I think I’ve had enough, with work related to the Web that is (and I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a while actually). You see for the past five to ten years, most of my enjoyment with the Web has been in creating community sites where I explore and share information with others. Yet in all of these ventures (including my recent Exploring Squarespace site), I didn’t make a dime from them. Thus the thing I’m the most passionate about, I can’t see a way of making any income from it.
Since this may be my last post on the Web (for quite a while anyways), if anyone has any ideas on this, definitely let me know. I mean the only two options I can see are adding ad banners, which would basically provide pocket change, or a more substantial approach would be making new content to the site subscription-based for a monthly fee. Yet I honestly don’t see many people being into that and actually I’d rather avoid that if I could, since I believe information on the Web should be freely accessible. Yet there in lies the problem. If everyone makes their content free, how can they sustain themselves?
Seems like we haven’t made much headway since the dot com bomb period when many sites experienced the same problems and closed up shop, even though many may have had thousands of people visiting them daily. If there isn’t a way to sustain what you’re doing, no matter how valuable and appreciative your content is, then don’t expect to be doing it for long. End of story.