Donors vs. Free Riders in the market

Miscellaneous General
1

Being still a student, and only saving for the future from whatever part time work earnings I have, I have never donated to many of the niche websites I visit.

I am now thinking, however, that on the day I get my first big paycheck, it will take a lot for me to overcome the strong compulsion to donate a large part of it.

LewRockwell.Com, AntiWar.Com, CounterPunch.Org, and ChroniclesMagazine.Org are just some of those websites. At least three of them are in bad financial situation and need donor funding. Recently, I found out that of the four websites, the latter has turned off comments permanently. The tiny staff does not have the time to monitor comments regularly, and their business loses $600,000 annually. I always knew it, but now I again remember that the only reason I was viewing the content was that a few generous donors were ensuring that privilege for the rest like me.

I don’t like being a free rider. I want to be a part of the solution, not the problem.

And that makes me come to economics. One would assume that the strong incentive to freeride for content means that freeriders will consume and waste away the generous service and the donors will slowly get more demotivated to continue donating. But I never entered into that equation to emotional letdown of being a freerider, of seeing yourself as an ungrateful person making use of a free service that you enjoy so much, and thus later causing that service to be ended.

And that makes me understand how donor-based activities still survive somehow.

2

Maybe the solution is to stop thinking that free riding is a problem.

3

Perhaps you don’t need to donate a large part of your paycheck to a bunch of websites. If you want to go for it, of course, all glory to you. But those websites put their content out for free in the hopes of attracting a sufficient number of donors to finance them. Donate what you can and find appropriate, you can’t save everything. You are not obliged to contribute to every cause in the world.

On the other hand, not all problems are solved with money. “The tiny staff does not have the time to monitor comments regularly,” - how about donating time? If you are a user in good standing with that website, you could organize with a few others and suggest to them that you’ll monitor the comments for free. You can campaign for what is an important feature of that website and is likely to attract more interest (and more donors, too).