Well, I was thinking that some websites make money, and Barbelith is really a website - although we self-identify as a forum we are actually a place on the internet, I mean, it ends in .com after all and does the things that websites do (renders html, has logged in users, hosts images etc.) so actually you could argue it has the monetary potential of any website.
Let's see, where is the value in Barbelith? In terms of cold, hard, cash?
Well there's the people- having a commmunity of people (or even a list of email addresses) is an asset that could be realised- after all Tom could sell everyone's email address as data to unscrupulous spammers.
But I'm pretty sure he wouldn't, which we're all glad about obvs.
So then there's the infrastructure- Barbelith could be the new Flickr or whatever, and fulfil functions like hosting images or blogs or whatever but again, non-starter as it's leased from someone elses servers I believe (also many other sites do all those things for free, there is already a Flickr for example) so that's not a moneyspinner.
So then there's the content- Bingo! That's where the value in Barbelith is, in the words we've all written over the years, in the conversations we've had and the commentary we've generated. I mean, you could scour the internet for years and never find anywhere with a better resource of info and opinion on Jenny Everywhere, Political Correctness, Bleach etc etc. it's the content that is worth anything.
Of course, getting money for content is a task, but the newspaper industry seems to manage. Take a look at some other websites that make money by displaying or generating content, how do they do it?
Even if nobody ever posts again, there's a fair amount of virtual strip-mining that could be done, re-digesting old threads for modern consumption and cutting chunks out of the body of the 'lith like carrion crows sucking the marrow from it's corpse or Dr Frankenstein harvesting the premier cuts of the dead for his creation... wait, my rhetoric is colouring the business plan- chop up the corpse of barbelith as sell it as content to finance a new board! Nuff said! |
