In recent weeks yet another major online content producer has silently slipped into oblivion: Suck, long a bastion of independent and critical thought, is now into perpetual repeats presumably until someone shuts down the power to the servers, or the lucrative domain name is acquired by an adult oriented site. Suck represented all that was good with the net: Critical expressions voiced without mega-corps. controlling the presses worrying about offending allies or inciting frivolous lawsuits. Long, rambling essays detailing the failings of society in general, our culture, technology figures, and our media were cutting, extremely relevant, and often opened one's eyes to things that we didn't even really consider. Suck had great, often updated content, fantastic artwork, and their servers were always up and always nice and speedy. Suck has been around since 1995 in the early days of the mainstream net, when Netscape was the cool new innovation, and Suck pioneered the use of links to bring humor and context into discussions. Then, unexpectedly, on July 8th, 2001 readers were met with a notice indicating a summer vacation. Things became more clear when articles in major outlets detailing the death of Suck hit the airwaves: Suck had followed the route of so many other online shops and had run out of money after the promise of advertisement supported content failed to pay the bills: The bandwidth providers want cash, the landlord wants cash, and the employees need to eat. Something has to give when income < expenses for extended periods of time with no reasonable end in sight.
Suck is yet another reminder that doing what you do professionally on the web is very difficult to do in the current environment, unless of course you live in your parents basement and host your server as a parasite on a relative's corporate network, and expect nothing more from your creations than the odd pat on the shoulder. Not only do you have to contend with advertisers who doubt your hits, doubt your reader profile, and try to weasel out of paying however possible (see "performance advertising" which is totally contrary to the standard foundations of advertising where the goal is to build namespace and mindshare), you also have to deal with denial-of service attacks, massive bandwidth requirements (and therefore hosting requirements), and hackers making active round-the-clock management of the site necessary. Most importantly though you have to have the time in you and your team-mates lives to be able to do what you do. This means that no one should expect that staff-writers at Suck (or any other reasonable online site: Note again that these are my random rants and this is by no means a "content" site) have day jobs pumping gas or waiting tables while they look forward to running home to write the latest article for tens of thousands of daily readers. Instead it seems reasonable that they should make enough for their blood, sweat and tears to live a reasonably normal life (with the possibility of excelling). I'm not talking about ridiculous money-for-nothing schemes with 20 year old .COM billionaires (such was the big dream of the early net when people would pay millions of dollars for domain names. BTW: yafla.com is for sale for $1,000,000. (-:), but rather professional people who are great at what they do (as the contributors and artists were at Suck) getting paid a reasonable salary to allow them time to create. Without this the creators end up with jobs unrelated to their talent and the world loses out. No matter what any open source fanatic claims, the simple reality is that giving someone the financial means to live a reasonable life and spend their time doing what they excel at is always better than expecting the thing that they produce of value to be offered up without financial reward forever, because such a foundation quickly collapses under the weight of reality: A million plans were undertaken because someone though that they'd "really enjoy it" as a hobby, but when reality kicks in the project collects dust because there are too many other things to do. Put a little cash at the end of the rainbow and it's amazing how people will be much more attuned to actually spending the time and effort doing not only what they enjoy, but what is in a form that others can enjoy.
So the lesson is really this: Suck, with expenses of a reasonably low $50K / month, and one million different visitors per month, could not pull it off. Could they have saved expenses by cutting back on free King Dons (only kidding: I have no idea what the work environment was like) or paying the employees less and getting by with less expensive hardware? Maybe, who knows. However it was bad enough that they closed the door rather than "downsized", and you can be sure that in the months before everything to reduce expenses that could be done was done.
The irony of all of this is that while it appears that advertiser driven content is a failure, the reality is that in gross dollars the amount spent on online advertising is actually increasing. One must presume that the major existing businesses are getting the lion's share of the advertising dollars. Sites such as MSNBC and CNN. This is an unfortunate twist because one of the benefits of the Internet was that it equalized and gave a printing press to everyone, and this premise still holds true, however the real power and influence has returned to the big boys with the big bank accounts. As always the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
So I took the plunge and installed WebWasher. The reason was quite simply that many sites had taken the campaign of advertising far too far, and while I'm completely willing to tolerate banners (even large) and reviews split into multiple pages to increase the impressions, etc., and I fully understand the reasoning for such measures, multiple pop-ups that reappear each time I navigate to a new page is simply unacceptable (indeed it was why I ceased following links to any GeoCities hosted site many moons ago). When I go to mainstream sites like MSNBC and gigantic pop-ups appear it quickly causes me to go elsewhere, however I've found that so many sites now do it that I can't simply banish the sites in question as navigating through links on discussion boards will quickly lead to a desktop overpopulated with spycam pop-ups and other such nonsense. As I mentioned in another article there are some "technologies" out that spawn a popup upon leaving the page with the intentional goal of obfuscating which page actually caused the ad, and to me this has pushed all reasonable limits. As such I've decided that I'm going to take control of my own technology and banish popups (or at least to the greatest degree possible), and WebWasher makes this possible. As an twist though it's oh so easy to keep the banner ad filter on at the same time, so it's interesting to think that the attempts to make more money through advertisements has turned right around and caused otherwise apathetic users to eliminate advertisements entirely.
So what's to be done, or must we simply watch the collapse of the sites we frequent the most continue unabated? I believe the advertising model will continue to be a total failure for supporting online content, for the reasons I dictated at the beginning of the micropayment article, and indeed with the increased intrusiveness of ads more and more people are going to use tools like WebWasher to rid themselves of the nuisance leading to a catch-22 for content companies trying to recoup their costs through higher paying ads. For the near term I believe that the only salvation with be an easily usable, very low overhead, no barrier to entry micropayment system (as I detailed in a prior article) that allows each of us to pay our way (very inexpensively. The reality is that the efficiency of numbers means that very little would be required of each user). I have noticed that the PayPal donation method is taking off and that's a good first step, but such donation measures are usually met with great enthusiasm at first, followed by a prisoner's dilemma psychology where everyone feels that they're the sucker if they donate while others aren't. To really take off sites need to start an effective, efficient subscription based system not based on page views (unless heavily bandwidth intensive where it should be based on views), but rather on short period time based subscriptions. In the case of Suck if such an efficient system were in place (ergo not credit cards) I would happily pay $0.25 a week, for example. What's a dollar a month if it gives me a chuckle every now and then?
Links
Plastic, a Suck relative that is now apparently an amateur driven site, had a conversation thread regarding the vacation.
Jon Katz wrote a mini-essay posted at Slashdot (of course with the follow-up replies). I actually submitted an article (2001-06-13 22:47:38 The death of content on the web (articles,enlightenment) (rejected)) regarding this the prior day, however it was rejected. Alas.
Salon posted an article about the demise of Suck, Feed, etc.
The Washington Post has an interesting article as well.
In my article regarding micro payments, or electronic money, I detailed my belief of the demise of the net as we know it.
