Kottke Free Ride Ends

Jason Kottke - well known within the tech/blogging community, has ended his "pay me for blogging" experiment after one year. In February 2005, he announced that his blog, kottke.org would become his full time job and readers were encouraged to donate "micropayments" to keep him afloat. He received just under $40,000 during his initial 3 week fund drive, but didn't seem to significantly improve the site (as he promised), despite having the time and resources. Today, he announced he's giving up on the subscription-based blog idea and moving on to other things. Kottke.org will continue, but simply as a zillion other blogs do - without donations.

I confess to visiting his site daily. His writing is generally OK and he strikes a pretty fair balance between nerd/non-nerd topics. The content was never however, worth paying for, considering the abundance of similar free blogs out there.

Over at Metafilter (another of my daily visit sites), he took a hammering.