The Perils of On-line Publishing

The Canadian election led some people to my articles How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics? and Should Canadian Taxpayer’s Finance Political Parties? I chose those topics because I thought that would happen.

When you search for “How Would Proportional Representation Change Canadian Politics?” on Google the first item is my article. The big disappointment for me is that it is the copy on the site that pays the least. My higher paying sites are further down the list.

I hadn’t thought of that as a problem before. I felt that the various sites would draw different groups of people, so the more sites I had, the more readers, and money, I would get. Now I see that they can compete.

I wanted to remove the article from the low paying site, so it wouldn’t steal readers from my other sites. It turns out that they don’t allow you to delete your articles. All the other sites where I published my articles allow you to delete your articles, so I never thought to ask.

I ran into video sites that don’t allow you to delete your videos after you’ve uploaded them. The terms of service do say they get a perpetual right to show the videos on their site, so there is no way to get out of it.

I have thought for sometime that it makes a lot of sense to have your own website to publish on. You do have more control over your work, although you do give up a lot of exposure that you would get on larger sites. On the other hand, I notice that it is the smaller sites that are more likely to want perpetual rights. I expect that isn’t just a co-incidence. That would drive away the more savvy video makers, who also draw the most viewers.

I experimented with publishing my stories on my site (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/writing.php) and more recently I tried a video (see: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/extra_special_care.php). So far I haven’t got a huge number of visits, and they’ve dropped off in the last few weeks, but my site does better than some of the other sites I post on.

Last year when I thought of ways to promote my website, I came up with an idea for A Co-operative Video Website. If I can find other people who also want to set up their own sites, then we could come up with a way to link the sites, which would expand our audience.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog