Education What To Do Next - Input Sought!

I've been digging into Patreon for this, which only takes 10% off the top with no monthly fees (unlike Ghost and Beehiiv) - but while it does support RSS, it only does so for audio. No other format. Yeah.

Going to have a look at Ko-fi next, but I feel like a lot fewer people have an account there than Patreon...

EDIT:
Nope, that doesn't do RSS either! I'd have to use rss-bridge or something, make my own feed. What a pain!

Buy Me A Coffee doesn't do RSS either. The heck?

 

Might have a stay of execution: Hackster's come back to me with an offer for the next three months which would cover the loss of October's income while they were faffing about, making me whole again. There's talk of the same rate continuing in three-month intervals afterwards, but no promises - but at least that gives me some time to think about other outlets and/or approaches.

 

It's swings and roundabouts. No office, technically no bosses, I'm registered for VAT which makes stuff I buy for work dirt cheap, full flexibility in when and how much I work...

...but clients can (and do) disappear at any time, no sick pay, no holiday pay, and my pension pot hasn't grown one penny in the last 20-odd years. And 'cos you're not salaried, the more you work the more you earn - which makes it very, very hard to stop working...

 

New scheme of work received, looks good t'me - I'm back in business, for the next three months at least!

 

That thumbnail literally made me retch. Is his entire head CGI? Why do his eyes appear to be disconnected from the rest of his face? Why is his beard in Ultra-Ultra-Ultra-176K-HD? 'kin YouTube...

 

Okay, I have confirmation that I can syndicate my articles - so long as they appear on Hackster first, and that syndicated copies include a backlink. So, time to start building things up...

First, Patreon. Threw a $3-a-month membership tier on there, but everything's free so there's no point in actually paying. Bit of a manual process, but not too bad.

Second (and for now finally, 'cos I've other things to do today) Medium. Unlike Patreon, everything on here is paywalled (but that weird Medium paywall, where you don't actually pay *me* you pay *Medium* then a fraction of what you pay Medium goes to everyone whose articles you read that month including, hopefully, me.) Ran into a hiccough here, in that apparently since I last used it they've implemented a three-stories-a-day limit - but I've written six today. There's nothing about it in the Help Centre, but I found a rando's write-up claiming that paying members could post 15 so I bought a year's membership at $50... but it still won't let me post more than three.

Sent support a query, we'll see what happens.

When I get a chance, I'll set up Ko-fi and maybe Buy Me A Coffee too - got to meet the audience where they are, after all!

 

Turns out I already had a Ko-fi account, I'd just never done anything with it...

 

's not really do-able. The company that owns everything these days isn't really a thing any more, as everyone went to work for Crucial - so step one would be buying the IP from a company which doesn't need the money.

Then once you've found a number that's worth the hassle, you're going to need more money. Oh, not for hosting: we live in the days of synchronous gigabit fibre-to-the-home for thirty quid a month and processors that have more cores than I've got fingers and toes. Properly optimised, you could host the thing on a laptop - at least until you're at classic-Slashdot levels of traffic.

No, you're going to need money for content. The reason Bit-Tech was dying under Dennis, prior to its sale, was because they weren't investing enough. We had, like... four regular writers? Three? The news was mostly just me, and I was only doing, like, three articles a day. For peanuts, I might add.

So, if you want to actually compete with the Big Boys (the ones still standing, anyway, 'cos Bit-Tech's story is neither unique nor even novel) you're going to need to hire a full-time editor, ideally a sub-ed too, and it'd be great if you could have at least two staffers as well. Then you can lean on freelancers for the rest.

Then you're going to need more money, because your staffers are going to need hardware. Maybe you can blag some freebies - heck, maybe you make Crucial kit you out as a requirement of the sale - but given that you're looking to reboot the site from its current status of nothing but bots reading the homepage it's going to be an uphill battle.

So, you're now a few hundred thousand in the hole, but the site's back up and running! ...and we're the only ones reading it. So, guess what? That's right, you need more money. This time it's for advertising, PR, and marketing.

If all goes well, readership starts going up. Congratulations: now you need yet more money 'cos you can't pay all of the above with donations alone. So, now you need ad sales to bring in revenue. And good luck with that, 'cos online advertising is horrendous at the mo'.

Now, this isn't to say it's entirely impossible - and yes, you could have just one editor-in-chief and have absolutely everyone else as freelance. But it's certainly a lot more challenging than just "launch a Kickstarter," sadly - and there's little left to the BIt-Tech name than nostalgia, so honestly you'd be better off saving the money needed to acquire the brand and back catalogue and just launch Yet Another WordPress Site under a new name.

EDIT:
Tell a lie, you would need hefty hosting: I forgot about the "AI" boom. Their bots are chewing up terabytes of traffic and literally DoSing sites. Oh, and you won't get readers from search engines anymore, 'cos they'd rather feed your site through an LLM and "summarise" it to keep eyeballs on their ads. Ugh.

Maybe I should become a lumberjack instead...