The Internet Was Never a Livelihood for Writers

By Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Internet Didn’t Break — It Worked as Designed

For decades, people have talked about the internet as if it changed—as if something once functional was later corrupted by platforms, algorithms, or corporate greed. That story is comforting. It suggests a lost golden age.

For writers running web-based publications, that golden age never existed.

If you were trying to make money entirely on the internet—not building websites for others, not selling services, not running a physical business with an online storefront, but doing the actual work of writing, editing, publishing, and analysis—the internet was a dead zone from the beginning. Not since social media. Not since smartphones. Since the mid-1990s.

From the start, the promise was simple: low barriers, direct access, unlimited opportunity. What that really meant was lower pay, total responsibility, and infinite competition. The internet didn’t fail writers. It succeeded at doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The Work Was Always Real. The Money Never Was.

Running an online newspaper or magazine has always required real labor: reporting, writing, editing, fact-checking, design, hosting, technical maintenance, marketing, distribution, and constant adaptation. In other words, a full newsroom compressed into one person.

What it never came with was a durable revenue model.

Advertising only worked at massive scale. Subscriptions required capital and brand trust newcomers were told they didn’t need. Donations were unpredictable. Affiliate links cheapened the work. Sponsored content compromised it. Every proposed solution pushed writers away from journalism and toward something else—growth tactics, SEO games, algorithm chasing.

That “something else” was always framed as opportunity. In reality, it was distraction.

A Perpetual Labor Subsidy

The missing piece is this: there was never enough real money flowing into web-based publishing to pay the people producing the value. So the system solved that problem the only way it could.

It replaced wages with hope.

Time, effort, and skill were reframed as “investment.” Unpaid labor became “building.” The payoff was always just one pivot away. What the internet actually generated was a perpetual labor subsidy—a system that extracted high-quality creative work without compensating the people who produced it.

This wasn’t an accident. It was the business model.

When a system cannot pay for labor, it reframes labor as opportunity.

Why Quality Was Required

Low-quality work would have collapsed the illusion early. The system needed people who cared—people who raised the bar, self-edited, and delivered serious work—to keep the promise believable.

Writers weren’t exploited despite their seriousness. They were exploited because of it.

Free access wasn’t generosity, either. It trained audiences not to value the labor behind the work and stripped creators of pricing power. Once content is framed as free forever, charging later looks like greed—even when it’s survival.

Platforms Didn’t Kill This — They Revealed It

Social platforms didn’t destroy a working model. They exposed that there never was one. Traffic didn’t equal income. Attention didn’t equal support. Exposure didn’t equal sustainability.

Writers were never the customer. They were the input—the content supply and engagement layer. Advertisers and investors were the customers. Writers were told they were entrepreneurs when they were really unpaid research and development.

Naming the Truth

The internet didn’t betray writers. It used them exactly as designed. Naming that truth isn’t bitterness. It’s clarity—and the first honest step toward deciding what, if anything, is worth doing without expecting it to pay.

For more social commentary and great fictional writing, please see Occupy 2.5:
https://Occupy25.com

References (APA)

Lanier, J. (2013). Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

---

From time to time, I write about why independent journalism matters. I do that because you need people like me—people who are not sold out to the system, to corporations, to oligarchs, or to political parties.

You need independent journalists to get clean information. Information you can turn into actionable intelligence.

You are not going to get that from mainstream media. What you will get instead is biased material, saturated with confirmation bias. It will tell you what you want to hear. It will reinforce what you already believe. This has been demonstrated so many times, in such a short period, that it is no longer a serious point of debate.

You do need to support independent journalists like myself. I also know you probably won’t.

I’ve been doing this a very long time. Many people believe this kind of work should be a free service. That belief itself is a product of the system I’m describing.

I will continue writing as long as it suits me to keep writing. When it no longer suits me, I will stop. I don’t lose at that point.

I want you to understand that.

Sincerely,
Cliff Potts