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Comment by rrhoover | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see more content producers adopt this model. As a long time TWiST fan, I gladly donated.

I actually wrote a short blog post about this model and twistlist.co a few hours ago: http://ryanhoover.me/post/4768633874/please-take-my-money-mr... /unashamedplug

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My friend used the "I'm doing this for a living, so pay me" model, which has worked out very well for him. He was a radio talk show broadcaster and after one more format change (after CBS sold off stations to Alpha Broadcasting) and decided to found a subscription version of his same show. Two to three hours of show every week day for $7/mo. He had 500 paying subscriptions in the first day and has been making enough to pay himself, his co-host, production costs, leasing an office and building a studio in it, an assistant/booker, and pay all of the royalties (BMI, ASCAP, etc).

I'm undecided which model is truly the best, however. Purely ad or donation based content will surely acquire a much larger audience, but is that worth anything other than ego-stroking, if you can make the same living off of a couple thousand people willing to pay you to do what you do? Of course, it's likely a different proposition to take someone and ask them to do what they do for a profession for free (or donations, etc) versus taking someone who is doing it as a hobby or a starter project and looking to build up from there.

Adam Curry and Dvorak do the "donate" thing with the caveat that "as long as you keep making it worth our while, we'll keep making content". Of course, something like one percent of their listeners actually contribute (but boy, they contribute a lot). I tend to adhere more to the idea that you only ned a small number of true fans to support you and you can just cater to them. If you get the same income either way, then it seems the only benefit of a massive audience that mostly doesn't pay is that you can hopefully springboard that into a paying gig somewhere on a big time site or in some form of traditional media.

Media is becoming more fragmented as the internet disrupts traditional TV broadcasting. We'll see more networks and independent shows similar to TWiST. Most of these people and shows will have relatively small audiences that don't yield enough eyeballs and ears for brands to care. Monetizing with standard, low-CPM will return pennies (a la low traffic blogs using Adsense). Donations from a core fan base might be the best approach for these small majority content producers.

Do you really feel that it is a superior idea to give it away for free and rely on donations, though? Both options are essentially the same thing, but one says that you're doing it for free and hoping someone will toss you a buck here or there while the other is establishing a value on your content and saying that if you want it, you can pay for it like you pay for anything else. It seems like one says "I do this for a living and I should get paid for what I do for a living" while the other seems more "this is a hobby, but it'd be nice if I could make a living out of it".

I know one is far more common than the other, today, but I also know that there is almost nobody actually making a really good living with the free model or even the advertising model (with a couple exceptions). I also know that I consume a lot of content and would consume almost none of it if I had to pay $5-$10/mo for it. But many may.

It almost seems ripe for the Netflix model to step in, where you pay a flat monthly fee for a whole catalog of content and then the creators get paid as a result. That that I'd actually want that sort of a giant singular wall between myself and accessible podcasts and video streams, mind you. But I'm surprised it hasn't been pushed, yet.

That's an interesting concept. What if there was a Netflix for independent content producers (bloggers, video shows, podcasts, etc.)? I could see this model work in the tech scene, where there are early adopters and tons of content.

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