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I’ve been parroting Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” model so much recently that I forget how many people still haven’t heard it. If you haven’t, take a moment and read the concept. Here’s a taste:

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

I’m convinced this is one of the best ways to approach the question of business models on the Web. News industry conversations about “the business model” tend to settle somewhere near here: “News-oriented websites have a future … but traffic needs to be above 200 million pageviews per month.”

When you eye the Web through the lens of pageviews and uniques and CPMs, 1,000 of anything seems ridiculously paltry. But if your 1,000 “unique visitors” derive value from the work you create, or if you can find advertisers who value the attention of that community, that might be enough for you to make a living. And if your company comprises a number of individuals, each attending to her 1,000 True Fans, this even starts to look like a business.

And if your 1,000 True Fans are motivated enough by your work to effect change in their communities, this even begins to resemble Journalism.

BTW: This principle dovetails nicely with Caterina Fake’s philosophy that you build a real community by greeting each early user at the door. Among the most essential skills that I believe must be taught to tomorrow’s journalists is community management — a skill entirely lost in today’s discussions about newsroom training. Technical training will be obsolete in a year. But the best community managers on the Web today employ principles refined over a long history of community leadership.

BTW 2: Make sure to read Kelly’s follow-up essay, “The case against 1,000 True Fans,” in which he addresses the practical realities of approaching a business this way. But consider that all of his case studies involve artists, whose work is valued even more abstractly than the work of journalists.

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