A Personal Coronavirus Diary; Losing My Sponsorship
The trick for a working writer is captured in the phrase “dedicated revenue streams.” Most of us don’t place books on best-seller lists or have staff writing gigs at the New Yorker or Washington Post. (In fact, most people writing for high-status newspapers or magazines are freelancers and get paid by the word.) For most of us, a career is cobbled together by writing books (with advances and, if you’re lucky, royalties) and articles augmented by other revenue-generating activities: speaking, teaching, consulting. In order to eliminate the capriciousness of the life, we try to line up some of these as ongoing streams, so we begin the year knowing some income will arrive without having to go out and find a new project and sell it.
Good old Covid has not been kind to these schemes. Half my dedicated streams for this year have vanished, and unless I do something quick, the other halves will vanish in 2021. Given the likelihood that Covid will last into the next year (I would place it at “dead certainty”), this is an unsettling state. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll walk through my own situation as a way of illustrating how all this is impacting my tiny little corner of the world. For today’s post, let’s start right here with the blog.
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Four years ago, I had the incredible fortune of landing Guinness as a sponsor for this blog. They have been a wonderful source of support for my life as a writer, and it’s literally true that had they not sponsored me when they did, it’s very likely I wouldn’t be a working writer today. They brought that “dedicated stream” to a level where paying the bills was (almost) possible. And yet, when I was casting around for a sponsor, I wasn’t sure how it would work or whether it was the right model.
The first question was whether I should even continue with the site. Most writers don’t maintain blogs. They would rather put their effort into procuring and writing paid gigs. It was kind of crazy that I hadn’t monetized the site at all for its first decade, and I realized I couldn’t put the hours of work into it for free anymore. Either ditch it or—sorry for the crass jargon—monetize it. I decided to try the latter before resorting to the former, and considered how to do so in the way that would minimize my conflict of interest while maximizing revenue.
As a one-man show, there is no barrier between editorial and advertising, and so that conflict-of-interest question was always going to be tricky. (As an aside, it’s actually a lot more tricky with larger publications who claim an advertising/editorial firewall, too—that firewall has always been porous.) There are different ways to monetize content, including ads, subscriptions, and sponsorships, and I considered them all.
For example, Boak and Bailey use Patreon. It’s a voluntary-subscriber model in which people sign up to support a site and receive some insider bonus material. This is easily the best model if you can make it work—your clients are the people you’re writing for, so all the motivations are aligned. There are no conflicts of interest and no sales—and it helps build a bond with subscribers. Unfortunately, beer is a small niche and when I ran the numbers, it didn’t pencil out. (Though there may be some new opportunities thanks to new tech—which I’ll address in a post on Thursday.)
Ads, another possibility, require sales, which is time-consuming, and expose the blogger to far more opportunities for conflicts of interest. One typically works with local businesses as well, which means the same businesses I would more often cover. They do have the potential to generate a fair amount of revenue, though, so the conflict and revenue were both high.
The third option seemed the best of both worlds. Working with one or a select group of sponsors and being extremely transparent about the relationship. There’s clearly a conflict of interest, but it arises less often. Because it is part of my promise to readers, whenever I mention a sponsor, even passingly, I acknowledge the relationship. That is easier when there’s just one—and easier for readers to keep track of. The level of transparency is a lot easier to maintain.
What I got from that relationship is obvious. What Guinness got, aside from a banner on the site, was my attention. Over the four years of the Guinness sponsorship, I’ve visited both Dublin and Baltimore and written a fair amount about the breweries. No doubt readers absorbed these pieces with an asterisk in their minds, but I am satisfied that they met my standard for journalism. They are not sponsored content. Have a look at this piece about Michael Ash and this one about Baltimore to see if you don’t agree. Looking back, it was definitely the right call for this blog.
The coronavirus, unfortunately, has challenged breweries and their ad budgets. It is not clear that Guinness will be able to continue as my sponsor, and beginning July 1, this blog was officially generating zero dollars again. I hope to find new sponsors—even if Guinness can eventually re-up again. But given the uncertainty of the times and the slashed budgets, it may be a while.