Aaron Severson (2024) recently announced that, due to a burst of donations, he would renew hosting-related services for Ate Up With Motor. That presumably keeps the website online but doesn’t address the cost of producing more content.
This led a reader to ask: Why is researching articles “so costly? Obviously, the research you do is extensive, so that won’t help; but I’d have thought a good deal of archival material should’ve been digitised by now, and made available for nominal or nil cost” (MAL, 2024).
Severson (2024b) responded by saying, “It’s not that the research or work is costly in monetary terms — for the most part, it’s not — but it is very time-consuming and energy-intensive, [and that] has its own costs. For the Jetfire article, for instance, I ended up compiling something like 380 pages of notes, and once I’d distilled that into an initial draft, it took days of work to edit it into something readable, and days more to assemble and set up the various images.”
The only thing that surprises me about Severson’s response is that he talks about it taking “days of work.” The Jetfire story (2023a) was huge even by magazine standards. I could imagine that it took at least a month to produce. That’s just a guess, but for illustrative purposes let’s run the numbers.
What would it cost to produce the Jetfire story?
If Severson spent 160 hours on the Jetfire piece and he charged the average freelance writer rate in Los Angeles, which ZipRecruiter (2024) says is $26.05 per hour, he would have made $4,168. Of course, since he is an independent contractor rather than an employee, Severson would have to deduct taxes and whatnot from that amount.
If that sounds like a lot of money for one article, keep in mind our scenario that this represents a month of full-time work. Multiply that by 12 months and you get $50,016 — only a few thousand dollars more than the average salary in Los Angeles (Zipcruiter (2024b). However, remember that employees don’t have to cover the basic costs of doing business like a freelance writer does. So this is hardly a gold-plated wage given the professional skills that are needed.
Why shouldn’t Severson donate the time it took to produce the Jetfire story? Because in the freelance writing business, time is money. If he cranked out the story on evenings and weekends when he wasn’t working on paid projects, it could have eaten up virtually all of his spare time. That’s a recipe for burnout.
Also see ‘Is Ate Up With Motor the canary in the mineshaft for auto history media?’
In addition, Severson (2023b) has previously implied that he needed to generate more income because other revenue sources have dried up in the last year. So it makes sense to focus on writing projects that fully cover his labor costs.
How could Severson better monetize Ate Up With Motor? It would take 1,000 subscribers at $50 to bring in $50,000 per year. That may sound like a lot of people, but the top writers at Substack have reportedly generated upwards of 10,000 paid subscribers (Maher, 2023).
Could Severson find 1,000 subscribers? I don’t know — particularly as the postwar car-buff generation passes from the scene. However, I wanted to give you a better feel for why there is no free lunch. If we want professional-quality writing such as what Ate Up With Motor offers . . . somebody needs to pay for it.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Maher, Bron; 2023. “Revealed: Top 27 highest-earning Substack newsletters generate over $22m a year.” PressGazette. Posted Feb. 23.
- MAJ; 2024. Commentator in “Status Update.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted Jan. 11 at 6:29 p.m.
- Severson, Aaron; 2023a. “Turbos for the Turnpike: The Turbocharged Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted April 29.
- ——; 2023b. “Status Report.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted Dec. 23.
- ——; 2024a. “Status Update.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted Jan. 8. Ate Up With Motor. Posted Jan. 11 at 7:48 p.m.
- ——; 2024b. Commentator in “Status Update.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted Jan. 11 at 7:48 p.m.
- ZipRecruiter; 2024a. “Freelance Writer Salary in Los Angeles, CA.” Updated Jan. 15.
- ——; 2024b. “Hourly Rate Salary in Los Angeles, CA.” Updated Jan. 15.
To clarify what I meant by “days of work,” I was referring specifically to the phase that in the print world would be called production “paste-up”: selecting which images to use, resizing and cropping them, adding captions and ALT tags, pagination, proofing, and otherwise putting it all together in a WordPress post. That stage is primarily mechanical, but with a 10,000+ word article with dozens of images, it’s a huge amount of work in itself, and it inevitably sets me scrambling to sort out some last-minute textual details. It would take even longer except that I now usually write the actual text in an HTML editor, so I don’t have to allow extra time to do the markup except for images and tables.
The whole process for the Jetfire article, including the primary research, writing, and editing, took 10–11 weeks at a fairly intensive pace, of which the final production phase represented about two and a half full-time days.