2014/indie-business

Business & the Indie Web

4pm

Who's trying to make money at it?


 * IndieBox: HW +
 * ? advertising revenues
 * Achangeiscoming: custom sites/consulting, hosted sites
 * homesteading.io: hosted sites, "homesteading box"
 * known: services (with some licensing/custom work)

Who's moving first, and why?
 * for those people, which aspects of the indieweb are the most valuable

Known's perspective

individuals who have some reuptational/financial connection to what they're publishing. journalists are an example (Known's low-hanging fruit).

media organizations: groups of people who are producing content, some of which will be published. right now, they're mostly doing it via email. "enterprise indieweb" [since you're going across servers anyhow, the firewall doesn't add that much complexity]

complications: lots of customization is required to match their workflow; the orgs have in-house dev teams. if the journalists don't own the content themselves (that is, it's owned by the media company), how is this "indieweb"? in this case it's the corporation's benefit. today they're giving a lot of ownership (and interaction with audience) to Facebook or tumblr etc.

non-profits, citizen scientists, political parties: complex notions of what information is public, want to maintain ownership of data

known is finding it very challenging to sell in the pure public situation -- people see wordpress or hootsuite (depending on which aspect of the problem they're looking at) as having solved the problem well enough

Shane: we're all people who build individual websites. How do people who do their own websites make money? Something I've been noodling with, on my site there's a "products" session. it's not a separate post type (e.g. they're videos), they have a few additional bits -- licensable, sales price. how can all of us in this room make money from content that we'd otherwise post? (e.g., charging to reuse content -- creative commons non-commercial).

cashmusic is one model

patreon and gittip are another approach.

Elgg: grew organically. did it for education originally, gradually expanded. the key was not to be prescriptive about what people used it for -- whatever they did, we'd support it. bootstrapped it. got a lot of money out of education (recurring revenue for support), web shops (paid for support, and also to be official partners)

Squarespace is an example of a company that makes it ridiculously easy to get a site up. (although they're not indieweb-ish)

Diaspora: an example of tying in with news-related

microtransactions

Conclusion: those of us who are interested in making a business of this, stay in touch!