I’ve been all about micropayments lately — but here’s another idea to chew over.

I’m going to call it the “got any spare change guv’nor?” approach. It works, consistently, for Wikipedia — but for how long we don’t know. (Side note: Is ‘Ars Technica’ actually pronounced, y’know, ‘arse’? Works for me.)

The other night I got an email from Simon Owens, a former newspaper hack and now social media-y kinda guy. He shared his post about ‘Paste’ magazine, an independent music magzine in the States:

“We needed some cash,” Purdy told me. “So we had always known that if we ever had to, we could go to our readers. A lot of them tell us — especially in the last few months, because they’re not dumb, they know what’s going on in the economy — they’ve written us and said, ‘hey, if things ever get rough on Paste, make sure you ask us for help,’ and so we took them seriously. We have a special relationship with out readers.

Woah — how many magazines could say that with a straight face?

But it got me thinking — is the passion press the ultimate business model? I donated money — a tiny amount, but an amount nonetheless — to Wikipedia when I was studying. Why? Because I couldn’t live without it. Are there magazines you couldn’t live without? Possibly not — but there’s probably a website out there that you love.

Personally, if they asked, I’d donate money to When Saturday Comes, the brilliant football magazine which, I’m delighted to say, I now write for. Before the days of WordPress.com, I’d have winged a few quid to WordPress if they’d really needed it. After all — I owe much of my career to this simple yet powerful software.

Twitter? Perhaps. Facebook, no, not now. There’s a point, I guess, when a site lifts itself away from the community and into the hands of corporations — and Facebook’s time has long gone.

But how’s that for a business model? Sites struggle on with advertising revenue — but if they need it, readers trump up and sort them out. Are there any magazines you’d donate money to in order to keep them alive?

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