Decision Point of the Moment

And a possible shift in the sort of content you get here.

Press photo of the strontium clock experient from the Shimon Kolkowitz group at Wisconsin.

There was a story going around yesterday about some new “optical clock” measurements (scare quotes because it’s not really a clock in a technical sense), which you can read about in this press release from the University of Wisconsin. (Which, as an aside, includes an absolutely spectacular save attempt when it’s noted that a JILA group has published an even higher precision version of the same thing in the same issue of Nature…). But this post isn’t about that, it’s me wibbling about my online writing, and an upcoming decision point.

Prompted by the story (and the fact that I talk about optical lattice clocks in Chapter 16 of A Brief History of Timekeeping), I wrote a background explainer for my Forbes blog about what problems in timekeeping the optical lattice technology is solving. As of this morning, their stats page says that it’s been clicked through to by 58 people. Coincidentally, I’ve also gotten emails this week saying that my blogging contract with Forbes is up for renewal, which has me thinking about whether I want to continue that, or change how I handle the more science-y side of my writing career.

At the moment, I’ve been using this Substack as an outlet for writing about politics and pop culture and more personal stuff, and trying to save more physics-related stuff for the Forbes blog (which I’ve been doing since 2015). The logic behind this has been that that’s both a longer-running thing and a higher-profile outlet, so it makes sense to try to leverage that platform.

But, you know, 58 readers in 24 hours is a lot less reach than this Substack. Now, that’s an exceptionally bad performance, but most of my recent posts there are not drawing dramatically more eyeballs than the typical post on this Substack. They may be different eyeballs, but there aren’t that many more of them.

And, on the financial side, what Forbes is currently paying me is absolutely not worth the time I spend on those pieces. I could shift to a different payment model, but that would require me to commit to writing significantly more stuff there, and the rate per post would still end up on the low side of something reasonable (instead of the current “borderline insulting”), given the time it takes to write a post to the standards I like to follow.

This is, to some degree, self-inflicted, because of that last clause. I did a background explainer yesterday because that was relatively easy for me to bang out— probably an hour and a half— having written the book chapter not all that long ago. I deliberately did not write an explainer of the actual experiments, because that would’ve taken a lot longer— I know more or less what they did, but actually understanding it would involve an hour or so of just reading the papers, plus a good deal more time figuring out a way to explain it that would make sense to a non-scientist while also being more detailed than the press release. (Which isn’t bad as such things go, but there are some choices made that I don’t really agree with, and would like to fix if I wrote it up.)

That takes the whole process into a realm where it’s hard to justify taking the time to do that. Particularly doing it as often as I would need to do that to get a reasonable amount of money for the effort. And those posts don’t really get a level of engagement that justifies the effort outside of the money.

Of course, most of those things would also be true if I wrote those posts and put them here. I enjoy and appreciate my handful of paid subscribers, but I’m not exactly making bank from this. There is, of course, a relatively straightforward way to bump that up— start doing subscriber exclusive posts— but that also changes the feel of the whole operation.

Aside from the direct financial side of things, I’ve also been conflicted about the Forbes posts for a while now. Their paywall is really strict, and their ads are an absolute assault on the reader— every time I need to check back on one of my old posts, I’m faintly appalled. There’s also some limitations on the content that I chafe at a bit.

So, I’m leaning toward shifting a greater fraction of my writing over here. It’d be a bit of a shame to lose that connection— the Forbes posts are much more likely to get aggregated by people outside the tiny universe of people who already follow me. But I’m increasingly unsure of whether it’s worth the effort to maintain. My time might be better spent pitching more formal pieces to higher-profile outlets (as much as I hate doing that…), rather than being frustrated by a blog platform that isn’t really paying off.

Anyway, we’re leaving on vacation this afternoon, which will give me some more time to think things through. (It may or may not lead to decreased output here— I get up way earlier than anybody else in the family, and may end up blogging just to pass the time…) If you start seeing a lot more physics content here in a couple of weeks, though, you’ll know why.

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I’m not at all sure why this would motivate anybody to click them, but here are the usual buttons:

And I’ll open the comments if you want to offer words of encouragement or offers of flipping great wodges of cash.