On Making Your Own, #3: Hedonic Philanthropy
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
As I write these words, one respectable estimate puts the number of Internet users at two billion globally. That’s a lot of people, and if you make art, some of them will find you,. With numbers like that, there’s philanthropic magic in the math.
About anything you might create, you might think, “Well, it’s a strange thing and maybe not that many people are into it, and of those, not that many people will find it.” And maybe both of those propositions are true. Suppose your thing will only appeal to or give pleasure to one person out of a hundred. And suppose you’re not that easy to find, even if you optimize search terms for people who want to see the sort of thing you’re into, so only one person in 500 who wants to find your art will find it over the entire life of your site or posting or whatever where you present it.
Well, if you assume two billion Internet users worldwide and do the math, what do you find? That there are 40,000 people in the world whose day you’ll brighten up, at least a little. You could almost fill Wrigley Field with smiling folks (which is more than can be said for the baseball team that plays there these days).
Suppose that creating a single work of art costs $200.00, whether in artist’s commission fees, the monetized opportunity cost of your time, or what have you. (And you can do something pretty nice for $200, in my experience.) Divide that $200 by 40,000 people and it works out to half a cent per person. How many other forms of pleasure can you buy for that little? In philanthropic terms that sounds like a tremendous bargain to me.
And it’s yours for the taking…
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