Themestream

» see themestream.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Themestream ran on one sentence you could explain to your parents. Write about whatever you actually know, publish it under your own name, and every time somebody opens the page you get ten cents. No editor to get past, no invoice to chase. The company was started in August 1999 by people who had come out of Netscape and Primedia, and the site went up while the market still believed that an audience was a thing you could buy your way into.

The people who showed up were amateurs, in the older sense of the word. Model railroaders and retired teachers with strong opinions about their local school board, over forty thousand of them by the end, filing pieces about gardening or about how to deal with a difficult sister. For most of them it was the first time anything they had written carried a number next to it.

The number was the problem. Ten cents a read is a rate that only works if the reads come from somewhere other than the people getting paid. Themestream's traffic mostly did not. Writers read each other and linked each other, and the general public that was supposed to arrive and generate the ad revenue never showed up in the volume the arithmetic needed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the math ~

Work it out in the direction the accountants had to. A thousand reads costs the company a hundred dollars in payouts. In 2000, a thousand banner impressions against hobbyist content brought in a few dollars if the sales team was having a good week. Every page view Themestream succeeded in generating made the hole deeper, and the more writers it recruited the faster it dug.

I was seventeen and in Turkey when this was running, on a dial-up line where the idea of getting paid in dollars for a page nobody could guarantee anyone would open sat somewhere between science fiction and a scam. The English-language personal essay economy of 2000 was a US thing with a US payment rail behind it, and it never occurred to me that I was outside it, because I did not know it existed.

~ the letter ~

On 11 April 2001 the contributors got an email. Due to the current business climate, the Themestream web service will close its doors on April 13, 2001. It went on to say that it was very unlikely the company would be able to pay any other creditors, contributors included, and advised everyone to back up their articles before the deadline.

Two days. Whatever you had put there, in whatever quantity, you had two days to pull it back out by hand, and whatever you were owed you were not getting. A fair number of people discovered at that moment that they had no other copy.

~ the shape that returned ~

Paying writers by the read did not stay dead for long. It came back with better instrumentation and better excuses, in partner programs and creator funds run by companies that had quietly worked out how easy a per-view rate is to announce and how easy it is to cut later. The failure mode came back with it. The audience gets assumed while the payout is real money going out the door, and the gap gets closed on whoever is writing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »