I have written online content since 2002. My first blog started then. I don’t really remember my motivation for making the initial effort, but I suspect it had something to do with exploring what at the time was a new way of using technology and the opportunity to share personal ideas. Because my interests focused mainly on how K12 classroom teachers could use technology and I had a relatively popular textbook on that subject, I wrote to explore ideas in the same domain and to share these ideas with educators whether they used our textbook or not. I didn’t think about my online writing as a source of revenue. It was college profs who made the decision to assign the textbook. There were no ads on the original blog and I hosted the blog on a server I ran myself.
As blogs became more popular, some of my ideas changed. I had an idea for drastically reducing textbook prices and keeping textbooks more current by shortening textbooks and supplementing the material in textbooks with free online content. I began to explore the idea by creating a separate online site linked directly to our existing textbook as an experiment to see what type of use the online material would generate. Because there might then appear to be a financial benefit, I decided it was time to purchase server access outside of the university so there would be no questions about the inappropriate use of university resources. I was never able to convince our publisher to implement my plan for a $29 textbook, but the idea was planted in my mind and I continued to spend time working on online resources.
Alternate ways of supplying content to students had become a personal interest. I never got into the OER approach. Knowing the amount of time it took to research and write educational materials and being aware that universities really don’t reward such efforts in comparison to research publications and grant submissions, I included the issue of compensation in my explorations. Google ads were relatively easy to add to my content and I gave it a try. Just to put things into a financial perspective, my monthly payments for server space and the fees I pay to own the names for my accounts (Learningaloud and Curmudgeon Speaks) total approximately $200 a year. I could probably lower this amount if I did not want as much control as I have over the types of things I can do on the server, but $200 a year is a great investment for a hobby. As far as ad revenue goes, my total take since starting the ad-enabled versions of my blogs (maybe since 2010) has been less than what I pay for one year of server use. What people may not know about ad revenue is that it is not the appearance of ads that generates revenue, but clicks on these ads. Thinking about how the ad revenue works I admit to being puzzled. I can’t remember ever having purposefully clicked on an ad. I must display a hundred ads a day just being online a lot, but I don’t produce clicks. Others must operate differentially for anyone to make the effort to write for ad revenue.
What I think is often not understood is that the textbook company and authors make zero money after the first sale. I remember our income as 12% of the price to bookstores (the wholesale price). The revision schedule for the book was three years (six semesters). We made most of the total income from the book in the second and third semesters. After that, the used book market took over. The “Technology for Teachers” course has a far smaller potential audience than courses required for large numbers of students (Psychology, Math, Chemistry) and the price for such books is significantly lower, but the competition is also less and there is a demand for frequent revisions because of changes in the field. We were able to generate five editions so we did pretty well.
The textbook business is tough. There are many complaints about the cost of textbooks and there is no doubt the cost of new books is high. However, there are signifiant costs and risks to the companies and the investments they must make. I have some sympathy for the companies knowing the pressure they are under and the number of companies that have given up and sold their holdings so that the number of actual publishers has declined drastically. Our book was part of the holdings of three different companies in fifteen years.
With all of this as background, I remain interested in where the support for educational content is headed. I am still exploring in my retirement and I have the time and body of content I can use to test different compensation models. My more recent explorations have included Kindle, Substack, and Medium. Kindle is an obvious alternative to commercial publishing companies. Authors self-publish at a much lower price (say $10-15 instead of $100). Authors are pretty much on their own in generating interest in their books. Substack and Medium are probably not best understood as book sources. Both provide an audience that authors try to attract. The typical approach is to offer some content for free in hopes of attracting readers who will then pay a subscription fee. Authors typically continue with some free content and some paywalled in hopes of finding a balance that will grow their subscribers. Substack and Medium use different subscription models. With Substack, a reader subscribes to the work of individual authors paying maybe $50 or so to each author. With Medium, readers subscribe to the service ($60 a year) and then read all they want from any author. Medium then has a system to divide up the subscription fees based on how much attention is devoted to the content of a given author. It seems to me that Medium offers the best value. I do subscribe to some Substack content, but I keep thinking I could purchase three Kindle books for each Substack subscription and I would get more out of these three books.
I am now trying to repurpose one of my textbooks for Medium. It is hard to say how this will go. The service is really not designed for books although I have published a book as a series of chapters. It also does not seem that K12 educators are not that well represented among Medium readers as the content tagged K12 seems limited. I like the idea of micropayments so I am giving Medium a try just to see what level of interest I can generate.
I welcome your interest. You can view the free Medium content without paying a subscription and I have some content available that is not behind a paywall.
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