Category: Making Money Online

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity

Screenshots show Donald Trump’s website is a donations-collecting machine, not a blog

Donald Trump has a new website. A lot of the coverage I have read is about how it is essentially a blog filled with tweet-sized rants (example coverage).

I think the most notable aspect of the website is how transparently and aggressively it is optimised to be a money-making machine.

Here is my experience (I am outside the US). This popup greets you when you visit the site.

Tapping on it leads you to this.

This is the same text and design that led people to unwittingly sign up for repeated donations from their bank accounts – in some cases until their account was empty [1].

The text is endearingly deceptive, panders to ego and assumes lack of attention. For example, “If you step up in the NEXT HOUR, we’ll make sure your name is the FIRST name on the list” with a large timer counting down from one hour. But also in the middle of it all, “The countdown has ended, but you can still donate below”

If you linger too long on the page, you get this other popup informing you that the ex-president wants to see you on the ‘top of the donor list’, whatever that means. Tapping ‘complete my donation’ simply dismisses the popup, but presumably you are now more likely to finish the transaction.

All of this is before you’ve even seen the home page of the site itself.

Anyway. You navigate back to the popup and dismiss it. Here is the actual home page:

There are three buttons on this screenful, and none of them have anything to do with what Trump has to say. They all have to do with money. Scrolling down, you get yet another contribute button.

The focus of the coverage, Trump’s new blog, is behind that tiny ‘Desk’ link at the top. It’s clear what Trump wants his supporters to click on.

So. Since ‘contribute’ is the main call-to-action, let’s tap on it. You’re taken to a page looks very much like the one you were taken to right at the beginning, complete with hard-to-notice default opt-ins.

Donating on the earlier page would put you on the ‘official donor list’. Donating here would put you on the ‘official founding member donor list’.

If you linger here, the same popup as earlier nudges you.

I couldn’t contribute because I am not “a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident”, so I haven’t experienced what happens after.

But if you navigate back and tap on the other major button, ‘Shop’, you’re taken to this store:

This is the checkout page:

When you check out an item, you aren’t buying it. You’re still donating. Even when you’re in the ‘Save American Shop’. I’m not sure if this is standard practice across USA political organisations.

I’m also not sure if the ten dollars for ‘shipping, handling and fees’ is normal. I’ve never bought items on a USA website. Seems somewhat high.

Finally, when you do tap on Desk, that tiny link at the top that is the center of all the coverage about Trump’s new online presence, this:

The first button, the first actionable click on the screen is the ‘Contribute’ button. Right alongside the post. Bolder than the actual text of the posts themselves.

One last thing. The privacy policy makes clear what the organisation can do with your data:

We reserve the right to use, share, exchange and/or disclose to Save America affiliated committee and third parties any of your information for any lawful purpose, including, but not limited to, as described in Section 3.

And what’s in section 3? All this and more:

This gives the organisation the ability to monetise your data, over and above the contributions you make to it.

So.

The site makes no pretence about who it is for. It doesn’t seek to convert; it’s for the faithful. Back in January, we had discussed this when several of Trump’s social media accounts were suspended:

Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this [then-not-yet-live] 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.

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

Because it’s for the faithful, the site doesn’t need to create talking points; the 24×7 news cycle of outrage creates them already. He knows that his opinions will be picked up by news websites and channels and social media personalities even if they are buried deep on his site. Why, those people have probably set up alerts for new posts.

The true utility of the people who actually visit those site, the ordinary right-wing USA citizen, is their money. That is what Trump’s website is for. And it has done a truly outstanding job.

[1] The donations infrastructure is by Winred, which describes itself as “the official secure payments technology designed to help GOP (ie Republican) candidates and committees win across the US.” Winred appears to have a monopoly on online Republican fund-raising.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Colin Lloyd/Unsplash)

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Growth hacking infects our attention

In my mind, Farmville was the first game to really annoy people. It was also the first game I saw that sucked in for days people I knew – people who otherwise had little interest in even casual games.

In other words, Farmville was the first large-scale success of online gamification. These are techniques that are designed – deliberately – to promote anxiety, fear of missing out, hijacking attention, guilting players and their online ‘friends’, among others.

This New York Times article from December last year takes an unsparing look at the game. Even though it shut down that month,

FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.

The article cites examples of the techniques I listed above:

drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.

It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon

I see a recurring pattern of blaming people – the ‘consumer’ – for their supposed weakness in getting sucked in by products like Farmville, and social media in general. This has happened before with tobacco, with packaged snacks, even with recycling.

This article makes clear that companies like Zynga deliberately design games and social media to prey upon our emotions and attention in ways that TV and outdoor advertising couldn’t.

They use phone and email notifications, unread counts, access to your phone contact list and facebook friend list, your location and individual pattern of use, design techniques like pull to refresh, arbitrary countdown timers – all to systematically weaken your resolve and act according to how the game or app wants you to, including spending real money to buy in-game baubles.

Unfortunately, Farmville’s techniques now pervade the tech industry. Fortunately, enough of us have been burnt by such games and are aware of our addiction to social media that – should we want to – we can in fact start of wean ourselves off it.

Unlike with viruses, there is no vaccine that immunises you from distraction. But you can build a natural resistance to it. It’s harder, but it’s also equally effective. And we will each be the wiser for it.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else

A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.

The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.

It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:

Understanding attention scarcity

He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.

This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

Understanding attention hijacking

“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”

[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Politics and Attention

Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…

Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.

he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,

“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

Categories
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.

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

No-code gives founders superpowers

I’m working with a few founders, mostly first-timers, who are going about building the initial experience for their very first customers in an interesting way. Two short tweets:

When it comes to raising capital, being able to demonstrate traction with a few hundred or a few thousand customers quickly is extremely valuable. Ditto when hiring a team or even a technical co-founder.

When it comes to actually going ‘live’, the founder leapfrogs the usual build phase → market phase transition. The founder is both building and marketing simultaneously. It’s a much quicker road to product-market fit.

Finally, when it comes to the actual tech that the founder’s using, a no-code set of tools is typically built by startups building for other small startups. They’re well-thought-out: they make it easy to build visually compelling, data-heavy pages (Notion), they make it easy to ‘glue’ together disparate elements (Zapier, IFTTT), they make it easy to build and engage with an audience (Convertkit), they even make it easy to collect money from that audience (Gumroad, Memberful) – all are things that would otherwise require complicated signup forms, KYC, licensing/commitments, and complicated technical integration.

This tweet captures this dynamic well:

Categories
Life Design Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

The Precariat and today’s tech age

The precariat is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for “gig” work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being “on call”).

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

– Precariat, Wikipedia.

We usually ascribe the ability of technology-first companies to disrupt existing industries to the fact that tech brings the marginal costs to service customers down to nearly zero. Tech-first companies can ‘scale’, get things done more efficiently: cheaper, faster, with fewer errors and people.

Another, darker side of many types of technology companies is that they externalise costs that were usually absorbed by more traditional companies.

These costs are often borne by employees themselves. This is more obvious in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies have fought hard to have their drivers, delivery persons and other roles classified as contractors so they wouldn’t be required by law to receive all the benefits employees were due. But this is also evident at several other tech companies, especially those that have moved to remote work (or were remote-first to begin with). Many companies have employees pay for their own computers, phone and equipment, internet, power, and their own home office while saving on rent, IT and utilities.

The precariat isn’t a consequence of the Tech age or tech companies. Its emergence and persistence are more than anything the symptoms of an inadequate welfare system which itself, as Wikipedia article suggests, is a result of “neoliberal capitalism”.

But it is also true that the very things that make some types of technology companies efficient and innovative are those that create precarious employment.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Carl Campbell/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity

An alternative future

Once, a long time ago when Whatsapp was independent, their founders wrote:

We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads. No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.

The company they did NOT want to become? One where

…their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

But this week in 2021, Whatsapp backed away, temporarily, from a change in their privacy policy. Newspaper ads clarifying the change didn’t work well enough, so we’re now at another blog post:

… we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook. his update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook… we’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp…

This is a company, sold by its founders to Facebook, now having to fight against the widespread perception that its a siphon for data to its parent.

That 2012 blog post, which quoted Fight Club, was a glimpse of an alternate way the decade could have unfolded: one where Whatsapp made money and the mere act of people writing and talking with each other wouldn’t be a stream of activity and metadata.

Categories
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.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

A potential new pillar of an independent internet

The messaging service Telegram intends to make money next year onwards, after being funded by its founder’s fortune. The announcement also makes its principles clear(in bold below):

All the features that are currently free will stay free.
We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
We will fix [monetisation with intrusive ads in the absence of alternatives] by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.

The goal of monetisation seems to be to cover running costs as Telegram approaches half a billion users, not to create another Big Tech company. The post mentions sustainability and independence as explicit goals:

Telegram is here to stay for a long time… [monetisation] will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come… we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate

The best-case outcome for Telegram is becoming a pillar of the independent internet like Mozilla, Wikipedia, the Tor project, Automattic, GNU, among others.

Making money from your customers, your users is how you avoid being dependent on the largesse of one person or entity. Mozilla has not yet managed to crack it; I hope Telegram does.

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On Writing

For content platforms, revenue and moderation are inextricably interlinked

The newsletter platform Substack, on its revenue model:

A lot of people suppose that we started Substack to be the next big thing in journalism. But what we’re actually trying to do is subvert the power of the attention economy.

When engagement is the holy metric, trustworthiness doesn’t matter. What matters more than anything else is whether or not the user is stirred. The content and behaviors that keep people coming back – the rage-clicks, the hate-reads, the pile-ons, the conspiracy theories – help sustain giant businesses. When we started Substack to build an alternative to this status quo, we realized that a tweak to an algorithm or a new regulation wouldn’t change things for the better. The only option was to change the entire business model.

Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions. With subscriptions, writers must seek and reward the ongoing trust of readers.

Substack does two things differently from typical social platforms: one, by encouraging paid publications, readers pay to receive their information fix, which naturally caps the number of newsletters a person receives and by extensions the attention they capture. Two, it has aligned its revenues with these paid publications. These two by themselves are a significant departure from the norm, for the better.

There is always the likelihood, perhaps the inevitability that deliberately divisive, disingenuous polemical publications will publish on Substack for free, making money off sponsorships instead of reader payments, and they may amass large followings too. And Substack too has declared that they will be light with censorship:

we commit to keeping Substack wide open as a platform, accepting of views from across the political spectrum. We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable.

This will be something that Substack will have to reckon with, and perhaps soon. Yes, apublication with a generous enough sponsor – whether public or not – and a large enough audience is better off simply hosting their own newsletter infrastructure, which is not complicated. But they may also simply continue on Substack. What is the company to do then?

The possible answers are for another time. In any case, Substack’s approach to revenue and moderation, its recognition that they are interlinked, and its willingness to publicly articulate it, is commendable.