Hunter Cashdollar

JonnyB’s right, as site owners we shouldn’t rely on people writing for free, and I don’t. To continue the analogy, I was using my own plastic to make margarine tubs before anyone else offered me theirs.

I was on the verge of being able to pay writers a few years back, but then our ad revenue collapsed along with everyone else’s and it hasn’t recovered to the point where I could make meaningful payments. The people who have written for me over the years have never done so because they thought I’d be able to pay them one day (on the few occasions that I’ve mentioned the possibility, a couple have said they wouldn’t want paying anyway). They write because they enjoy doing it, but everyone’s got to eat.

Right now I don’t know of any UK site that pays its writers, which is a great shame because I’ve seen some brilliant writers and they deserve to be rewarded. The only realistic way that’s going to happen is if a handful of sites really take off. As ducksam said, both for the sake of quality and survival, we have to come together in some way.

Unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon. I don’t blame people for starting new sites – heck I did that five years ago and there were a few other sites then, like the much-missed Brains Trust and Herd of Sheep. Everyone dreams of being as successful as The Onion, but while we’re all doing similar things in competition we’re only dividing the audience. More often than not the new guys are gone within a few months, either because they get bored or they get fed up with nobody reading their stuff. If they’d joined an existing site and helped promote that in the first place then we’d all be better off.

O’Farrell might not follow that rule because he has the contacts to build up an audience, but that will only work if the content’s good enough. Right now the majority view seems to be that it isn’t.

Satire editors are already working together through projects like HumorFeed, but it’s hard to see any closer cooperation because that would probably involve people giving up their sites to some degree. So we’ll all just carry on doing what we’re doing, and innovating where we can. I just hope the mediocrity doesn’t come through the middle and give us all a bad name in the meantime.

The ‘consolidate things for a revenue stream’ point is good. However, if I were to start a business making margarine tubs, I’d probably need to get some form of bank loan in order to pay the people I wanted to supply me with plastic.

I assume that they would not want to donate the plastic on the offchance that I could build up my margerine tub business and possibly buy plastic off them in the future.

That might be shortsighted on the part of the plastics people. But hey! They have to make that sort of decision in the plastics business. It’s a dog eat dog world.

Ben, you’re spot on about the current content on NewsBiscuit. I hope that they just thought, let’s throw some stuff up there and build from there. By ‘existing top UK satire sites’, if you mean DeadBrain, RockallTimes and the others mentioned by Chris in his piece, I agree that NewsBiscuit is not challenging them for ambition at the moment, but as for quality, there’s not much to choose.

I just think it would be great to see the best of DeadBrain et al gathered in one place and given great production. The more ‘authentic’ the presentation, the better the satire works – another problem with the amateur aesthetic of most web content.

I agree with you, the content is consistent – however, as with most production line comedy (the Onion included) is only as good as the ingredients comprising it. Whereas the Onion has a team of writer working on an individual story, those on NewsBiscuit seem to be a short and formulaic creation of a individual playing on cliched, tried and tested satire techniques.

Well, that’s the point – it’s very little to do with the organisation of comedy on the web, and a lot to do with the sustainability of revenue streams on the web, which is what you need for the sort of full-time, professionally edited venture you’re talking about. I don’t think any writers need to “swallow their pride” to think that it would be great if there were a large number of websites that accepted submissions and paid well for them. “Allow your wildest fantasies to run riot” would probably be a more accurate description of the necessary mental process there.

But those websites just aren’t there, because the money just isn’t reliably there. That’s why the places where people get edited and paid are mostly offshoots from traditional media – remember, The Onion (which is able to maintain its consistency in a way few other sites are because it does have a paid staff) was, and still is, a paper paper.

Way back when, in the heady days of Bubble 1.0, there were a lot of dedicated comedy portals that got launched, then mostly died quickly. Maybe we’ll see some more crop up soon now that the money’s back, but even then, I suspect they’re more likely to be community-based, social-networky aggregators of stuff, with voting and tagging and rounded corners, than traditional central-editor models.

Which is what Chris was actually getting at, I think – the web actually has excellent mechanisms for bypassing the need to wade through crap, and they’re all socially driven by communities at large, rather than by John O’Farrell’s (or anybody else’s) personal editorial taste.

NewsBiscuit is a terrible name, which is a great shame, and the current content is variable, but I would say, on the whole, more consistent than most other UK news satire sites. I agree that O’Farrell’s columns were formulaic and mostly not very good, but that’s the problem with asking one writer to produce a lot of material. Which is the same problem with comedy/satire blogs.

I agree with most of what you say in your piece, Chris, but I disagree with your conclusion. You seem to be saying that it’s in the nature of the internet that talent should be dispersed and that readers should have to wade through a lot of crap to find the jewels. I think that’s what turns off a lot of people.

Those of you who are writers should swallow your pride and start imagining a brave new internet where there is quality control, proper editing, and you get paid for your work. Or am I missing the whole point of the internet – enthusiastic amateurism?

How much does it really cost to design and run a site in Wordpress, or did some canny web designer see them coming, do the old plumber routine and charge them £30k?

I also like the explicit breaking of Google Ads’ terms of service in the cycling headlines above the main column…

Still, who am I to mock? The message board is full of praise – and it’s not like Mr John “humourless propaganda emails for Labour in the run-up to last year’s general election” O’Farrell would stoop to astroturfing on his own site, is it?