t have to wait for your segment to come up, you could flip the pages and read sports.
The value of straight news didn’t really change until the Internet, where we started offering you the information at no immediate cost. Most of the time, the Internet sites can’t compete with reliability, but people became increasingly annoyed with having to pay for content. Buying the paper, sure, but I’m already paying for the Internet (access to it). Shouldn’t that be funneling back like TV fees do? Alas, they don’t, which means news media goes through hoops and ladders to try to lock their content down so you can’t copy it, or you have to pay to get at it. In return people like me find ways around paying to read content.
It’s not that we don’t think we should pay for things. I do pay for books, music, movies, media, news, etc, and I encourage people to do so. It’s not the money at all, it’s the barrier between me and the content. There’s obvious value in reading the news, but the value is diminished by proliferation and frankly by their own quality. It’s true that if you build it they will come, but without letting people share what they found, then you won’t get more readers.
That’s why the walls between your reader and your content need to go. That’s why you need to allow a direct link to your content, so I can say “Hey, I read this awesome article, go here!” You want me to tweet, text, link, post, tumble, and share your content so you get more readers, and more to the point, you get happy readers. The happier your readers, the more they feel like they should share. They’re getting a psychological kick-back from sharing, and we’re back to the positive association reinforcement we want.
I’m certainly not going to say that giving away all your content is going to make you money, but I will say that giving away some of your content will do so. There’s no magic formula to say where the breakpoint is for your product, but there’s no way to do that for anything. You have to determine where you’re going to make your money. My father makes money with his work and lectures. By posting smaller excerpts of his essays and papers online for free, people can find value in his work and hire him. An artist can post lower resolution/quality versions of their art for free, and let the reason find merit in the product. A writer can put disparate thoughts that don’t really combine themselves well into one work up on their blog, and let people see the value in their books. And by letting people copy your content, by letting them quote in part on in whole, you make them happy.
Do I worry about plagiarism and content theft? Funny thing, no. By having my SEO ranking high, based on Google and all being able to read my content, if someone searches for phrases found in my articles, they’ll find my site before the sploggers and thieves. By making it easier for people to link to me, I increase my SEO. The same goes for my quality of content. I make it high, people will link to me, and we get a happy circle of reciprocity. I never fear content theft, and because of that, I let my content be copied.
It’s served me well.
