Category: Discovery and Curation

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

Rewarding affinity, not transactions

We’ve discussed before the increasing population of what I call CoCoCo – content → community → commerce, and what’s also been termed Linear Commerce.

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 1

Now, a recent Harvard Business Review article touches on this in the context of loyalty programs: “Want More Loyal Customers? Offer a Community, Not Rewards“

True loyalty is emotional and irrational and leads to customers feeling like they’re part of an exclusive membership group which then leads them to become loyal subscribers or consumer network participants.

as opposed to

some companies allow you to earn points for following them or writing a product review. This sort of bribery usually attracts the least loyal and least valuable audience — people mostly interested in claiming the reward not invested in the brand… [things like this] have more to do with an economic transaction than with true affinity for a brand.

I have been part of great communities, and they are everything that the first quote talks about. I’ve also seen such communities decline as the company behind the brand failed to convert this loyalty into commercial success. And I’ve seen referral rewards dressed up as loyalty programmes that ultimately attracted the sort of people the second quote describes.

At its core, the most influential customer-facing person at a brand need to be genuinely interested in engaging with customers and understanding what they want, in the context of the brand. Creating products and solutions does not automatically beget a community.

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

The last Twitter megapersonality – Part 2

(Part 1 – Deplatformization)

What’s new is the Trump episode demonstrated these companies’ herd mentality: first no one could afford to act against his social media accounts because it would mean losing eyeballs. And then all of a sudden no one could afford to keep his account standing. [2]

This means online personalities can’t rely of any of these platforms as an alternative to the others. Now that the platforms have acted in unison once – rather effectively – they’re likely to be more aggressive in the future. It’s like being cancelled, but by entire platforms.

So the next megapersonality isn’t going to be primarily on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or even Telegram. They are going to own their presence. They may publish and engage on all of these platforms, but their home, their fortress, is going to be an independent online presence.

Two types of such online presences will proliferate among influencers: One, state controlled or state influenced online media for national political leaders. The internet equivalent of state TV and Radio. China leads the world here.

Two, independent online properties. We discussed this earlier in the context of Trump’s options:

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

This Vox article shows how other right-wing personalities like Alex Jones have their own website and online radio show have an audience independent of social media sites. While they also have also suffered in their ability to reach people after being shut out from media platforms, they have survived, even thrived. For Trump, who hasn’t bothered spending any time investing in any platform his own, there is suddenly no way to reach out to his followers. Every political leader, every entertainer, every tech personality has seen this unfold.

Trump may have been the last Twitter megapolemicist, but it’s likely he’s going to run one of the first personal megaplatforms. I’m looking forward to how quickly it happens and what form it takes.

(ends)

[2] The point of this is not about right or wrong. For the record I think Trump’s Twitter account was a disgrace to online decency.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Harald Arlander/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

The last Twitter megapersonality – Part 1

‘Deplatformization’ is now a word in the tech world’s vocabulary. It’s what the Tech Giants did to Donald Trump. First one, then another, and then all of the herd followed last week:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”.

And just like that, Trump’s vast influence was neutered. This site makes the case that after years of hand-wringing, the tech giants took action simply because it had become clear that Trump no longer held political power:

For years Facebook and Twitter were unwilling to enforce their own rules against those inciting violence, in fear of upsetting a substantial part of their userbase… Not only is this [deplatformization] too little too late, but needs to be understood as an admission of complicity… Could it be that after the electoral shake-up what used to be an asset became a liability?

One of the mega trends we explore repeatedly on this site is that of Audience as Capital. You can’t discuss that trend without recognizing the fantastic power now held by social media companies which, if user bases were populations, would be the world’s largest countries:

  • Facebook itself: over 2.5 billion active users
  • Youtube: over 2 billion
  • Whatsapp (Facebook): over 2 billion
  • Instagram (Facebook): well over 1 billion
  • Wechat: ~1 billion
  • Tiktok: ~800 million
  • Twitter: ~300 million
  • Linkedin: over 300 million

Add to this Google Play Store with about 2.5 billion users on Android and Apple’s App Store with over 1.5 billion iOS devices controlling app distribution. They took the right-wing-dominated social network Parler offline.

Further add to this Amazon’s dominance of online commerce, Stripe’s of online payment acceptance, the decades-old Visa-Mastercard duopoly of payments processing [1], and Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform’s cornering of the internet applications, including such basic internet plumbing as DNS. AWS took Parler’s infrastructure down too.

We have never before seen such global concentration of attention and distribution.

[1] Not to mention local leaders: China Unionpay and India’s Rupay

(Part 2: so what’s the future?)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Willian Justen de Vasconcellos/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation

A short thread on an alternative to big tech’s control over online conversation

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Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

From the viewpoint of Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and potential other social media/commerce services, banning and suspending Trump’s account makes sense. It is pretty straightforward for these services to make the case that his posts/tweets violate their terms of service [1].

I’m stuck by how quickly and totally Trump’s influence has been curtailed. His options are now
(a) White House press releases, which he has until the week after next
(b) the group chat app Parler that is popular with the fringe right, but which was also banned by Google Play and has been given notice by Apple’s App Store,
(c) various subreddits, but Reddit has already suspended most of the popular ones
(d) other potential social networks (including, say, the group messaging app Telegram)
(e) his email lists
(f) his own website

Only with his email lists and his own website is Trump fully in control. [2] Perhaps he could set up his own Twitter-like social network on his site with Mastodon. He could set up discussion forums on his site with Vanilla Forums or Discourse. All of this over and above built-in comments on his blog. It is likely that sooner or later Trump or an organisation linked closely to him will set up this sort of infrastructure.

But what he gets back in terms of control he loses in terms of distribution. Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.

With an account on broad-based social networks like Twitter, your ‘viral’ messages find their way into the feeds of people who have nothing to do with you. In this way, at least, Twitter works for you, distributing your message in a way that optimises for discovery of your account. You don’t need to pull people in; the platform pushes them to you.

This optimisation is one the most common criticisms of social networks – with an algorithmically picked feed, at its best, you discover new interests, make new friends, understand things better. But at its worst, your feed makes you more anxious, causes more outrage, causes you to be more polarised than you otherwise would be. This is how polemical figures like Trump gain both followers and detractors.

What’s important is that both sides are equally important to his popularity. And there’s an inherent danger in having only supporters on a platform.

On Twitter (and Reddit/Facebook), there have probably been hundreds of thousands of online fights between supporters and detractors of Trump. However ugly they may have been, they have served as an outlet for rage and hatred, a valve for emotional steam stirred up by Trump and TV channels.

For a while, I imagine these online squabbles will continue. But if and when Trump or an entity aligned with him sets up their own online infra like we discussed above, it’s going to be an echo chamber that surpasses subreddits like /r/the_donald or on the chat app Parler. Some of the frenzy may be let out on social media, but the risk is that the majority will play out in the real world.

This is the main second-order risk I see with a ban on Trump’s social media presence. I’m not sure we’ve understood this, leave alone acknowledged it.

[1] Whether it was too late, or whether they enforce these rules arbitrarily or selectively is another debate, and not this site’s focus.

[2] That is, as long as he uses his own infrastructure for them, as opposed to something like Substack for email and a wordpress.com site, which could both be turned off.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Nareeta Martin/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation Startups

Time, not capital, is an early stage company’s most valuable resource

This somewhat short post lists the software that a small three-member startup says that it happily pays for. There are eight services that total up to USD 171 a month, or a little over two thousand dollars a year.

When you’re an early-stage company, your biggest cost is your opportunity cost of time. Above all else. You can buy yourself that time quite profitably with well designed, highly available software.

I’ve seen – and experienced – a lot of startups that look to conserve money in their early days by either looking to build out software that they use internally, or by repurposing one tool for another use case, or by sticking with the limitations of a free version of an otherwise paid service that was designed to save time.

These companies typically think that their capital on hand is their most precious resource. In trying to be good stewards of that money, they end up working inefficiently with suboptimal tools, creating quite unnecessary overhead for themselves and in many cases incurring early technical debt.

When time is your most valuable resource, evaluate software carefully, then find a way to pay for it.

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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Facebook as the only means of discovery for small businesses

A couple of weeks ago we explored a counterpoint to the narrative that Facebook is being disingenuous by protesting Apple’s increased privacy controls in iOS 14. In summary, that the internet has evolved to a point where Facebook ads are an important, affordable means of discovery for small businesses.

A few days ago one of the co-founders of the Morning Brew newsletter reiterated that:

Morning Brew is one of my favourite newsletters and one of most popular ones, with over two and a half million subscribers and having recently been sold to Business Insider for dozens of millions of dollars. If they owe their scale to Facebook ads, then they are the poster child for the success of this ad platform.

Now. This site’s spoken often of wresting back control from Facebook’s pervasive, opaque tracking; I also think Apple’s right in its endeavour to protect people from such tracking by default.

My position on this has little to do with Facebook’s pirported hypocrisy or culpability. I think it’s a collective failure that there are no scalable alternatives for discovery on the Internet other than Google and Facebook (and Instagram and maybe soon Whatsapp), both roughly twenty-year-old companies.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Gatekeeping and status-preening

The sociologist and writer Zeynep Tufekci on the reaction that one of her conjectures about the covid vaccine rollout received:

The third category of reaction, the most interesting from a public sphere point of view, was a version of “how dare I write about this”—given, obviously, that I am not an immunologist or a vaccine expert.

– Maybe Freedom is Having No Followers to Lose

She surmises about how the innate need for in-group and out-group identification is magnified first by social media and then further in uncertain times like this pandemic. But to me the most interesting part is at the end, which is also what the title of her post, is about when, on applying for an academic job, she heard back only either from the very top institutions or the bottom. Of the latter, she says

… the episode also gave me an appreciation for the ones with nothing to lose… They were in many ways the outsiders, but they didn’t have as many chips on their shoulders because they weren’t playing the game in the first place. They weren’t weighed down with the status-climbing because they didn’t have a chance. They were free. In many ways, the open nature of status-climbing efforts on social media has taken away some of that freedom and reconfigured it, and how to recognize its distorting effects is worth thinking about.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online

Unlived lives and wormholes

This four thousand-plus word article in the New Yorker – about considering the alternate lives we could have lived if we’d made different choices – is a good longread as this year comes to a close.

This bit interested me:

The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.

This is by and large true. I had held for a while that I’d have a career in computer architecture and operating systems, either designing chips or OSes that ran on them. Instead I’ve ended up working with early stage startups across a bunch of fields including in finance. And while I’ve stayed in tech, it’s no longer practical to switch to my earlier, specialised tech career.

At the same time, the growth of no-code tools that bring fixed costs down, the proliferation of distribution channels to build your own audience, and several alternate means of financing (one, two) means that know-how and technical skills as barriers to entry are falling every day.

Five years ago the quote from the article would mostly hold; your career would be a journey down an eternally narrowing funnel. But today there are an increasing number of wormholes out of that funnel. Curiosity and passion are now at least as valuable as tech kn0w-how and access to capital.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Independent publishers as the new distributors of controversial content

Major streaming video services have declined to bid on a new documentary about the Saudi Arabian government’s alleged killing of a dissident. Netflix, in particular, was eager to bid on and list Icarus, the director’s previous documentary about the Russian government’s pervasive athlete doping programme but, according to the New York Times, did not even reply to the director about this documentary.

The same market forces that make streaming services great US stocks to own – Netflix, Amazon, Disney among them – also make them less inclined to pursue anything outside of a certain risk-free definition of entertainment, since a broader market inevitably brings broader constraints on what is acceptable.

I see an important role for independent publishers with a direct relationship with their audience in distributing new material like this documentary, especially those that collect payments directly from their readers/subscribers as opposed to via sponsors.