label

business models

Linked to 14 items

• from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

  Caroline 24:11 business modelsI think we’re sort of lucky and that we got in early. And so we’ve been around long enough that our Patreon subscribers more or less support a baseline. It's just like a five or 8 dollars or euros subscription if you are accessing the community or just listening to the podcast. Julian and I use the podcast as a R&D arm for also doing some more commercial consulting. That is usually NDA or internal. Those things together give feedback, which is helpful. We get insights from doing those kinds of jobs, which I feel we can then bring to whatever we're doing on the podcast.

• from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

  Channel is super interesting. business modelsI still have hope for something in that general structure to work. We sold a bundled subscription to New Models, Joshua Citarella and Interdependence, which is the podcast of Matt Dreyer and Holly Herndon. It was one NFT, and it was an unlimited subscription to the podcast content for this NFT. The NFT was a token that unlocks a private RSS. co-publishingI think there is something really promising in being able to co-publish with other entities, to not be dependent on Patreon or any of these larger platforms. There’s been a proliferation of different platforms in the time since we first started thinking about Channel. It need not be dependent on a large platform, but the problem is that they often don’t help with discovery. In theory, they could. So if there’s some way to reconcile those two things, you have a really interesting podcast publishing model on your hands.

• from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

  I’m just not sure how to make those inroads exactly, because there’s so much capital there. What 100K could do, not just one, but a constellation of small publishers, that’s significant. I just wonder how to match that money. Money still, at least in America, it still seems to operate in this very strange way. The traditional circles where we apply for funding, you have to contort your project into this very particular kind of mission. business modelsHow can we better match the money and the thinking, that’s always been the negotiation of the art world. How do you find somebody with funding and somebody with ideas and find some kind of Venn diagram space where they need each other? So maybe there’s some social engineering to do. Is it a cultural question? For sure it’s not technical.

• from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

  There’s also this bit of a purity question, who you take money from. It’s bad to take money from certain places and that’s kind of true, but also then who ends up winning and who then ends up getting to publish. business modelsI don’t think there’s some magic formula of like 30% books and 20% live streams and 10% podcasts. And I think it’s using all those available resources and also calibrating in a different way to the social, both in terms of the audience and those who may be interested in funding those audiences. We’ve seen kind of a dark pattern in the world of praxis and like Thiel bucks. I don’t know if that’s necessarily repeatable with more savory figures.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  Carolina 22:21 We could spend a whole day untangling these threads together! You were just talking about how you combine your other work with the collective work and how you also bring your individual experiences into Clusterduck as a collective. When preparing this, I also saw in another interview that you gave that you sort of define yourself as business modelsemployed in the creative gig economy by day and meeting online at night. I’m curious if you can expand on that with how you ensure or work towards some kind of sustainability of your collective and how you operate in this way.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  Noel 32:43 I wanted to say something more about what Silvia was saying, about self-exploitation in the cultural industry, because I think it’s a very important topic. That’s one thing I wanted to address, this relationship between the corporate jobs that we have — which have a lot of limitations and issues and problems that I think I don’t need to address that are quite self-evident… But on the other side, the deal is very clear, and sometimes it’s more honest than what you have in the cultural industry because business modelsthe cultural industry thrives on those grey zones of informal work that Silvia was addressing. It’s much more apt at colonizing your free time and your passions, while at the same time criticizing exactly those kinds of things, and that’s what makes it feel very weird, to say the least, sometimes.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 36:43 It was possible to sustain Monoskop for this long because we run and operate our own infrastructure. We have our own computer server, which was first installed in 2008. We don’t even have a rack. It’s not a virtual machine, it’s a real piece of metal, sitting in Prague in a small server house. It’s not just Monoskop but almost 100 different kinds of domains, platforms, and websites that run from the server, and we are two admins. I’m not good with server administration, but I’ve been learning this for many years, and I know how to set up an email account and a domain. sustainability of workflowsWe operate the server and we have control over the hardware and software environment that makes these websites possible to serve the public audience. The server itself is operated by two of us, but we are part of the NGO which has been running a festival for many years, so there is a legal body attached to the server. Partially, it used to operate from grants when we do events. Now it’s mostly donations, and we have one or two websites for larger cultural initiatives that give us some fees. We’ve been able to run it for 15–16 years. business modelsIf Monoskop were sitting on a commercial provider, I think they would cut us off sooner or later. In terms of the traffic and security we’ve had some attacks, and it requires work from our side, so I would say it’s not easy to run a server but it’s possible: there are so many servers and some of them are operated by artists. communityThere are lots of different communities that have their own infrastructure and I mention this because this is often overlooked, invisible and considered “too geeky”. It’s crucial to work with the web on a long-term basis and experiment with it.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 21:36 business modelsThat’s quite a challenge, to be honest, and completely transparent. I’m not sure that OSP currently is or has a sustainable business model for its members. What we try to do is to make the development of the tools part of the work, we do not separate the making of the tool and the making of the design, but we try to further the tool during the making of the design. We also have a document that we call the Collaboration Agreement. Through this, we try to explain our practice towards future collaborators. So the function of it is to, from the start, make clear that the work on the tool is part of the work on the design. So to come back through this “practice shapes tool shapes practice”, the idea is to extend the functionality, making something new possible, which in the case of the Almanac, means to go towards a printed object from multiple paths. This is as much part of designing the object as it is to think about the font or the layout of the book.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 19:01 That’s also funny — I find it strange that in the funding system of the Netherlands, even the smallest cultural organizations are supposed to have a business model. My business model is not a very traditional one. I always take it slow, one or two issues at a time, also depending on what else is going on in my life. I do look ahead, of course, but I didn’t set it up to think that things are going to be a certain way because it doesn’t work like that. This has been a reason why I’ve been rejected by funders as well, for not having the right business model. I find that very funny because, again, the way we work and the way we live are being pulled apart. I’ve been living like this (as a freelance cultural worker) for over twenty years: I can look ahead for a few months, but not more than that. So I started an organization, it has no overhead, no buildings, and no staff, and yet I’m expected to make a ten-year projection? business modelsI was told that Errant Journal wouldn’t last because it doesn’t have a good business model. I found it very strange because the only reason Errant Journal would stop is if I don’t feel like doing it anymore. Financially, I can keep going, especially with this model, because I haven’t set myself up to produce a certain amount. A distinction is made between organizations and artistic practice, while for me, this doesn’t exist. This is my artistic practice, it’s just that because of how things are structured, I am required to have a board and a business plan etc.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 26:29 The space I ran before was also a residency, and we had an open call. But when you’re looking for ‘other voices,’ business modelsan open call is not necessarily the best way. In my experience with the residency, 99% of applicants will be white artists from northern/western Europe, all making the same kind of art (and calling it experimental). I also see other organizations doing open calls, and spreading the call widely and then using the amount of people that respond as a sort of marketing tool or indicator of their popularity. “Look, we had 700 people reply.” But what’s the point of that? Again, why this performance for the funders? When Errant has an open call, I actually don’t promote it that much because I don’t want quantity, I want quality.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 02:06 First of all, thanks so much for having me. It’s nice to try to reflect a bit on many years of involvement in publishing. My name is Silvio Lorusso, I’m a designer by training, an artist, and more and more, an author. My involvement in publishing and experimental publishing has several branches, I started at the INC with an interest in researching business modelsprint-on-demand, which at the time was a new thing — you can imagine how many years ago we are speaking of. This led to a certain interest in the platformization of publishing, such as Amazon, Kindle, and systems of rights management. Then I did my PhD thesis in Venice on experimental publishing, which was focused on the artistic experiments around platformization and enclosure.

• from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Thomas 11:53 It was clear to us that we needed to reflect the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, or we are like three generations and also three fields of work. So Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway, as I already said, and he’s the oldest among us. He has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of these two books I mentioned. So she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style than academia would do it. I myself sit somewhere between the chairs of maybe writing academically and also organizing those panels, the let’s play critical panels. sustainability of workflowsSo we regularly exchanged ideas, via Zoom, due to Holger being in Norway. We also met in person several times. For us, it was very important to give the authors a sense of working together on a project, which is why we set up a joint meeting before everyone started writing. For this, we specifically asked experts to cover various areas. And fortunately, no one declined. We allowed them relative freedom, including the format of the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript. It’s a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support the entire project and also finance it. This is not common as publishers usually are not prepared for such volumes. As you know, they either focus on academic publications or non-academic literature. So, normally academic volumes are funded by universities, but we were not based on any university for this volume, even if we worked on them or at universities. So we had to find a way to finance the whole project. As I said, business modelsTranscript has this funding from, I think, different universities from Germany. They have a pool of money and they can split it into different projects. So this was very good for us, and they also funded Open Access, which was also great.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  The last thing I will cite is a piece that I did as a part of the Dark Force Collective, but that’s a piece I spent five years on, called The Post-Individual. I thought a lot about how I wanted to release it. It was originally going to be a book. business modelsThen I had the idea to release it as a limited edition zip file where someone could pay $5 or whatever they wanted and they would get one of 250 editions that had this piece inside along with a video of me introducing it and audio recording and my research notes. All 250 of those editions sold out in a week, so I got paid $1,000 for that piece.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  We dug in and discovered a way that we could build a system like that using Stripe. And so the way we have made it is that business modelsfor every release on Metalabel, there is a record agreement where anyone who’s listed as having credit on a release can be added from a drop-down and you set a percentage of money that will be directed to them. You can also choose the treasury of your group, which is just a pool of money that will just sit there and like not go anywhere. Every transaction from that release goes into a private account for just that release where the money sits on top and it has all the logic of the split underneath. You can also add in hard costs to be recouped. So in the case of my Dark Forest book, the first $8,000 first would go to one account to pay back my printer and my shipper and then only after that $8,000 was crossed would the split happen. But the money builds up in that transaction.