Is this thing on?

I’m not sure why I feel so nervous. It’s not like I’m Bruce Gyngell, standing in the studios at TCN9 trying to think of a line to welcome Australia to television. This is just a website, a less-blinky redesign of tonywilson.com.au that accommodates the truth about my receding hairline, and a back-end interface which allows me to actually post.

I want to start by saying a big thank you to the legion of fans who have made the big shift over from the old website. According to the stats, there are 150 or so of you who turned up each day, the vast majority entering and leaving through my 2005 article about a gambler who made a billion dollars, with each one hovering on the site for, let’s see, an average of 0.64 seconds.

O.64 seconds! Thank you, my loyal speed readers. I hope the Alan Woods-Bill Benter secret to a never ending torrent of beautiful horse-scented money was more obvious to you than it was to me.

One of the problems in having a fan base made up of entirely of punters who want to make a billion dollars is that old marketing maxim relating to overpromising and under delivering. Never mind that I’ve dressed up as a cockroachand died live on stage across Kenya in an insect repellent commercial. They could care less that I’ve met a guy who has a tractor for every letter of the alphabet and a wife who collects dolls and chainsaws. They want to monetise their passion. They want to monetise their addiction. And I have very little expertise at monetising. Indeed I’m the guy who started this petition to the Oxford English Dictionary arguing that ‘monetise’ shouldn’t be a word, and that people who want to make money out of an idea should have to labour under the cumbersome weight of the expression ‘make money out of an idea’.

Indeed, the very decision to relaunch this website speaks volumes of my ability to unmonetise. In the old days, I might have come up with a pithy insight into a flawed political system, dredged up an almost relevant personal anecdote, blown it out to 800 words, and got paid for publishing in a newspaper’s opinion section. But does that really compare to the thrill of getting a tweet on ‘Q & A’? Of course it doesn’t. Who needs a paying column and half a million readers nationally when you can pick up 25 retweets and 16 new followers?

I was sharing this thought with my sometime radio co-host, Tony Martin, and he suggested some other avenues for unmonetising. ‘Have you thought about a website? Tony inquired. ‘Have you thought about a website with a huge weekly workload and a strict no paid advertising policy? You’ll be making no money before you know it.’

Tony maintained ‘The Scriviener’s Fancy’ through two frantic years that yielded 140,000 words and zero dollars. I was a sometime ‘Visiting Scrivener’. It’s true that in recent weeks, he has launched an ebook compiling these consistently hilarious columns for the price of a coffee and doughnut. And so, yes, although he remains a pioneering hero of unmonetisation, he’s now jumped ship for the lure of literally tens of dollars.

For those who’d like to get a piece of this unmonetisation, but don’t fancy themselves as writers, there are now opportunities to be had across all creative fields. Options include

1. Instagramming the rights for all your best photos over to Mark Zuckerberg;

2. Gifting your short films to the friendly team at Google;

3. Uploading podcast gold for the financial betterment of Apple; and

4. Busking without an upturned guitar case.

I’ve decided to pursue the website route. Not that I can’t sense distant gold glittering on the horizon. If I play my cards right, I figure that I can become a world expert on unmonetisation. I’ll be asked to speak at New Media conferences. I’ll be employed as a consultant by arts administrators, educating them on how even low level unmonetisation can result in arts administrators earning still more than the artists they’re administrating. I’ll develop a corporate keynote, simply entitled ‘The Challenge of (Finding Loose) Change’. This is it. I’m excited. Maybe I do feel a bit like Bruce Gyngell, standing in that studio in 1956.

Good evening, and welcome to tonywilson.com.au.

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