Fairy Tales or Fear of Taxes?
The web is made of millions of web pages freely accessible to all. The multiplicity of opinions available is probably its greatest asset.
Each site also has a set of free tools -- such as forums, chat rooms, and dynamic editors -- to structure, organize, clarify, inform and/or make its content more interactive. Such people as those at Pyra, which created Blogger, are fantastic. When they asked for people to send money so that they could buy a new server, the surge of generosity was indeed unbelievable. But can we rely solely on others' good will to make a living?
Using our passion to help others is praiseworthy: There's no money involved, which means there's no barrier between your users and your content. That's the magic of online interactivity. You start with a nice idea that you think is well defined, such as the creation of a site dealing with such activity, aiming at creating a tribe of people with the same affinities, in order to share, exchange and use others' knowledge -- in short, to create a community. To achieve that, you create a business model (which is of course influenced by real-life models, as the online models do not exist yet -- we're still in the process of creating them). In the process, you realize that there is a cognitive contribution from the other players in your particular activity into your project, its interface and spirit, creating a new blend. One idea after the other, the tree grows and your concept blends with others' percepts, and finally gives birth to a whole system, the result of the network-environment interaction. You've just created constructive dependency.
Before there even was a World Wide Web, we all dreamed of the ideal newspaper or magazine. It would exist if writers and editors of a said publication would take into account the criticisms and comments of its readers. But the latter don't feel sufficiently involved in the life of the magazine. How many readers make the effort to put pen to paper to suggest an idea to a magazine? Not many. Why so? Because you have to pay for the magazine! There goes the one barrier blown up by the Net: Content is free (apart from connection fees, of course).
Because online content is free, online interactivity is blooming; but the free sites themselves aren't, unfortunately: A site and its content don't appear at will. You need developers, graphic artists, content editors, a hosting provider -- and for all these things, you need money. So you need to think of a business model. Sure, it's very cool to turn your passion into a website, to make it The Place To Go for a community, to be acknowledged for all the work you've done; you get lots of mails of thanks and encouragement, and it's heart-warming, sure, but taking these to your grocer, your host or you landlord won't do you much good. They'll still want money.
So, can we be independent from money?
It's nice to be free. You'd think independence derives from being free, but I don't buy it. The lack of means is not a sign of independence. We live in a world ruled by money, and the web is no exception. Our respective governments look at our dying sites and think the web will grow back, just like mushrooms. Because our governments don't seem to make a move to create a landmark to facilitate or survival, we have to sort it out on our own.
Being independent also means to forbid ads from our sites, to cut any commercial reference. That's not a problem; really, ads are not that good anyway. First, because ads won't make us a lot of money, and second, ads on a site may undermine the credibility of editorial independence. A site owing its survival only to its advertisers cannot speak freely: An advertiser could refuse to be associated to a statement or a point of view that is not his. Only the readers, visitors and users of a site can put life into it, through their appreciation and presence on the site. Success is determined by not by ads, but by a site's audience, as well as the informative potentiality and the richness of its content (including that contributed by the users).
There are shades of advertising, though. I don't think a site is not independent just because it serves informative ads. Seeing a Macromedia ad on a site dealing with Flash resources certainly is not shocking to me. Likewise, the vast majority of web designers who use Photoshop wouldn't mind seeing an ad on their favorite site promoting the forthcoming release of the latest version of a tool they use every day. When you work in a specific area, well-targeted informative ads don't look like a trap.
Free access to a website is a concept part of the sharing philosophy, it's the essence of the web. Even though, some reworking needs to be done. Websites, which are still online because their owner is passionate about it, are getting fewer and fewer. It's hard to maintain a day job and a website in the long run (after all, there is still only 24 hours in a day). The site owner comes to a choice: his job and some spare time for his passion, or getting fully involved in his website, not knowing how he's going to make a living out of it.
Can you see the difference between a site charging a fee so that it can keep evolving and improving, and a fee-based site intended to make as much money in as short a time as possible? An independent site could very well offer a fee-based service in order to maintain its free content on the site. Once the paid service is selling well, its revenue would be invested into the free services, enabling the site to build additional services and provide richer content.
If you insist that charging for access to a site breaks the rules of web ethics, you are force to make a Manichaean choice: life, or the death of a worthwhile resource.
Because you can't jump from free access to paid access overnight, it seems to me that the best strategy is to add a fee-based service (which, ideally, should be something that is highly desirable to your visitors) to your freely available content. This is neither elitist nor discriminatory: Those web publishers who breathe life into their free sites must face the realities of our society -- and pay its bills -- just like everybody else.
That, or we die.
It would be nice if we could openly use the web as it is: a media and a tool.
