The Plain View
I used to write a column for Macworld magazine. People trying to butter me up would tell me they bought the magazine just to read my modest contribution. I didn’t believe them, but it got me thinking. It was the mid-’90s, the early days of the web, and pioneers were starting their own sites. What if I “went internet”—sold just my column and charged a buck for each edition? Cheaper than the magazine! If I were paid by only a fraction of Macworld’s several hundred thousand readers, the proceeds would far exceed the fee Macworld paid me. An interesting thought experiment. I put my calculations in a PowerPoint deck and made it part of a presentation about the internet I was giving back in those days, which ended with a promise that, sooner than they thought, many of the people in the room would have their own email addresses. Really!
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Attempting to execute that plan in 1995 would have been preposterous. The audience hadn’t arrived. The tools weren’t there. How would people pay me? And besides, the big media companies I was working for were well established and secure.