The puzzles we’re struggling to disentangle here at The Republic are no different from those besetting the entire media industry around the world. In the last issue of The Republic, we asked readers to visit our website often and click on the Google ads they find there. Each click, we had calculated through earlier tests, earned us an average of 20¢.

The idea was to monetize the fairly high traffic the website enjoys. The real newspaper, the one printed and distributed on real paper, achieves this by selling ad space. The website currently receives about 67,000 page-views per month, and we calculated that if even a very small proportion of online readers, plus some extra real newspaper readers, were to click a few ads a few times a week, we could begin to make at least token payments to writers and editors who volunteer their contributions to the newspaper.

As with all ingenious schemes, problems almost immediately began piling up. The first thing we noticed was that, for reasons Google fails to explain, shortly after our readers generated many more clicks on our website, the average revenue per click dropped to as low as 3¢ some days. Then, after about a week of very good response from our readers, Google’s automated detection devices decided that the rate of clicks per visitor to our website was suspiciously high, and suspended the account, alleging fraud, and removed all the ads from our site.

While we were composing our appeal to this decision, a few readers of The Republic brought to our attention the fact that Google had recently agreed to insert special code into its algorithms that would allow the government of China to censor incoming news articles for the Chinese online population. This, the readers quite accurately pointed out, ran counter to The Republic’s claim of doing business only with companies whose ethics we can support. As of this writing, we haven’t heard back from Google about our appeal. When we do, and if we win our appeal, we’ll decide whether we can continue doing business with Google.

The primary purpose of The Republic is not the profit motive, and the overall business plan is not built on unending growth. Nonetheless, while The Republic is (lately) perfectly sustainable in its present form and size, some additional revenue to pay writers and editors, and a bit of growth to achieve more influence in public debates, is a big part of our current aims. While advertising sales in the real newspaper have been going strong and show lots of future promise, the substantial online traffic looks like an even greater opportunity to generate some kind of additional revenue. But what kind is the question we, and, it turns out, the whole media world, is trying to figure out.

In a lengthy Sunday New York Times article about the recent collapse of industry stalwart Knight-Ridder and the sale of all its newspaper properties, the role of the Internet as both saviour and menace figures prominently throughout. “Powerful changes in the industry—particularly the accelerating shift of advertisers from print to online and the effect on big-city dailies—changed the equation,” Katherine Q. Seelye writes about the newspaper business. Elsewhere in the article, she adds, “The migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet, as well as rising costs and falling revenue, are threatening the financial well-being—even the very existence—of some of the industry’s most storied brand names.”

She goes on later to say, “That leaves bleak options for newspaper companies that lack the financial resources to ride out the current upheaval or don’t have the ingenuity to reinvent themselves to remain profitable purveyors of information, analysis and entertainment in the digital age.” Among the key reasons for Knight-Ridder’s collapse, according to a key investor who pulled its plug, was the company’s failure to address “media fragmentation that was diverting newspaper ad dollars to other media . . . and the lack of a strategy to leverage its content online.”

It’s all online-this, online-that: the Internet is changing everything. The Republic, especially after our big Google idea appears to have hit the rocks, likewise lacks a strategy to leverage our online content. But we’re always thinking.