It Takes a Village to Save a Site By Paul Boutin
2:00 a.m. June 21, 2002 PDT Begging for funds to keep your bankrupt site afloat rarely works. Unless you're Rusty Foster, whose tech community site Kuro5hin just raised $35,000 -- and a few eyebrows -- in less than a week.
"I gotta say, I'm quite impressed at what they've pulled off," said Slashdot.org founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda.
Slashdot's site, along with its free source code, inspired Foster to found Kuro5hin in December 1999 as a similar forum for "technology and culture from the trenches."
But a string of disappointing ad models led Foster to post a long missive on Monday titled "We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community." Enumerating his income and expenses, Foster asked readers to help him meet the site's $70,000 annual operating budget.
"This has been coming for a while. We didn't have any money coming in," Foster said by phone from Peaks Island, Maine, where he and his wife relocated from San Francisco last year.
"I spent a lot of time asking myself: Are we a magazine, are we a media company?" Foster said. "We're a community; that's why the whole advertising thing doesn't work for us. Advertising works in media because the company showing you advertising is providing you value by writing the articles. On a site like mine, the transaction breaks down because the visitors are writing the articles themselves."
Such introspection and analysis are standard fare on Kuro5hin, whose tech-savvy members discuss everything from software license details to the U.S. government's failure points in design, specification, and implementation. There are few places you can have an intelligent discussion like that.
"Rusty doesn't interfere with the way the site evolves," said Robin Bandy, one of Kuro5hin's most prolific participants who contributes under the name "Arkady."
But Foster's announcement shook up members, who realized their reluctant leader might have to give up the site for a paying job.
"Kuro5hin is about Rusty Foster the same way Slashdot is about Rob Malda," said writer Doc Searls, an early booster of the site. "He's a wise young man in the literal sense of the word. He's a programmer, but from a different variety -- more intellectual, and less focused on technology."
"I asked the community what I should do, because that's always worked before," Foster said.
Bandy agreed, "Rusty honestly wants the site to be a community. A year ago he tried to give the site over to the readers. The overwhelming reaction was, 'Nah, you're doing a good job, keep it up.'"
This time, though, Foster's financial bind helped him find a way to bring others on board without selling the site. "We're talking to accountants and lawyers," he said about converting his one-man company to not-for-profit status under Section 501c of the Federal Internal Revenue Code.
Besides the tax breaks, 501c status would enable Foster to bring in other Kuro5hin members as trustees to oversee the site.
There should be no lack of volunteers: Foster said the largest donation received by mid-Wednesday was $240, as the turnout came from hundreds of small donors rather than a single sugar daddy.
Leslie Nakajima, a vice president at PR agency Bite Communications in San Francisco, explained the pledge drive's surprise success as proof that, unlike many sites, Kuro5hin's worth is apparent to its fans. "They have an obvious value proposition," she said.
Less so for the site's name. "'Corrosion.' It's a pun on my name," Foster said. "Rusty ... corrosion ... get it? Don't worry, nobody else ever got it, either."