Full Stop Mag on Launching a Website, Paying for Writing, and Not Going Bankrupt
When and how did you get your first actual advertisers? Is it feasible to run the site on digital advertising money alone (or do you already do that)?
Right now we run on advertising money alone, but are working on a few ambitious projects (unfortunately I can’t say more than that, for now) which will require outside money, whether it comes from grants or investors. Thankfully, we’re members of LitBreaker, an advertising collective of sorts, that also works with many of our friends/competitors, including The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Believer, and Conversational Reading. Jason Chambers, who runs the network, does a really incredible job —- we’re making significantly more money than we did before we joined and expending significantly less effort to do so than we did when we were going it alone.
Even with a little money in the bank, your editors don’t have salaries. What’s the reasoning behind that?
When we started the site, our options for editorial work were pretty slim. We’d done some writing for other outlets, but we couldn’t afford to do unpaid internships and didn’t have the personal connections that make getting those kinds of jobs a lot easier. We didn’t think that was fair, so we started a site that aspired to maintain some degree of financial egalitarianism. We didn’t like the idea of other people supporting themselves off of our unpaid labor, so it made no sense for us to ask others —- especially others who were in similar financial situations —- to work for free so we could support ourselves.
We pay writers $150 for essays now, however, because we want to stay competitive and because those pieces, which often run to be over 2,000 words take a great deal of time to put together and revise.
So where does the rest of your money go, then?
So for now, besides paying for essays, our cash goes to keep the site running, and to build up a reserve that we can use for projects that will help us compensate our writers and ourselves. We incorporated last year as a 501(c)(3), which took a long time to do (about 3-4 months) but would have taken much less time if we had hired a lawyer, which we didn’t.
We’re really, really careful about how we spend money, even though we’re doing pretty well financially right now. Max Rivlin-Nadler, our blog editor, physically writes the checks, but financial decisions are made as a group — we present any financial issues to the entire editorial staff, not just the founding editors, before approving them.