When Kevin Nguyen and Nick Martens founded The Bygone Bureau in 2007, few online publications offered outlets for the kind of pieces they wanted to publish: long-form essays examining life, culture and art. At the time, the rise of easy to create multimedia content seemed to be sounding a death knell for long-form writing on the Web.

Nguyen will join The Morning News co-founder Andrew Womack and The Millions founding editor C. Max Magee on a SXSW Interactive panel exploring how their respective publications have thrived despite this bleak forecast.

At the heart of this panel, titled Too Long Didn’t Read: The Future of Indie Longform, is that audiences do, in fact, want to read longer, more thought-provoking pieces on the Web. The problem, Nguyen says, is the business model.

Most sites make money from ad revenue which depends on clicks and page views. Under this model, sites that produce a greater number of shorter pages have an advantage over those with fewer pages with longer writing, Nguyen says.

Web publications have also cluttered their pages with flashy ads so that almost no white space is left on the screen. All that noise, Nguyen says, distracts and hinders reading. But it’s getting better, he says.

Nguyen says he sees more and more websites moving to a clean design with more white space, more “room to breathe.” The Bygone Bureau has strived to keep a clean design and recently launched a redesign with a responsive layout.

He says neither he nor his fellow panelists started out with a viable business model, but they’ve all found audiences.

“These are passion projects, and we’re trying to figure out if we can jimmy a business model into them,” he says.

He says there are many more ways to fund online projects beyond ad sales, and he’s optimistic that publications like his can find one that works.

This will be Nguyen’s fourth time attending SXSW Interactive. The Bygone Bureau received the Web Award in the blog category at SXSW Interactive in 2009.

You can catch Too Long Didn’t Read: The Future of Indie Longform Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Austin Convention Center.