I was digging around for some useful links for an upcoming post about the Dumbledore outing when I discovered this piece of what the fuckery. Turns out that “Ampersand”, one of the blogosphere’s most noted male pro-feminist bloggers, has sold his domain name to a porn site in order to pay for server costs.

More here, though I was a bit perturbed by the Pandagon-bashing in some of the comments.

Update

I’ve taken a closer look at the articles: I didn’t realise the story was over a year old. Here’s Ampersand’s original post about the sale, and here’s a one year later retrospective. I’m still puzzled and shocked by the situation, but I’m starting to see it as part of a pattern of mis-management and inexperience in independent web-based cultural production.

On selling out

One of the most paradoxical problems with producing new media is that increased popularity is actually an incredibly dangerous thing to experience if you don’t have a commercial focus to begin with. Blogging tools like Wordpress are easy to set up but once you get real traffic are also very resource intensive to deliver to an audience. You can offset these resourcing costs by serving contextual Google ads, which examine your content and serve related ads based on keywords. Or you can get into more complex revenue deals with other, noisier ad providers. Either way, you’re going to need content that suggests or pertains to saleable content, somehow. And you’re also going to need to focus on revenue generation and sales, which is hardly what you got into indie blogging for in the first place.

Ampersand clearly ran into some of these problems (and they’re not the only ones) and equally clearly made some questionable decisions in response. Something of the same dynamic is playing out with the acquisition of Television Without Pity by NBC (in its guise as “Bravo TV”). TWOP has struggled with massive popularity and inadequate funding for a very long time. Their creakingly ancient web design must have been costing them a fortune in bandwidth and server load costs, and splitting up recaps into 12+ pages (to increase page views, the primary metric for ad revenue) would have increased the load even further. But at least the site had a bit of style and personality. Post buy-out, it’s all gone, replaced by a hugely corporatised design, ADD-inspired “weecaps”, and the ruthless purging of show recaps that don’t fit the demographic.

I kind of think the only independent content producers who are doing it right at the moment are the BoingBoing guys. On which more later.