Being the owner of a large site which gets quite a bit of traffic, I get quite a few emails, always well intentioned and polite, along the lines of:
"Wow, what a great site. Thanks for providing it. I especially love your tutorial/guide/browser support info etc. Do you mind if I reproduce it at my site? I'll give you credit of course."
Because I'm a generous soul and small-c christian (or maybe it's just because I want everyone to love me) my first response is always "why not?". But then the other part of me (the part that wants to pay the rent, go on holidays, buy new cameras and just generally be a cog in the machine of capitalism) always kicks in and I come back with something like the following:
"The content at our site represents a huge amount of work on the part of myself and John Allsopp, the other half of my company. While the content is available for free so anyone who wants to can use it, we don't develop it solely with a view to providing free content. We develop it with a view to driving traffic to our site. If I allow you to reproduce our material at your site, people might go to your site and not mine. So I'm afraid I'll have to say no to your request."
I always feel right after I've written this, probably because it is an honest expression of my position. But then I always have misgivings as I hit the send button and wonder whether the person who receives the email will think I am just a cynical capitalist pig with the morals and motivations of a Wall St Trader. And then I wonder whether they might actually be right in thinking this. And then I remember how many things I have to get done today, get on with my business and forget about it.
But today I decided the break the mould and really think through my position and its implications, and do a bit of hand waving about what might motivate other people.
My position and its implications
Maybe I've covered this well enough above, but indulge me while I work it through a bit more. We develop quality content and make it available for people to use for free via our site, or as part of our software demo. We've always done this. Really, I see it as being the only infallible method of driving traffic to your site. Back in the days of our first product, a funky little hypertext application called Palimpsest, we set up a directory of resources called the etext pages. These were all about finding, creating and reading electronic texts. We did this because it meant we had something that was free that we could email other people in our subject area about and say to them "why don't you link to us". On our etext pages then we could have all sorts of ways of pointing to what we were really all about, which was getting people to pony up $50 for Palimpsest. Many people linked to us, a lot of people came to our site, and a very small number of people ponied up the $50.
And so, when we came up with the even better idea of developing a product that didn't need to be explained in a phone book length dissertation, ie, a style sheet editor, we thought to ourselves, "CSS is hard - we'll become the place that makes learning CSS easy.", and The House of Style was born. John wrote (with reference to one of Woody Allen's crummier outings) Everything you ever wanted to know about style, which one day grew up and got all serious and became The Complete CSS Guide. We did a whole lot of browser testing (who *doesn't* love spending hours finding out which values for the overflow property are supported by IE5.5?) and created some browser support tables. Over time we wrote more articles and tutorials and one day we could look around and realised we had a real body of work. People linked to us, indeed, lots of really cool and popular people people linked to us, many many people came to our site, and quite a few of them bought our software. I gave up having to mix cocktails in order to not live on the poverty line, John gave up teaching, we both started to be able to afford freshly squeezed orange juice, and getting the occasional cab home rather than waiting for the 3.15am 380 bus. The time that was freed up through not having to mix cocktails, teach, and wait around for buses at 3.15am was able to be spent developing more, and better content. And so here we are.
But here's the implications bit. For the system to work the content has to be good and original, and it has to be free. The way I see it, it's a bit of a win-win. People who want to learn CSS win because they get a great resource. John and I win because we avoid starvation through working at something we enjoy doing. People who want to learn CSS win even more because John and I have more time and motivation to write more tutorials. People who want to buy a CSS editor or some courses get to do so.
Other people's positions
One thing that does interest me is that most of the other people in our space in terms of the kind of content we produce are definitely not selling a product. Some of them make a few sales of their books, but by and large book sales will not be sole source of income, as software and course are for westciv. A lot of the people in this space make most of their income from being designers and developers. Some are educators and public speakers. All of them love and believe in what they do, and are able to express their interesting ideas clearly. Making content available at their sites would appear to drive a lot of traffic to their sites and essentially make them more famous. So, when someone's looking for a designer or developer, or a speaker, or someone to write a book for them, these are the people they're going to hear about.
But the thing about all of this is that none of it is cynical. It's almost a core belief for me in fact that in this space, if you are cynical, you will not succeed. Cynicism will be sniffed out and spurned as sure as the day is long. I think it will manifest itself in your work not being of as high a standard as it need to be, so of course people won't link to you, they won't come to your site, they won't recommend you to others.
But to swing the pendulum back to the other extreme, with few exceptions, very few of the good sites are labours of love. I think this is for the simple reason that it's pretty damn hard to sit down and produce anything of genuine value after a hard day mixing cocktails. Yes, some sites are probably close enough to labours of love, created by people who have genuine day jobs who don't appear to be too interested in branching out on their own. But these tend to be blogs which essentially document projects or ideas that someone is working on in their real working life. With some notable exceptions I think the content at these sights too tends to be less polished and accessible to a very wide audience.
Where's all this leave us?
I think it leaves us all in a pretty good place. There's a wealth of great resources out there that get added to on an hourly basis. There's food on the table of the people who create this content, so they feel motivated to keep sharing. Good people are getting rewarded for their goodness, albeit sometimes in a pretty roundabout way. But if you happen to meet me, don't try and get under my skin by saying I do everything for money alone. If that was how it worked I think quite a few clever people would do things where there was a slightly less tenuous connection, don't you?
Stick to your guns. I am a photographer and I get asked to "contribute" my images for free. There is little thought on the part of those asking me about how difficult it was to capture a moment or the cost of professional schooling in photography. I too am done subsidizing other people's websites. My own policy for use of other people's photography on my site is this - it's never to decorate my site, it's to inform and instruct on the photographer's skills and promote their work (not my site!) In fact, I seek out a link to the photographer's site and make sure that people go visit it to see more of the photographer's portfolio.
Posted by: Seshu | March 08, 2005 at 02:35 PM