Behind the Blogging 2025
By 
Scott, Dave and I founded LGM on May 31, 2004 towards the end of the Early Days of the blogosphere. The site rapidly found a small but non-trivial audience, and became a small part of the bigger blogospheric conversation that developed around the 2004 election and its aftermath. That small audience grew over time, making it psychologically possible to continue contributing to the site even at a time when there were no noticeable financial or professional reasons to do so. Over time the complexity of the site grew, as did the list of contributors. It’s hard to even imagine a time at which Erik and Paul were not LGM writers, but it is nevertheless so, as Paul has been with us for almost 17 years, and Erik 14. Over the years Cheryl, Dan, Shakes, Abigail, Simon, Vacuum, Elizabeth, Dave the Brock, Dave the Noon, Melissa, Charli, Chris, Christa, Bean, Katie, and the dearly missed SEK and Steve Attewell have also helped make this site what it is today.
Lawyers, Guns and Money remains an independent site, which means that we have a wide array of bills. We pay the good folks at Sunant for our servers and for the technical service that the site periodically requires (this number goes up periodically); we pay for a few different news subscriptions in order to give the contributors grist for their writing; we pay Disqus to maintain the comment section; we pay the accountants at FWK to make the numbers dance during tax season; we pay Zapier to make our social media function with a minimum of fuss and muss; we pay to maintain Acephalous; we pay Blubrry for podcast hosting; we donate to Wikipedia in honor of its generous provision of photos for the site; we pay ransoms to a variety of predatory law firms when their web crawlers manage to identify copyright violations on the site, and a variety of other miscellaneous expenses. Of course these expenses have gone up over the years as the site has grown larger and more time-consuming to manage.
Most of you have become familiar with our approach to revenue. We want to make enough money to pay the bills associated with maintaining the site, while having enough left over to share between the contributors. There has never been enough to fairly contribute the writers for the time that they spend here, and there has never been enough to make up for the time we spend working on the bones of the site, but that’s the business. Nobody is getting rich, but it’s nice to see folks getting a share of what they deserve for the work that they do. It’s worth noting that a site with our level of traffic could bear a far more aggressive monetization strategy (I get ten or so unsolicited e-mails a day on this point), but we have made a conscious choice to maintain accessibility and legibility in lieu of revenue maximization.
For my part, having this community is deeply important to my continued mental health. Apart from my kids and my teaching I feel like LGM is the most important contribution that I have been able to make. It has always been an honor to be on the masthead with the fine writers of this site, just as it has been an honor to have my own work read by the finest comment section in the Old Blogosphere. It is our intention to continue to build upon this foundation for as long as it is possible to do so.