Broken Toys

I was just thinking that the Massive Insider crew seemed to be posting a lot less than usual very abruptly the last day or two. My guess is that their bandwidth consumption is increasing faster than their ad click-throughs (AFAIK, the only form of revenue generation on the site) as their readership grows. If no one clicks your ads (I’m currently seeing a wide variety of non-gaming-related offerings, perhaps due to the miracle of tracking cookies), you’re not going to make up for losing money by doing it in volume. Various WoW-related sites have had trouble paying the bills when they made it big, with two of the biggest signs being ad sales to less-than-scrupulous adservers (who start serving up pop-ups/unders and/or trojans) and being bought out by IGE.

I don’t fault AOL for doing the math, if that is what’s going on here, but I hope they’re willing to sell rather than kill the sites outright (which is what will happen if they don’t let the post count go back up to normal levels).

Brent over at Virgin Worlds got the job done via donations. I make a few coins off my blogger website via Chitika, which pays out sooner than Google ads and is far more customizable. IMHO, time is valuable, and there is nothing wrong with making a little to compensate for the time spent.

“I’m looking for any position to my work as a writer, anywhere in the US.”

If I were begging for a job as a writer I would phrase it in proper grammar. But that’s just me.

I dropped Massively a while ago as well, mainly because it seemed like it was more a Second Life promotional tool than anything else. And Wowinsider recently pissed me off with it’s fearmongering post about someone with an authenticator getting hacked. When the story was proved to be less than accurate, instead of posting a retraction they put in a “well you’re still not entirely safe” excuse post.

Obvious question: Where is our peer-to-peer web hosting solution? There isn’t any practical reason why a popular site should have higher bandwidth costs than an unpopular site – can’t it just act like a tracker and dump a hash-code for me to pick up at the closest cache?

Bittorrent is a god send for indie sites as you don’t have to worry about being too successful. But when this happens to plain text blogs? I remember LtM got hit with ridiculous hosting fees, but that was like a decade and enough fibre to wrap the earth a few times ago.

Brask: HTTP, theoretically, handles this Just Fine via cache control headers. Content distributors, ultimately, *don’t want* the internet at large caching their content for (possibly illusory) control reasons — the ability to modify content after posting, the ability to un-post something, the ability to track hits and gather advertising metrics for page views… The reasons are endless.

Even Akamai, the old grandad of distributed publishing networks, goes fairly far out of their way to ensure content providers retain the control they’d have if their content was on their own servers; this curtails some of the things they could do to further mitigate the immense bandwidth load they’re under.

Unless there is a fundamental mindset shift in the content production side of things, distributed content publishing is going to remain a tool for the Free Information nerds and for small authors, and be largely ignored by medium and large distributors.

(Content creators apparently get no say in this.)

bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it used to be. we used to have five figure bandwidth bills back in the day

Talked to a friend that works at one of the websites. Guess AOL was being a big mysterious, but the ultimate goal was to get things back in order. Some people were posting more than their contracts allowed, driving up costs. They’re going to start enforcing contractual limitations on the sites.

Nothing drastic, just some people getting worried since the AOL bureaucracy lurched into action before explaining itself. Being the blogosphere, people took things out of proportion. Imagine that!

Have fun.