The Cost of the Internet

Over at LabourLost, the curiously smug Tom Miller talks about his "career" to date, and mentions his time working for Derek Draper:

"...and of course (I) spent a few months at LabourList before the McBride affair rinsed us out of cash."

It is a curious thing that I have never quite been able to understand about LabourList: this dependance of cash from other sources. I'm sorry, but why exactly did they need a single penny to start LabourList and to run it? You don't need cash to run a website these days, and (as I'll show later in this blogpost) it can actually be unhelpful to take cash from others.

First of all, though, let's prove that you don't need to take a penny from anyone else to run a website. Let's take a website, and look at how much it costs to run it. Just to make it easy for me, I'll use this blog as my example:

TOTAL FUNDING: £0

TOTAL INCOME: £0

TOTAL EXPENDITURE: £0

TOTAL PROFIT/LOSS: £0

Therefore, whilst this blog has not made me a penny, it also hasn't cost me a penny either. You don't need money in order to create a blog. You don't need sponsors.

In fact, taking money from parties and from unions is arguably counter-productive. As soon as you do, there's a pressure to stay on message, and talk about the things they want you to talk about. There is also a pressure to produce regular posts, whether you have anything worth talking about or not. And even if you do manage to avoid simply writing to please your sponsors, you have the added problem of not quite being able to convince your audience that you haven't been bought by those who keep you afloat. 

Aside from employing Derek Draper*, perhaps this was the biggest flaw of LabourList from the outset. They set themselves up, through taking the money of others, to be the biggest and best Labour internet offering. They didn't do the grunt work or slow build up that so many of the best political blogs out there have done. They expected to have a reputation because they could pay for it; they tried to bypass the hard work actually required to get a decent reputation on t'interweb. 

Tom, the McBride affair shouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to LabourList other than giving you the perfect opportunity to offload that deluded moron, Derek Draper. It shouldn't have rinsed the website of cash; you should never have taken that cash in the first place. 

*A man whose only skills are scandal, self-promotion and picking fights with much more capable opponents than him.