I want to make money; it’s a relatable statement. But how we go about making that money is a bit murky. We all (Hopefully) want to make money ethically and without exploiting anyone. There seems to be more ways to monetize our passions than ever. If you’re an artist, you can start a Patreon, use the Youtube Partner Program or create an NFT project.

Depending on who you ask, there are issues with all those options. Making money from your passion isn’t easy, and that goes for me here at The Icon. So how do I ethically monetize this site?

Websites like Bloomberg and Forbes charge you a subscription to read their articles. Which I think is fair. They’re often detailing breaking news stories that took time and years of collecting sources to produce.

But the problem with that is it puts news out of reach of people who don’t have money. Not that a subscription to Forbes is expensive, but if you can barely afford dinner, then subbing to a news site isn’t a priority. But no matter your financial situation, we all need to stay informed.

Additionally, it’s tough to get people to read news articles. Half the time, you’re lucky if people read past the article’s title on social media. Most of the time, at least with my site, people read the title and immediately comment or just read what other people are commenting. The problem with this is that it can aid find misinformation spreading on the internet. Still, when you lock information behind a paywall, that limits the number of people getting that information.

It’s a struggle to get people to click on the article, and getting people to pay to read it is much more challenging. This means people turn to people in the comments and other secondhand accounts to get the information.

On a related note, have you ever played the game ” Telephone?” You get a group of friends and whisper a phrase to one of them, and they’re supposed to whisper it to other people, and once it gets to the last person, you see how much the phrase has changed. Usually, the phrase has changed somewhat. That’s because most people can’t recall exactly what was told in the time it takes to hear the phrase and then repeat it. So the more people the information goes through, the more human error is filtered in.

Same with information on the internet; when we get information secondhand, the person’s biases and interpretation get filtered in, and god forbid, they’re an idiot. If you’re blocked access to the sources of information, you’re denied the ability to scrutinize the data for yourself and to form your own opinion.

*Obama voice* Let me be clear. I don’t think anything is wrong with Forbes and Bloomberg charging money. Still, I believe it puts up a wall that could potentially facilitate spreading of fake news by limiting access to information from people.

For instance, recently, there was a dispute between Platinum Games and the former voice actress for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor. Hellena claimed Platinum Games only offered to pay her $4000 to voice the title character in Bayonetta 3. However, Paul Schreier of Bloomberg discovered that that wasn’t exactly true through documents and various sources.

He tweeted his article and said Hellena Taylor’s claims were misleading, which some people in the comments said he needed to provide proof. He did. The evidence was in his article, but it seemed most of the comment section hadn’t read it. There were a few who did who tried to explain what was happening. The problem with this is that it’s that person’s interpretation. The others who didn’t read the article were losing out on the ability to scrutinize the information for themselves.

Again Bloomberg is great, and their prices are more than reasonable. But writing something and putting it on social media is 50% hoping people read past the title, 45% defending yourself against people who didn’t read past the title and begging them to do so, and 5% wondering why you even bothered.

And as much as we hate tactics like clickbait, if it didn’t work, sites wouldn’t do it. We’ve all done it, given in curiosity, and clicked on a clickbait article. However, I think clickbait is a toxic practice and breaks the trust you’re trying to build with your readers.

With all this said, I wanted to devise a way to monetize  The Icon while avoiding some of the pitfalls mentioned above. And remember, we’re not as big as Forbes or Bloomberg ( yet), so our founding needs aren’t as vast.

We will try to avoid pay walling content and instead offer optional ways to help fund us.

We’ll have to build trust with our audience, and that means giving them the information they need without clickbait and without adding a bunch of padding to the article. This means some articles might be short, or some information doesn’t need to be articles at all and will instead be a Twitter post. Posts will have critical information immediately at the beginning of the article. We want to keep you all moving forward, so we don’t want you scrolling for necessary information. We want you to get the information you need and decide if you want to keep going.

We’ll employ ads, but we’ll keep them from being intrusive, and additional funding options will be optional for those who enjoy our content and want to support us.

It’s easy to say all of this now. But creating something and making money from it has a slew of struggles, some I’ve spoken about and some I’m unaware of. So, we’ll see.

There’s still a bit of stigma about meeting people online. I remember people speaking in hushed voices as they said, “We met online,” when asked how they met their spouse. Not me, though. I don’t care what people think. #rebel.

But I have felt the awkward looks and questions when I’ve told them I met my fiancee on an online dating site. We’ve been together for seven years but yes, Karen, raise your eyebrow in surprise as I tell you we met online.

But those things were never the most challenging part about meeting people online. The hardest part was the distance. Sometimes we have online friends across the country; heck, some of us have friends across the world. So I thought distance and realizing someone you played with hadn’t logged in years was the worst part. But as I’ve gotten older, I realized something that’s even harder. And that losing a friend.

Recently a friend of mine passed away. We played Destiny 2 together. He and a group of us have saved the universe from the Cabal, raided for hours, suffered in Crucible, and he came to the rescue when I was stuck on that damn elevator in the corrupted strike.

But what’s more, we talked, shared life stories, and checked up on each other, and now he’s gone. His wife called us to let us know that he had passed because he spoke about us, and she knew he would want us to know. We impacted his life enough that his wife, whom we had never spoken to, knew who we were and reached out. That would make me feel special if  I wasn’t so despondent about it.

But the problem with meeting people online is that you can’t just walk into the funeral when your friend has caught a bad case of death. Even if you do have the money, a lot of families aren’t going to think to invite Jason’s friend “NoobPWNr69.”  Not many people are lucky enough to find out their friend has passed away. Many of us have to see they haven’t logged on in years and wonder what they’re up to. We imagine that life probably just got too busy. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. And sometimes you don’t find out until long after the person has passed.

But where does that leave us? The people they leave behind. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they had o go up and die, they leave us to deal with it. As if my therapist didn’t have enough to deal with.

I hate funerals; they’re kind of depressing; however, I think they’re essential in helping us get closure. So when online friends pass, we must find our own way to honor them.

Apparently, Online funerals are a thing. There’s an entire article on What’s your grief that details how to deal with the loss of a friend. In addition, they have some great suggestions that I plan on implementing.

One website suggests having an online memorial. Maybe a web page you and the rest of his online friends can leave comments on. I liked this idea because it gives you something to go back to and look at.

A New York Times article talks about how grief isn’t a problem to be solved but rather something to be lived through. The article even talks about ways to gently and appropriately reach out to your friend’s family.

But the main thing you should know when dealing with grief is that it’s okay. It’s okay that you missed them, and it’s okay to hurt. Friendships formed online are just as real and as special as the bounds you form in “real life,” and anyone who tells you any different probably never lost a friend they stayed up with until 3 am saving the galaxy.

One thing this ordeal has taught me is that losing an online friend has all sorts of difficulties, but I also discovered that there are all sorts of resources online to help. I’ve even linked some below.

If you take away one thing from this article other than I’m a snarky bitch that deals with his grief with humor, I hope it’s that it’s okay that you’re hurting and you don’t have to do it alone.

With that said, we at The Icon give losing a friend – infinity out of 5. Don’t recommend

Grieving an Online Friend: 8 things you should know

New York Times:  How to Grieve for Online Friends You Had Never Met in Person

This is a post by the CDC about dealing with grief during COVID. I feel many steps would be suitable for losing an online friend.

Send me a message. I can relate.

In the mid-2000’s Xplay did a bit where they said Adam Sessler was leaving to do his own show called “Meet the Sess” with the tagline: “The fun Stops Here.” But, of course, Adam wasn’t going, and there was no show. It was a part of a bit which basic concept could be boiled down to “What if shows about video games were more like shows you’d see on CNN and Fox News?”

Ironically, over a decade later, I feel that’s precisely what many video game content creators, including myself, have done. Created content about video games that’s full of anger, contempt, and devoid of fun. But unlike Meet the Sess, this isn’t an April Fools Joke; there is no punchline.

I feel like so many of us wanted video games to be taken more seriously that we overcompensated and swung the pendulum in the other direction. Please make no mistake; I know how messed up the video game industry is. Rampant labor disputes, sexual harassment, corporate greed, and that’s not even mentioning issues of the games themselves, such as stagnation of content, an overabundance of microtransactions, and major corporations buying every studio they can.

These issues shouldn’t be ignored, and I think they need to be focused on more. I think looking at the industry through rose-colored glasses and not talking about serious issues is a problem in the community.

But for me, there needs to be a balance. So we have room to talk about serious issues that face the community while remembering that video games are meant to be fun.

Everything doesn’t need to be so serious all the time. Yes, talking about crunch in the industry needs to be handled with care, but that same type of tone doesn’t need to be carried over to, let’s say, a review of Pokemon Snap.

I believe video games can capture the feeling of whimsy better than any other art form. Yet, I noticed all my content, whether it be video or article, was handled with an air of deadly seriousness.

Eventually, I went over a year without posting. Then it hit me. I  fell victim to something you always hear about in the news but never think it’ll happen to you. Burnout.

And not just with video games but with technology too. Yes, these industries have their issues, but there are bright spots too. Bright spots I lost the ability to see.

But I’m not here to blame this on a toxic industry or communities. As a journalist, my job is to tell stories from all over the community, good and bad. I also have to remember just how big the video game industry is. Some indie companies are taking strides to fix the problems that a lot of the bigger companies have cultivated. There’s innovation and creativity abound out there. There are good people and fun to be had in the big industry and in indie games.

I think that’s the point of video games, to spread joy, and in turn, I want to try to spread joy by talking about it. So I want to talk about and discuss the bad things while also leaving room for the good.

After all, even something like politics that has implications that affect all of our lives has shows like The Dailey Show and the Colbert Report.

I want to take a lighter tone and focus more on the positivity in the community, even if I have to search for it. But the bright side, I don’t think I’ll need to search for it hard.

Ironically now that I’m leaving my burnout, I realized I just burned out I was and for how long.

It even showed in our logo.

Just words,  not that different from CNN or Fox News. I wasn’t happy talking about games, and it showed.

With all that said, where do I go from here? I’m now taking precautions to keep myself from burning out. I’m not going to try to emulate some misguided idea of what talking about video games should be because teenage me was so desperate to have video games taken seriously.

Instead, I’m going to be ok taking breaks from talking about video games and taking time actually to play them and, if I’m lucky, actually enjoy them.

Video Games and technology are still fun; even though I lost sight of that for a while, I want to focus myself and The Icon on that in the future.

And to anyone experiencing burnout, please remember it’s ok to take breaks; if you’re able to, you should. Hopefully, with time maybe your joy can find you again too.