www.wineanorak.com <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt became clear,\nthough, that even with good traffic, banner advertising wasn\u2019t going to pay a\nproper salary. This wasn\u2019t my goal, though: although the income was welcomed, I\nrealised that giving away content helped grow my reputation and then led to other\nwork. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other wine websites\nhave gone down the paywall route, giving away a limited amount of free content,\nand then charging for access. This works for some, but I don\u2019t want to go down\nthat route. It drastically reduces the number of people who see your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to keep\nwineanorak free, because I want to get my work out to as many people as\npossible. I can make money other ways: books, lectures, consulting, judging\nwine and writing for other publications. And there\u2019s also money to be made from\n(clearly marked) sponsored content on my website and social media feed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the material on\nwineanorak is free to access and is read by many people, then this makes me\nvery useful to regional bodies and producer associations, because if they get\nme to visit, the message reaches a lot of people. It\u2019s a site with a global\naudience, and everyone benefits. If I do a trip but then hide the write-ups\nbehind a paywall, then the message only reaches subscribers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other model is to\ngive content away and then appeal to the better nature of people, or the\nloyalty of regular readers, to make a contribution. I like this idea, although\nI don\u2019t know how many people donate in these situations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think free-to-access\nis the way to go. Others have different ideas. But this model of giving\nhigh-quality content away works in my situation. Increasingly we are seeing\ncontent disappearing from the internet \u2013 if you have high costs, like offices\nand staff, then these need to be recouped. But that just leaves the road\nclearer for people like me offering professional, quality content for free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The big thing with professional content generation: how to make it pay. Since the advent of the internet, and the rise of the Google\/Facebook duopoly, advertising money has been sucked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-of-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24438,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24435\/revisions\/24438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}