"but the actual information side of it is totally free just as it always was and always will be "
Got to disagree with Graham Whatmore here and despite what Phil says I stand by my original statement that 60% (or thereabouts) of sites available do charge to share their information.
A lot of those are the smutty sites and there must be thousands of them, but an awful lot more are society boards or libraries of informationthat have paid a lot for the collection of data and will want to charge for it.
It's no good putting in a couple of key words to Google and when it come up with a few answers you say "Boy, isn't this free internet wonderful." The reason Google has come up with those is because they're the only ones that Google can search. How many surfers actually go past the 2nd page of findings on Google?
Many pages are blocked by careful programming from Google and you will never ever see them. Thank heaven for Wikipedia, a wonderful source, but try
Encyclopaedia Britannica! or how about the
Oxford English Dictionary, or even
Ancestry.co.uk.
Hmmmmmm! Free eh? There are many thousands of others like them, but maybe you will never need to reference most of them. When you do, have you wallet handy.
From my own point of view, I am not interested in being paid one cent for what I do. Sounds patronising, but I do it for Graham whom I have read about for over 40 years now. He's one of the greatest unsung, well apart from his own singing, anglers of all time and it's still surprises me how few modern day anglers have heard of him.
If I got paid, I might start to get threatening emails from Mr Marsbar saying I am a day late with my new article or that I haven't supplied enough pictures with my last submission. I used to write for a magazine and the pay then was p1$$ poor and for the money alone it just wasn't worth it, that was 12 years ago and about ?50 per page.
Whilst I'm at it, I'll answer another question - how long does it take
to write an article? There's thinking time which could run to days, how am I going to frame it and what points am I going to cover in it. That's the creative design element of it.
Actual writing it, I reckon I can easily knock out 1000 words per hour. Checking it for typos, homonyms, and missing words, also that concurrent sentences don't all start with the same word, and that the sentences and paragraphs aren't too long (what is known in the trade as the "Fog Index") making the reading age of the piece around 15 years of age (don't get upset, the Times newspaper has a reading age of just 18.) All this adds about another hour to the article, but hopefully then Graham won't have to do anything to edit it except insert the coding to publish it.
Then there's the pictures, if I need them. Sometimes I have made special journeys or gone to certain venues that I might not have otherwise gone to just to photograph a float in the water or some bait attached to a feeder. That can add hours too apart from the cost of petrol and the fact that I might prefer to be elsewhere catching fish.
I promise you, try it. It's a darned site harder than you might think.
