I’ve got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don’t have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out.
First, after 14 years, I’ve effectively quit my job as a translator – I am self-employed so there’s no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing – you know why – and I’ve been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I’ve known this day would come, and I’m not sad about it.
My motto: it is what it is.
Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next.
Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I’m absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income – ads plus Patreon – does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn’t exactly a cornucopia either. This means I’ve got some serious work ahead of me to change that.
After talking things over with David, OSNews’ owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we’ve already taken a few steps. First, we’ve switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don’t know much about that side of OSNews – as it should be – I can’t comment much on it.
There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews’ revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do.
A third avenue for revenue I’m exploring is sponsorships – this is a longer-term project, and I’m approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information.
The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising.
This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I’ll have to find work elsewhere – and that would mean the end of OSNews. I’m not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand.
Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I’ve really only ever had one job, and that’s being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don’t like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I’m absolutely terrified, and while I believe there’s a sustainable income hiding in this ol’ website, it’s not always clear how to get at it.
Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.
I think I’ve been following OSnews as long as it’s existed, and will continue to do so. Memberships and subscriptions seem like a smart way forward.
No doubt this was a difficult choice. I salute your bravery. I, for one, support many of the media outlets that I trust and believe in. I am not yet an OSnews patron but will pay keen attention to how the next month or so goes and will re-evaluate this soon. I look forward to seeing how the site evolves.
Congratulations and best of luck, Thom.
Thanks, and it’s entirely reasonable and normal for anyone to see how things will go before sending any money anywhere. I’ll try my best!
@Thom, are you familiar with the folks over at lwn.net? They went through a similar transition, have a somewhat similar audience, and may have some good advice.
I know lwn of course, but haven’t really pent any time looking at their transition. I do often encounter people widely sharing “links for subscribers” to their subscriber-only articles, though, and even see them posted by other websites. That’s shitty, and I have a strict policy to never post subscriber-only lwn links.
I have certainly have run into their content on sites like Reddit or Lemmy. Although I sometimes wonder about it, I guess I always came away thinking that they probably benefits more from the wider exposure. I am not aware of anywhere you could go to reliably get subscriber only content without paying and so, if you like what you are reading, it seems reasonable to assume it leads to more subscribers for them not less. I mean, it seems like it is a capability they enable on purpose.
I have never shared subscriber only content myself. Certainly I would also think it wrong if another new aggregator ( not community run ) like OSnews or Phoronix was posting subscriber content from another site as an article
I certainly understand why you may not want to use the strategy at OSnews. It may be a worthwhile experiment however. If it works out, you may grow fast enough to realize your goals. If it feels like it is just becoming free content for others, you can always take the capability away. Something to think about.
Just don’t make us answer skill testing questions every time we want to post something. That almost drove me away completely.
tanishaj,
I have seen osnews articles that lead to subscriber/paywall articles when I try opening them (albeit very rarely). This is unintentional though. I think some of these paywalls try to trick bloggers into spreading their links by allowing a subset of users to get the content without a subscription so they’ll share the links without being aware that others have to subscribe to read them.
Not sure what your comment is referring to, but it reminds me of captcha. I hate those! Fortunately osnews agreed to disable captchas after they had been briefly enabled in wordpress. Google profiles users in order to compute their captcha strength (this translates to forcing more retries). Recaptcha is highly discriminatory though so if you use FF, block google trackers, don’t log into google accounts, they bump up the difficulty. After 4-5 unsuccessful tries I am thoroughly put off by them even to the point of abandoning an ecommerce order.
Oh wow. Good luck! I’ll keep reading 🙂
Have you also thought about cross-posting some of your actual reviews/articles that you right with other sites? That MNT Reform or Chuwi MiniBook X(2003) review would have been quite welcomed on ArsTechnica. Could be another way to spread the this site and gain new readership, while possibly earning some income.
Might be worth reaching out to Liam Proven, who i see pop up often in the comments here. I’m sure he’d provide some good advice as to who to ask even if he couldn’t help much himself.
There’s a massive power imbalance between a small site like ours and the media conglomerate behind Ars. Ars is part of a huge media company, and any article they’d buy from us would help them way, way more than it’d help us. I get the concept, but it would be very bad for us.
Ah, that’s really unfortunate 🙁 A thought, but you’d know the media landscape better than me. Was only thinking finding a way to help drive some traffic here to get some folks interested in sticking around.
Also, any possibility of non-Patreon subscription? While I do have that, and it’s not bad, I would mind doing a bit monthly/yearly sort of thing. But I do get that it’s VASTLY more helpful to see actual total # of subscriptions/etc for planning/etc.
Wow, this is tough.
I always though this was more of your “personal blog” kind of effort when you took over from Eugene. (And where is she btw, would be nice to have occasional guest posts).
However as you have discovered on translation being taken over by modern technologies, so is writing is also on the chopping block: https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-writing-generator/ (“the writing is on the wall”, pun intended)
Not sure what recommendation we could give at this point, but I am planning to stay as long as OSNews is there (and doesn’t deteriorate too much with massive amount of ads).
sukru,
I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot more job displacement in the coming years. People aren’t ready for it, and many don’t want to believe it. But the bottom line is all that matters to corporations. Unfortunately even quality doesn’t matter, cheap goods & services that are “good enough” will take over.
I haven’t yet faced AI related competition, frankly the amazon monopoly already killed off swaths of local businesses. But I know it’s only a matter of time before AI displaces software developers like me too. Sometimes naysayers assume human jobs are safe so long as AI can’t do the entire job. But the threat of AI is less about being an entire replacement, it’s more accurate to view it as a productivity multiplier: 2X,or 4X productivity multiplication still represents a significant amount of job loss regardless of whether the AI cannot do the entire job alone.
In theory, improving work efficiency should be collectively good for society and benefit us all. But the dynamics in our society is extremely imbalanced and there is no doubt this will increase our social divisions. Barring very significant policy changes, that is.
Alfman,
I might be overselling, but I would say the multiplier is more like 10x after you get used to the tools.
But as in the past, after the “shakeup”, it will be better. When ATMs and money counting machines were introduces, bank tellers (T part in ATM) were afraid to lose jobs. But we now have more bank branches, and more bank employees which don’t waste time with unproductive efforts like counting, but rather provide more lucrative services like personal banking and investment advice.
I am afraid it could, not because it should, but because there would be opportunists who like to expand these gaps instead of working towards reducing them.
sukru,
Funny you should say that because I wrote 10x initially. I revised it down because I didn’t want the point to be dismissed on account of the number possibly being too high. The exact number wasn’t the point, the fact that AI could help companies get by with fewer employees was.
I sense a major dichotomy around this issue. On the one hand improving job efficiency should help us all with gains spreading throughout society. But on the other hand, those “opportunists” are in charge of our corporations and might be able to pocket the profits for themselves while conceding nothing to employees or customers. The idealist will say such gains trickle down to everyone, but history shows us that this narrative is extremely naive and/or dishonest in the face of systemic market imbalances.
You seriously want Eugenia back? The woman who insulted her readers right here on the front page? No way.
RumblePony,
Maybe I missed a page somewhere, but was not active for few years in my ~20 years OSNews journey. I remember the good parts. 🙂
It was a long time ago. She called the OSNews readers “freetards”.
RumblePony,
I did not know that. That’s not nice at all… OSNews has been a community…
Whatever state she was in, I hope has changed now.
As a fellow translator, I sincerely hope you’ll succeed. I already put an exemption on my ublock for osnews.
Thom,
I am also self-employed and I understand the struggle. I’ve been trying to grow leads, but local businesses just aren’t doing well and even the ones that are happy with my work are pulling back budgets. All my references get me more of the same struggling clients, some even asking me for a job. It’s especially hard when you’ve got a family to support and this crazy inflation brings less buying power every year. We’re not starving or anything but we’re far from thriving. Things like home ownership are out of the question. My daughter is concerned about not be able to go to university, the feeling that I’m letting her down makes me feel terrible. I’m not in a great place to help out financially, but if you have other ideas that need implementing maybe some of us can help. An osnews linux distro maybe? New social media platform? Haha.
Omg an OSNews Linux distro. I would absolutely love that ♥️ Something we build from scratch too rather than being Debian, Redhat or Arch based etc.
A Linux distro?? Maybe a BeOS themed one haha
But I’d totally pitch in on that. Maybe help Asterinas so we can be a bit niche
Memories of Sequel on OSNews just flashed before my eyes.
While I am not self-employed, there have been lay-offs and pay cuts where I work. I hope to ride the storm for this year without at least losing my job. Though our situation is not the same, I do feel for you and am worried for my family as they have only been getting by since post COVID.
Please keep your chin up and even though it may be hard, family are always the ones that understand us the most. I hope you ride the storm and things do pick soon enough. It has always been a pleasure to read your comments on this site.
I mean, an OSNews Linux distribution would be one hell of an undertaking that could definitely be fun, but at the same time – okay, so, we can agree on the Linux kernel. So do we go systemd or…
…six months later half of us would be in court telling the story of how 6 people died.
Thom Holwerda,
Ouch, valid point. I don’t like everything about systemd. I prefer unix solutions that are kept simple and loosely coupled, but I accept systemd comes with the territory. Everything is better than sysvinit IMHO.
I think it really depends on the goal. You could cover something like this in an ongoing series. Building a basic linux distro from scratch seems formidable, but it isn’t so bad. Some of us have done it and it’s absolutely a great learning experience. Honestly the real burden isn’t building the OS, but how to support mountains of software for your OS. Unless you stick closely to an existing OS like debian to share binaries & packages, this becomes loads and loads of work. This kind of work is not that fun and not that interesting…. maybe there’s an opportunity to delegate this to a novel AI? I don’t really know if it would work, but it would cover new ground and the journey might be both fun and interesting?
This also brings up a dilemma that many OS devs face: would you want to emphasize originality or compatibility? Personally I don’t see much value in just being yet another (poor) clone. To me it is far more fun & interesting to have the goal be something drastically different. But the downsides of this in terms of a daily driver are rather obvious.
I’ve noticed that people have very different perspectives on what’s important: form versus function. People like me tend to care about technical aspects, but many users couldn’t care less about this. They judge an OS on outward appearances. It would be rather hard for someone like me to write anything that would interest those users. Meanwhile it’s hard for me to get excited about the latest GUIs. I like GUIs from win2k/winxp, haha.
A distro would be really cool, but at the same time it might be a big distraction for you if your real job is covering the news and not creating it. It’s just a thought. Whatever you’re ideas are though, as an osnews reader it’s nice to be included in the process 🙂
As for the serious part of your comment – yeah, it’s hard for a lot of people. I am incredibly lucky to live in Sweden, have upper middle-class parents, and have a wife with a good job who’s currently studying, paid full wage, through her work so she can keep growing. A lot of other people who should be doing fine are not due to several decades of neoliberal/neoconservative plundering, and it fucking sucks.
Don’t worry about contributing financially though, Your comments are awesome, and often are more interesting than whatever drivel I can add to a news story. That’s also contributing.
AI could generate excellent text without feeling frustrated when touching the hardware. This ability leads to an apparent competitive advantage for humans. There is another revenue stream: affiliate links for tested equipment.
I really dislike affiliate links personally, but I do know most people (I think?) find them perfectly fine and acceptable as long as it’s disclosed properly. I’ll take it under consideration to see if it would be worthwhile!
Yeah, personally I don’t see a problem with affiliate links if you have a little visible blurb somewhere “this site has affiliate links in articles” or at the top of articles, or what not.
I second that I have no problems with affiliate links. I don’t mind the ad balance on osnews either – it’s done well, never feels obstructive (and I say that as a Patreon patron who could switch them off).
You could offer alternative links for the people who want the choice? Gives folks the ability to support you. Gives folks the ability to use non-tracking links. MoneySavingExpert in the UK did that for some years with some success.
I personally would be fine with affiliate links, and think that they might be a really good bridge tactic that you might hopefully be able to grow past in time.
I’m also going to suggest something that many here might find heretical – so feel free to ignore it: if you’re going the full-time content creator route, and really _commit_ to covering the traditional OSNews domain, then you should at least consider adding another platform, rather than remaining print-only. 😐
__
I get your point about beyond just website/print…but I also feel that probably the core audience of OSNews prefers it as something readable.
Possibly some long form reviews or the like could benefit from short videos for showing UIs, or things like that, rather than solely static screenshots. But personally, I’d rather text based stuff. I HATE the videos that end up being filled with crap, or I can’t just do a quick search to find the section with what I’m interested in.
Hi, Sorry I’m a cheap bastard and donating 5e/month seems too much. I don’t care for ad-free and mainly read just rss feed. Is any of the alternatives to patreon any better when considering service fee etc? Should I rather choose yearly or monthly donation?
All the best. J
Because OSNews is an international endeavour, there’s always going to be service fees, sadly, I personally don’t see much of a difference between either Patreon or Ko-Fi, since our amounts aren’t large enough to really highlight the difference. Maybe, if things go really, really well, I’ll end up being able to answer this question for you.
You can set a custom contribution on Patreon that suits your needs.
CA8$/month also seemed a bit steep for what I currently “get” out of OS News, but I’ve been reading/using the site long enough I felt I really should try to support, so I put in a lower amount that I felt I could afford.
I look forward to an expanded OS News with more content that gives me a reason to up my contributions.
Claps of encouragement for ya, Thom!
I’m sorry to hear about how the translation industry has gone Thom. For now at least, I’m in the position of being able to increase my contribution and will do so shortly. I love your work on here and want to continue reading it for as long as possible.
Like most other folks have already said, I wish you the best in this new endeavor. I don’t post comments often, but I do enjoy the articles and the news. This is one of the few sites I frequent daily, so losing it would be very unfortunate. I’m hopeful the ideas you mentioned pan out, especially if it means more original content.
At this point, I think that job at the hardware store should not be underestimated in terms of effort vs income received. Although now that you know a thing or two about computers you can probably do better and get an IT job.
People denigrate salaried work and complain about how much their boss is making from their “surplus value” until they try to make money from actual clients out there in the real world. Also, so many people are trying to make money from ads nowadays (while ad spending is contracting) that it makes you wonder if there are enough ads for everyone out there. At least with salaried work (in a software developer job) I know how much my labor is worth every month, and I get PTO days. Also, I don’t have children because nope.
kurkosdr,
Yes, and they only see the upside when company is actually making money.
When company is newly founded, in financial stress, or winding down, they would not be willing to personally sacrifice (exceptions apply), but would jump ship if they are not paid full and on time.
The owner on the other hand, if is a good business person, would cut his or her own salary first.
sukru,
This makes me wonder what you think about your former employer’s huge executive pay packages?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867419/google-execs-million-salaries-raise-sec
https://www1.salary.com/ALPHABET-INC-Executive-Salaries.html
Of course this trend is not unique to google. Workers have been making huge productivity gains for many decades, but the proceeds regularly go to the executives and shareholders rather than the workers who’s productivity is up. Executives didn’t earn it any more than those doing the work, but they take what they want because their privileged positions let them. Even when they have all the wealth in the world, they still want to take more at the expense of others. 🙁
Alfman,
I was talking more about startups, small business, and organizations up to roughly a $billion size. You sink or float based on what you do, and the risks founders take on.
Larger than that size, you can hide inefficiencies with excess funds. So that is another discussion.
On the “other topic”, I still have very good friends working at Google, on projects they are passionate about. I have still the respect for these engineers. As for the management… I have probably signed an NDA sometime that would make me unable to express what I want to say here…
sukru,
Of course 🙂
Can’t blame you there.
NDAs aren’t automatically legal especially if they violate other rights, but who few people really want to go to court over it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/14/google-nda-illegal-california/
The lowest current patreon tier is £5/month, which is fine, but I’m already supporting a lot of projects on patreon so can’t commit that much to a new one at the moment.
Can you add a basic supporter tier of around 2.50 or so, don’t need any benefits, but I’ll sign up to support you.
Double-post about this but you can set a custom amount to whatever you want on Patreon. Also interesting for me when I reduced it there isn’t an HST (Canadian VAT) tax added — perhaps similar for you.
Hmm.. the Android app doesn’t let you set a custom amount.
I found the option on the web interface.
start doing video. expand to other platforms, a website is fine, but kinda lazy. if you start reporting weekly about what’s going on it’s another way to bring in income and expand your offerings.
iluvcrap2000,
Oddly enough I find that youtube and tiktok are kind of lazy. Running your own website is more work but it stands out. I’m of the old school opinion that you shouldn’t depend on others to promote your work. With that said though sometimes the lazy way wins.
Good luck Thom,
I think joe at omg ubuntu is doing a good job at engaging readers with high quality graphics and somewhat asking and answering the good questions. Something on retrocomputing, os architecture, privacy with good explanations and opiniated would be great. omg is nice for day to day app but too focused and Ars does not do enough Os articles imho.
Best of lucks Thom!
Greatest respect for those of us that might be losing work to newer technologies and that have to have a hard look at adapting. Heck the newer generations even saved the step of learning how technology works at all and make money out being influencers. It’s tough, it’s not fair, but it’s just happening.
I was hoping to find a $1 or $2 Patreon tier that offered me absolutely nothing. Just the ability to leave a little tip in the tip jar.
Best of luck Thom.
I’ve been visiting OS News for over a decade. Its fun, but often I go weeks without checking it and sometimes months without really reading anything intently. Its still nice to know its here and I check in every now and then, but nothing like I was a decade back. As such subscription isn’t quite the right model to entice cash out of a fond but irregular visitor like me.
Someone like me would be tempted to pay if there were a “Honesty box” under each article, for one-off payments. Could be a green banner under the article with, “Did you like this article? Consider paying for it with our honesty box ->” and a simple Paypal button. Perhaps Patreon allow a one-off Paypal like button. Advantage of Paypal is most of us have it and are logged in already.
There are a couple articles a year that I would pay a couple quid for each. And there is the occasional article which I’d pay more for, such as the Alphasmart one a few years ago.
OS news is worth it. You’ve always done an amazing job. Looking forward to it. Flair upgrade test…
Oh well, Can’t expect an instant upgrade.
I just changed your level to the highest one – you’re the first and only one at the highest tier, so I hope everything works. You get to choose a custom text flair, so let me know what you want – for now I named you “Platinum Prime”, but that’s a placeholder.
It takes a bit for it to update! Also, incredible amounts of thanks – this is insanely appreciated!
Omg there it is! The platinum badge is the BeOS logo, which I still think os ridiculously cool.
YES!!! Thanks Thom!!!
Oh, man, that’s some premium bling, Bill!
Well, this is exciting! Best of luck going forward 🙂
OSNews is one the few sites I’m happy to support by disabling my ad blocker.
I’ll be sure to add a direct financial contribution as well.
I’ve joined the Patreon. I’ve been an OSNews reader for a long time, and if I want that to continue, this is the time for me to step up. This leap obviously must feel huge and scary, so I can pitch in at least this much to help support the experiment for however long it lasts. Good luck!
I’ve also been a multi-daily OSNews reader since it’s very earliest days. I still have such an affinity for BeOS, it hurts that it died the way it did. I once sent some Haiku error codes into them and JLG emailed me back! Wish I still had that one.
I sponsor Wikipedia and SomaFM as they have both given me so much over the years. I’ll be adding OSNews to my list. (also helped on the computer fundraiser)
Hey Thom, if you ever want to do a blackberry deep dive, I’ve still got some BB10 devices around. (another tragedy)
Do you plan to add referral links to articles? It’s not like Amazon sells a ton of the stuff that OSNews talks about but it’s one more source of revenue.
Actually it would be good if some of your time went into editing for other posters and building that back up, otherwise OSNews ends up becoming Thom’s blog and that probably isn’t healthy…. even as things already were, the ratio is pretty hard in the wrong direction.
Joking about OSNews Linux… heh, I mean the way to do that is as a joke, but a quality joke and then it takes off and becomes a whole thing, and OSNews ends up dead because you are all in the Bahamas 😀
Good luck with it Thom. I hope the best for you and OSNews.
Just as a general comment/brainstorm to your post. Remember that “content is king” and the most important things it to have content on OSNews that will attract more readers. Changing hosting and Ads sponsor is good, but the focus and the hard part is the content.
But I also have a concern, are news/community web pages still good media to accomplish a sustainable income? I ask this because I see everybody moving to video platforms to get a decent income. But the issues is that not all people and not all subjects are suitable for Video YouTube Channel.
This post is just to think a little but about it.
Best wishes Thom, I hope it works out for you. I’m not sure if I’ve seen it in any other comments but also let people know how they can support you even if they can’t do so with money. I recall Michael Larabel at Phoronix saying that if people turned off their ad blockers on his site then his ad revenue would improve making Phoronix more sustainable:
https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium
I’ve done so for osnews.com also.
I’ve been a member of OSNews since 2002 as a PFY, when my IT manager at the time, and mentor, informed me about OSNews along with theregister (BOFH) articles back in 2002. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Eugenia’s editorial work and Thom’s later on, especially as my experience in IT grew. Those were the days that I wished Patreon existed and was available on this site. Now, I’m on a fixed income (disability) and only look to either one time payment options, as I’ve done for OpenBSD. recurring, subscription based options aren’t feasible , as hard times occur in such a way that I could inadvertently overdraw my bank account because of recurring payments that are eventually forgotten. There are pros and cons to all of Thom’s options, but most of them are a numbers game. I can empathize, as I’ve been out of work for two years now. I detest ad technology, paywalls, etc. But for the sake of OSNews, I only ask for balance in Thom’s decision.
Have you considered purchasing power parity for countries with devalued currency?
I don’t know if Patreon has this option
I’m from Brazil