How do you sell ethics without selling out?
When doing the wrong thing isn't making any money, how can one hope to make money doing the right thing? Time for some new ideas.
For those of you who don’t follow, Consumerist is a consumer-advocate blog run by Gawker Media. Hard times have hit everyone, it seems, and Gawker can’t afford to maintain all of their sites. So they’ve put the worst performers up for sale.
Consumerist is in a tough spot because it doesn’t bring in any direct revenue. How’s that? Well, as a blog that points out the bad behavior of big companies, Consumerist is ethically bound not to accept any advertising—as if any company would dare to purchase some. Instead, Gawker counts on the blog to bring traffic to other sites within its network. So, I suppose if something’s got to give, a site with no effective income is the place to start.
“How does Consumer Reports do it?” you might ask. Their situation is similar in that they cannot accept any ads or even demonstration products as it might potentially bias their work. To make money, they have to charge subscriptions—even on their website. It works well enough to keep them in business, but it keeps a resource for good out of reach for many people.
Why blog about this? Because it goes back to the key question Design Less Better is wrestling with at the moment: How does one make money being ethical?
We don’t know yet, but we will venture to say that if advertising and subscriptions are your only ideas for making money online, you are screwed. Not just if you’re ethical, but in general. Nobody likes ads, that’s why they block them. Subscriptions don’t work out, either. These revenue sources do not take well to the web. The medium —and the customers— tend to flow around them. The sooner we figure out alternative business models that don’t annoy customers, the better for everyone.
That’s a tall order, especially if we’re striving for the highest ethics. I’m not saying we have the answer, but we’re cooking something up that may work for ourselves. We’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, I hope someone smart buys Consumerist and figures out a way to keep it going. They’ve helped a lot of people and have been a great resource as we build the Taxonomy of Unethical Designs. It would be a shame to see it disappear.
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