Month: July 2020

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Curation, not discovery, is what people will pay for

A co-worker recently mentioned that they have a paid subscription to a video-based fitness coaching service that they’ve been using during this current work-from-home phase.

Another colleague remarked that that was pointless given the sheer volume of free content on YouTube from professionals and amateurs alike.

The reply was that that was exactly the point – too many options. Plus, no information on what was safe, what was appropriate for them, and what progress/results they should expect.

This is the difference between discovery and curation.

We have talked before about how discovery of newsletters today is an unsolved problem and therefore an opportunity. For content of this kind, discovery is not a problem. Google does an excellent job surfacing YouTube videos for search terms related to health and fitness. YouTube itself aggressively recommends videos related to the one you’re watching.

But curation adds trust. It adds relevance. And it is this that people will pay for.

For all of Fitbit’s problems losing market share to the Apple Watch, it understands this difference, and monetises accordingly. Fitbit has a top-level community tab in its app where you can discover the experiences, practices and routines of a large number (millions!) of people and engage with them.

But it also has a top ‘Premium’ tab that has

Ergo, curated, structured fitness and wellness services that include the following:

Workout plans from Fitbit plus videos from DailyBurn, Popsugar, barre3 …follow step-by-step programs to help you eat well, sleep better and move more… get a personal Wellness Report of your Fitbit stats to share with your healthcare professional… receive personalized insights about your sleep and follow guided programs to help you get better rest…

Fitbit believes that the opportunity costs in terms of time and health is high enough for people who want outside help with their health to pay for such a service.

It’s the same with investment advisors. Discovery of books, twitter threads, blog posts and videos about my philosophies, strategies and tactics of investing is not a problem. But creating, executing and re-adjusting a personal investing plan is difficult to construct from this information, unless you are a professional.

For many years now we have seen a continuing explosion of content created on the internet driven by the success of services built around discovery – search, browse, recommend – such as Facebook and Google. This content has almost universally been monetised via low-cost ads, a few cents per click, incentivising quantity not quality.

We have now begun to see a willingness to pay good money to curators of content in an infinite number of internet-based niches. I am excited about this coming explosion.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Twitter as professional network

The newsletter Not Boring had a very different view of Twitter in a recent issue:

Twitter thinks it’s Facebook, but it’s LinkedIn. 

Twitter thinks it’s an ad product, but it’s a subscription product. It thinks it’s an Aggregator, but it’s a Platform. It thinks it’s a social network, but it’s a professional network: one built for the Passion Economy, based on the strength of ideas instead of past experience.

That realization should be liberating for Twitter and Jack Dorsey. Instead of being the world’s least innovative social network, it can be its mostinnovative professional network. Twitter should be the beating heart of the Passion Economy, and begin capturing some of the tremendous value it creates. 

The newsletter goes on to make the point that with this shifty in positioning comes a shift in monetisation. Like Linkedin, which generates a large part of its revenue from what it calls ‘talent solutions’ as opposed to from ads , Twitter too could create paid products for people who use it like a professional network. As it says, 10% of its users generate 80% of its tweets, so there are clear power users who would be willing to pay for access to privileges and tool.

I think this has merit. This tweet from three years ago resulted in a lot of replies from people across many fields:

For many, Twitter is an invaluable aid to their careers. Their network of followers and the people they follow is their professional network. I have seen people among those I follow use Twitter to build a brand, communicate with prospects, promote clients, build a reputation, just like they would on Linkedin. When we use the terms VC Twitter, Investing Twitter, Crypto Twitter, Science Twitter we’re not just talking about interest-based communities, but the extraordinarily deep engagement between professionals in those fields and their followers. Both derive value from it in a way well beyond what you would expect in a typical social network. There are almost certainly hundreds of such “{Interest} Twitter”s.

End-note: In fact professionals are very likely more effective on Twitter than on Linkedin.

Linkedin’s Facebook-like 2-way connection model means that people are flooded with connection requests (that are solely meant for low-effort lead generation). The volume is now such that the norm is to accept by default, leading to people’s feed being inundated with posts from connections they have no affinity to and no desire to hear from. The signal-to-noise ration is much weaker on Linkedin than Twitter.

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Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 4

(Part 3)

Another perspective on leveraging one’s direct relationship with an audience is the idea of Linear Commerce:

Law of Linear Commerce: the lines of demarcation between media and commerce are fading. For the brands that are most suited to the modern retail economy: media and commerce operations work to optimize for audience and sales conversion. This is the efficient path for sustained growth, retention, and profitability.

– On Linear Commerce, Web Smith.

Smith, quoted on another site:

The Law of Linear Commerce is the prioritization of audience. Product manufacturers typically seek to outsource demand generation. Brands, that are ahead of the curve, emphasize their audience’s growth as much as they do their physical product’s development. Likewise, digital media publishers that follow linear commerce principles prioritize organic and loyal audience growth over SEO or PPC-driven commodity clicks.

Smith uses this graphic to describe the ongoing evolution from the current norm of buying audiences to the other extreme, media-first commerce:

One of the examples of a Level 5 company Smith describes is Glossier, a cosmetics company.

The best practical example of the Version 5 launch plan was Emily Weiss’ go-to-market strategy. Into the Gloss began as the primary sales driver for Glossier’s line of makeup and accessories. A newly minted unicorn, Glossier.com‘s 2.6 million monthly visitors now arrive from a sustainable blend of customer acquisition methods: organic traffic through Into The Gloss and Instagram, paid search, Facebook / Instagram advertising, and a quiet affiliate deal with BuzzFeed. Here is Emily Weiss on Glossier’s growth:

We are building an entirely new kind of beauty company: one that owns the distribution channel and makes customers our stakeholders. By connecting directly with consumers, Glossier has access to endless inspiration for new products.

This other site has yet another example:

Nelk started as a prank channel on YouTube. Over the years, they’ve evolved into more of a lifestyle vlogging channel…

When they drop a new line of products, it’s always limited and it always sells out. Usually within minutes. They tie their product drops seamlessly with the antics, catch phrases, etc. from their vlogs. These all become products sold on http://fullsend.com. They started with clothing, but have expanded—bottle openers, flags—you name it. 

That is the low hanging fruit. Nelk didn’t stop there. They’ve excellently tied their content roadmap directly to the future products they sell. Here’s an example 👇

A year ago or so, a fitness-focused Youtuber, Bradley Martin, started showing up in their weekly videos. Bradley became a staple in many Nelk vlogs. And so the Nelk crew started working out and talking about fitness regularly. Fitness became a core part of their vlogs. This wasn’t random. It was a well-thought out plan that deeply connected their content to commerce strategy. Yesterday they launched http://fullsendsupps.com— branded line of fitness supplements. Guess what? It fully sold out. In less than 1 day!

You can see how this goes well beyond simply being an influencer with a following that features sponsored products.

A Level 5 Linear Commerce company is a combination of a full-fledged media brand that has a fan following in its own right whose content is closely tied to the roadmap of that brand’s own products. The roadmap itself is influenced by the audience’s desires, forming a virtuous cycle.

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Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 3

(Part 2)

The Internet has also enabled

“the democratization of logistics and manufacturing, propelled by emerging digital shopping channels, has sparked a Cambrian explosion of DTC companies”

– The Pivot to Owned Commerce, David Perell

This means the barrier to entry to start a commerce business has dramatically dropped. Therefore if you have an audience that’s interested in something, you have the ability to shape that into a very specific desire and fulfil it.

The publishers of today are the commerce companies of tomorrow. Publishers with organic reach can launch and test products without paid media. Intimate customer touch-points remove the need for focus groups. With shopping experiences that are native and true to the brands DNA, they can scale fast, with relatively low investment. They can A/B test every ad, evaluate customers with engagement data, and use real-time data to iterate and improve creative. By diversifying their revenue streams, they’ll decrease business risk and increase their revenue multiples… Content and commerce are converging. Publishers who appeal to owned audiences will win the upcoming pivot to owned commerce.  

You cannot do this cynically, though:

Casper launched Van Winkle, the brand’s standalone online publication, in 2015, but quickly shut it down after struggling to deal with the site’s independence from the brand.

If you need a company, you seek it out or opt-into communication from it. “Need companies” are the email newsletters you subscribe to, the creators you talk about with friends, the podcasts you listen to weekly, and the writers who’ve blown your mind so many times that you’ll never miss a word again. They have extremely loyal audiences… “Feed companies” are the opposite. They’re undifferentiated. They try to be everything to everyone. But in reality, there’s nothing to no-one. Most feed-discovered content is interchangeable.

(Part 4 – companies that take their audience relationship to the next level)

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

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 2

(Part 1)

In his piece ‘Never-ending Niches‘, the writer Ben Thompson articulates in a new way some points we have discussed before in the context how the Internet has opened up exponential opportunities for people to build powerful micro-brands. In this post we look at one of these points.

So it was with the Internet and the trade-off between reach and time: suddenly every single media entity on earth, no matter how large or small, and no matter its medium of choice, could reach anyone instantly. To put it another way, reach went to infinity, and time went to zero…

… there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories that had the potential of going viral. Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.

That left a single alternative: going around Google and Facebook and directly to users.

Old Media relies on paid social for reach and discovery. 21st Century Media relies on organic social. Old Media gamifies sharing on social and on dark forests. 21st Century Media is shared because it speaks directly to readers’ interests.

Put another way, Old Media optimises for reach and hopes that will create a relationship. 21st Century Media optimises for relationships because it knows that will create its own reach.

This reminds me strongly of the upside-down funnel that the cofounder of the email service Mailchimp described seven years ago:

What he describes is, in a nutshell, what drives independent publishers:

When you start a business, you don’t have a budget for marketing. You probably don’t have the time or talent for it, either. The only thing you’ve got is your passion. That damned, trouble-making passion that suckered you into starting your business in the first place. Take that passion and point it at your customers.

(Part 3 – a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of direct-to-consumer companies)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

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

The writer and media entrepreneur John Battelle describes a form of media arbitrage in the ad industry today:

A big publisher like Buzzfeed or Cheddar sells a million-dollar advertising deal to a marketing brand. The media company guarantees the marketer’s message will collect a certain number of audience impressions or views, charging the marketer a “cost per thousand” for those impressions. (Known as “CPM,” cost per thousand pricing ranges widely, from a few pennies to $25-40 for “premium” placements)…

Because (Facebook and Google are cheaper, have better targeting), publishers have become audience buyers on Facebook, Google, and other networks. Enterprising publishers began packaging their own content with marketing messages from their sponsors, then they got busy promoting that bundle to audiences on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, among others.

This is where “the arb” comes in: The publisher will charge the marketer, say, a $15 CPM, but acquire their audiences on Facebook for $7, clearing an $8 profit on every thousand impressions.

But marketers still prefer this approach to simply advertising on social themselves because they

… still believe that the context of a media brand can help their messaging perform better, and they’re not wrong in that belief. So they’ll pay a bit more to have their messaging associated with what they believe is quality editorial.

These practices – “packaging their own content with marketing messages from their sponsors” on social media – will lead to the erosion of the media company’s brand.

The one way sponsorship works is when the publisher has a direct relationship with a defined, loyal audience. Think of websites like Daring Fireball, podcasts like Joe Rogan’s or newsletters like the Morning Brew, each of them their own micro-brand. In this case when the sponsor’s message is packaged with the publisher’s content, the targeting is sharper, it happens on the publisher’s medium, the publisher controls the narrative, and the audience hears about it in a transparent context – this last is Battelle’s main point, the intermixing of content and marketing on social ruins context, which is why it’s disingenuous.

Sponsorship via direct-to-audience properties becomes the norm in the 21st century. This value that these independent publishers capture is the return they see on the capital they have built up in the form of their audience.

(Part 2 – what about the Internet makes micro-brands more attractive than large publishers)

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Walk and talk

“Turning my Zoom meetings into walking phone calls. Less Zoom fatigue, more steps!” – @shl

Came across this tweet quoted in my RSS feeds. Given that I’ve also been doing this – and light stretching – the last couple of months, I’m wondering how many of us are now having walking meetings without knowing about it.

No matter how informal the meeting, sitting in front of a computer/propped-up phone is not the same as sitting in a chair/couch in an in-person meeting. If we are going to be doing remote-first work for a while longer, the desk for anything more than an hour of conference calls is not an option. With walking you’re getting improved breathing and improved circulation. You pay better attention and stave off fatigue.

Some folks are getting a lot of walking done.

There are downsides, even with audio-only.

“It is frustrating for me, I hate hearing ‘I don’t know, will have to look up when I’m back at my screen’ or ‘oh, I can’t read anything you’re sharing with the meeting cause I’m on my phone on the move’” – @goldie_

Someone else in the thread remarks how walking is fine until you have to take notes, but another reply says they take notes on their phone.

I think it’s great that we’re figuring this out. We’re creating new normals that are Internet-native.

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Audience as Capital Data Custody

A mistake, online presence and ownership

This is a short but important one. Earlier this week, Google lost ownership of the blogspot.in domain. On the day this post was written, it is still marked ‘for sale’.

If you created your blog in India, Google automatically redirected the <your user name>.blogspot.com domain to <your user name>.blogspot.in. Over time, the latter became the domain most sites would link to. This means with this change, all the links that referenced your blog via blogspot.in – Twitter, Facebook, other blogs, even Google search results – are now broken.

In the new Fire 2.0 era your presence online is your capital, meaning the ownership of your identity must reside with you. Not with Linkedin or Twitter or Facebook or about.me. Nor with Google or WordPress or Substack, all of whose business priorities and decisions are independent of yours. These can all be destinations where you publish, build your tribe, create your reputation, but your canonical identity should be your own domain.

This instance seems to have been a mistake but it could well be simply Google deprecating country-specific domain names – a business decision. Like its decision to shutter Google+. Or Yahoo’s to shut down Geocities. If your blog was on one of those, it’s gone from the Internet. Or it could have been on Livejournal, sold by the American company SixApart to a Russian media entity, now conforms to Russian law and serves Russian ads. In all of these cases, you do not have control over your presence.

If, like Google, if ever you forget to renew your domain, let it be your oversight.

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Goals, habits and a disagreement

While reading in the context of yesterday’s post I came across this post on the Farnam Street blog making the case that habits, not goals, are the key to making a difference.

According to the writer, the problem with goals include that they have an end point after which people usually regress, they rely on willpower and self-discipline, even that they lead to recklessness once made public – as yesterday’s post did. In contrast habits are ‘easy to complete’, are ‘for life’, ‘can compound’ and can even ‘overshoot your goals’.

The argument is one-sided, creates a false dichotomy and advocates against a powerful tool in your arsenal towards habit formation.

A goal, set correctly, puts you on course to forming a habit. If you carelessly design a goal such that executing on it causes a major disruption to your life, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the pursuit of a habit or not.

But executing on a well thought out goal – with regular check-ins– provides a great framework for making choices and changes so that the end habit becomes sustainable.

I want to create a habit to get adequate amounts of water daily, as we saw yesterday. The goal of hitting a 250-day streak is very useful in identifying challenges or opportunities to set that habit because you’re checking in every day. The logging of water to Apple Health via the iOS Shortcut tracks the streak goal but it is in the service of identifying and removing friction in water consumption. Without it it’d be really hard to make sure I’m having enough.

The problem with the writer’s take is the following. If the pursuit of a goal is a drain on one’s willpower and causes one to be reckless, it’s a symptom of a poor relationship with oneself. If you have a healthy nurturing relationship with yourself, a goal becomes something exciting, a project to look forward to. Execution difficulties become problems to challenge yourself with. Setbacks become learning opportunities, achievements become heartfelt celebrations – all because it’s you making yourself better.

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Water habit and walking the talk

We have seen my tracking the tackling of my migraine problem. Recently I’ve had a recurrence of a particular variant whose trigger I have narrowed down to inadequate water intake.

The idea now is to make water consumption a habit.

  1. The consensus around enough water seems to be 2.5L a day for men in tropical climates. Although I spend most of time indoors, Bombay is humid. So I have set my daily consumption target to 3L.
  2. The consensus around building a habit is now 66 days on average but up to 254 days. Everything I can find online seems to reference a 2009 study that states

The time it took participants to reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to reach their limit of automaticity and highlighting that it can take a very long time.

So I have set myself a target of 250 straight days of this level of water consumption, that is until 18 March 2021. The study abstract also says “missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process” so I won’t obsess over a perfect streak.

  1. To track water consumption, I’m going to simply use the shortcut I wrote in February 2020. It’s easy to launch from Launch Center Pro and logs to Apple Health, so I can look up my day’s consumption quickly. I have already logged ~5000 expenses for over 3 years via a similar LCP Shortcut, so the logging habit is already ingrained.
  2. Finally, to measure if water consumption has a material effect on that variant of the headache, I have modified my headache log script also log the variant in addition to the pain-level. Unfortunately we don’t have a baseline frequency of the occurrence of this variant. We will report in briefly every month.

This is part of what I wrote last week about walking the talk, as I write about how people are using the Internet to achieve exponential results in their lives.