March 08, 2006

The Passion Economy

I've been snooping around reading stuff about second life (see last post) while being careful not to fall into it. Because I could see it easily becoming my first life. It looks a lot more interesting than cleaning hamster cages, if you know what I mean.

When I read the stat that says "If Second Life had to pay programmers to replicate all of that content development it would cost $400 million a year," I thought about a chat Michael O'CC and I were having the other day/eve wherein I realized that I've created well over 32,000 separate pages on allied since 2001, and yes, some of them are short; however some of them are brilliant enough to be business models; and still other are works of art and poetry, so let's average it out to a by-the-page rate I might charge an average client for brochure copy, which winds up, almost always, being somewhere around $1,000 a page by the time all is said and done.

Extrapolate that out to my own First Life (i.e. blogging) statistic, and you could say, "If allied had to pay its author to write all that content from scratch, it would cost $3,200,000."

Ladies and gentleman, you are looking at a $3 million piece of virtual real estate right here, and most days the toilet doesn't stop running after you flush.

You have GOT to love the net.


ADDENDUM:

I am bad at math.

Here's the thing, the 32,000 pages spidered that I talk about above MUST include pages linked to mine, so the Webbed Value of this blog is $3 million, according to my calculations. BUT I've only created 3,300 posts on this blog (according to Blogger.com) over the last year, which, using my stated average per-page rate, means it would have cost $330,000 for me to have written all this stuff for a client. Which means, essentially, I should have made $66K per year for five years to write this blog at my freelance rate.

Not bad for a part-time job, but I think I'll hold out for the $3 million.... Links count. Some formula would have to combine the content creation value PLUS the link value.

Or we could just keep writing because we have to.

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