Category: Making Money Online

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Writing

Content may be free but publishers of content can nevertheless be powerful

In a powerful essay that explains the moats that people who publish can create around their work, the reasons behind audience loyalty. This applies to whether the work is writing, video, podcasts or other mediums. I’ve summarised my understanding of the seven points the writer makes:

  1. Scale works differently: Writing has larger fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs, unlike tech businesses of late, which are built around low to zero fixed costs. As a result, investment in quality pays off more than in quantity.
  2. Network effects apply both to content creators as well as to content platforms like social networks, but apply differently. A publisher’s followers build a shared understanding of a small part of the world. At its best, it builds its own subculture.
  3. Publishers with strong points of view that run counter to established narratives are hard for existing players to compete with. Resisting it will fail to retain those who are inherently swayed by it; co-opting it risks alienating incumbents’ very audience
  4. Following naturally from points two and three, once a group of people with a shared interest, opinion and understanding has formed around a person’s published work, it’s hard for them to replicate it elsewhere. In tech terminology, the switching costs are high
  5. The publisher builds a brand that’s clearly identified with what their message is, and that makes it easy for people who’re looking for authority and quality to find them, because the internet’s discovery mechanisms optimise for exactly this.
  6. The publisher’s talent is a scarce resource – as we’ve seen in point one, it’s not easy to build to begin with, and in points two and four, that once built it’s not easy to replicate. And across industries, scarce and desirable resources are valuable.
  7. A final moat is a publisher’s craft, described by the writer as their processes. It’s built up over time and can neither be replicated quickly nor substituted by cash.

There’s significant overlap between them, but then it’s a grab-bag of points, not a framework. Nevertheless, it’s great starting material to understanding your power as a publisher (or ‘content creator’) and creating your own positioning.

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

How pay-to-play news websites gain legitimacy

This article talks about the phenomenon of paid right-wing news:

Clients pay for certain “news” to be produced—and then it is, published on a normal-looking local news site, alongside countless innocuous stories produced by machines as camouflage.

But what’s more important is why these sites gain a veneer of legitimacy. They

 [take] advantage of how profit-chasing has blown up the entire concept of “media literacy.” When your local paper’s website is as larded up with spammy-looking ad crud as an illegal Monday Night Football stream, these spare sites cannot possibly look any less “real.” And as newspapers die and people get more and more of their news from social media, fewer people recognize which news “brands” are supposed to be “trustworthy.”

The alternative to running ad-heavy websites is to charge for access. While many well-known publications have done so – NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, even WIRED – the paywall does mean fewer people end up reading articles on these sites. This puts them at a disadvantage to these pseudo-news websites, which rely neither exclusively on advertisements or paywall, but on their patrons whose views they publish as news. This breaking of the business-editorial wall is not luxury a serious publication can afford.

This comment on a Reddit thread says exactly this:

Wapo, New York times, NY Daily news, business insider, wired on and on and on, all these places used to be free and now I’m left with the freaking horrible terrible NY post.

See also: Our series on 21st Century Media, what it will look like, and its challenges

(Featured image photo credit: Md. Mahdi/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Writing

Writing for shorter attention spans

From an interview with Anand Samwal, the publisher of the excellent business newsletter CB Insights, which I have subscribed to for years now:

“As attention spans have shrunk, short, conversational, and highly visual research is more respectful of the reader’s time and that is the type of research we aim to provide,”

“I’d characterise our research as being of ‘higher nutritional value’, which means fewer words and more insights vs being full of ‘empty calories,’

This explains the fun and rather cheeky tone of its newsletter.  It also explains the focus on bite-sized commentary and shareable infographics,

Credit for these numbers [640,000 subscribers] go also to the carefully crafted, irreverent headlines.  “Bye-bye,” “no more startup drama pls,” and “this might anger you,” are a few examples of these headlines – the kinds that leave subscribers curious and wanting to click through.

(Featured image photo credit: CB Insights website)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Misinformation and countering it – Part 1

This excellent long-form article in TIME describes the nature of misinformation that is rife in America:

Most Trump voters I met had clear, well-articulated reasons for supporting him: he had lowered their taxes, appointed antiabortion judges, presided over a soaring stock market. These voters wielded their rationality as a shield: their goals were sound, and the President was achieving them, so didn’t it make sense to ignore the tweets, the controversies and the media frenzy?

But there was a darker strain. For every two people who offered a rational and informed reason for why they were supporting Biden or Trump, there was another–almost always a Trump supporter–who offered an explanation divorced from reality. You could call this persistent style of untethered reasoning “unlogic.” Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation, an Orwellian state of mind that arranges itself around convenient fictions rather than established facts.

When everyone can come up with his or her facts, the responsible thing is for everyone to also become his or her fact-checker. This is easier said than done. We saw yesterday how spam is a community problem than can only be fixed by the community – misinformation is the same.

Social media is complicit

The cost of spreading misinformation is nothing – social media and messaging services have spent years reducing the friction of sharing.

In comparison, they have spent almost no resources to determine and signal whether information is accurate or not. Recommendation algorithms simply don’t distinguish between what’s accurate and what isn’t. On YouTube, watching one conspiracy video and clicking on ‘Also watch’ recommendations can quickly lead one down a dark path, as the Guardian article describes.

It goes beyond just neglect. Social media companies have historically distinguished themselves from regular news media, arguing that they are merely platforms on which other people express their opinion, and that they can’t be held liable for what is posted by such people. However, they also argue that only they are in a position to create and apply policies regarding hate speech, abuse and misinformation. For example, see this WIRED article on Facebook’s weak efforts to self-regulate.

In short, they’d like to have it all. And so far, they have succeeded.

This imbalance by new media companies means that you and I must pick up the slack. Checking the accuracy of information means verifying the source, and then verifying the source of the source, and so on. It means looking at the bigger picture to judge if comments were taken out of context. It means determining if someone’s opinion was presented as fact. All this takes time. This example of fake national glorification took me several minutes to locate and correct:

And then there’s the social angle. Correcting someone on Whatsapp or a more public channel is almost never rewarding. The person who shared the original piece of misinformation, like anyone, has had their ego hurt and will push back. At best, it makes your real-life relationship awkward. At worst, it exposes you to online abuse. But we will need to power through this.

(Part 2: So who should you trust – and avoid?)

(Featured image photo credit: Markus Spiske/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

News subscriptions are unlikely to be a sustainable business model

Tim Bray describes why, according to him, news subscriptions are unlikely to be a sustainable business model for most news publishers:

[Publisher management’s] arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.” In my particular case, that chance is almost exactly Zero. I subscribe to enough things and I am acutely reluctant to give anyone else the ability to make regular withdrawals from my bank account. I don’t think I’m unusual. People may not be financially sophisticated, but they’re smart enough to see through the “initial-price” flim-flam and a lot of us are highly conscious of our own administrative futility and the fact that we might just not get around to unsubscribing. I’ve seen this called “Subscription fatigue” and I think that’s a decent label.

“But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more.

In the blog post he also briefly refers to the fact that subscriptions are a thing because no one has cracked pay-per-view via micropayment. He goes on to argue that even if someone had, management would still prefer driving people to subscribe:

“Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?”

It’s the opportunity cost of locking in future recurring revenue.

As we had described in our series on 21st Century Media, micropayments is one of those things that everyone recognises is an opportunity but where solution is always just beyond the horizon.

The first entity that really cracks this problem is going to be very valuable indeed. Being able to collect micropayments at scale means that news publishers can free themselves of advertising. If publishers charge comparatively more per view/read via micropayments than they make via ads, it’ll also significantly reduce the pressure to make articles, headlines, content, design towards clickbait.

Last but not least, because readers are conscious that they’re paying per article, it makes them less likely to mindlessly browse through low-value articles online and think about what they consider valuable.

(Featured image photo credits: Bank Phrom/Unsplash)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer

Nationalism, capitalism and the Indian App Store

A Swadeshi App Store. It may well happen.

It began with the temporary removal of the Paytm app from Google’s Android Play Store. And snowballed with Google’s announcement that it would enforce its existing policy of a 30% commission on the in-app sale of all digital goods (with some exceptions). We discussed this a couple of weeks ago.

Soon after, the founders of some of India’s best-known tech companies put out statements not just condemning Google’s policy but also its intent, calling it a new Lagaan, after the tax that the British occupation of the 19th and 20th centuries levied on Indian peasants.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, lauded the banding of Indian entrepreneurs and likened Silicon Valley giants’ hold on India to the rising days of East India Company, which pillaged India. “Modern day tech companies pose a similar risk,” he told TechCrunch.

And they called for a local, all-Indian app store, piggybacking on the new term Atmanirbhar, one that the current government has coined to promote local manufacturing and services.

“This is the problem of India’s app ecosystem. So many founders have reached out to us… if we believe this country can build digital business, we must know that it is at somebody else’s hand to bless that business and not this country’s rules and regulations.”

Inevitably, as is the case in India, at least some heads turned to the government for help:

Even though Google said it will allow developers to sell their services through other app stores, or websites, the industry doesn’t see this as an option either. Naidu suggested that unless the government chooses to intervene, there may be no other solution. According to tech policy analyst Prasanto K. Roy, the government’s Mobile Seva Appstore has over a thousand apps and 85 million downloads, yet it is unknown among Indian users.

To which the government, of course, responded with a why nothttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/centre-open-to-launching-an-indian-app-store/articleshow/78438620.cms:

Weighing in on the issue, union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a post on Twitter that he is happy to receive notable suggestions from Indian app developers on how to encourage the ecosystem. “Encouraging Indian app developers is vital to create an #AatmanirbharBharat app ecosystem,” he tweeted on Thursday.

The Indian government “is not averse to the idea” of launching its own app store, officials said. The existing digital store for government apps, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), hosts a slew of applications such as e-governance app Umang, health app Aarogya Setu and storage app DigiLocker.

Paytm has since created and advertised heavily what it calls a mini-app-store, but is in reality a catalog of shortcuts to 3rd party web apps. Google has postponed the implementation of its policy to 2022.

In this tale, everyone’s actions and responses have been predictable. Google’s been tone-deaf and has immediately switched to appeasement. Tech company founders have been cynically opportunistic. They have been happy with Google’s (and Apple’s) stores for distribution, even advertising heavily on them, until the moment it worked against them and they switched immediately to victim mode, some even raising the spectre of neocolonialism. Though they’re among the most visible figures of India’s capitalists, they’ve quickly appealed to the government for a solution favourable to them, further pushing the nationalist angle. And of course the Indian government, regardless of its political learnings, is happy to intervene and get into the business of running business.

(Featured image photo credit: Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto RG.org The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

300

7th October marks three hundred days since I began writing daily on this website.

While I have written on and off on the site from late 2002, this is the longest publishing streak the site has had. The streak began in December 2019 as something I wanted to do for myself at a time I felt low. It has now become a habit. If I remember correctly, Seth Godin had said on Tim Ferriss’ podcast that at some point after he started writing regularly on his blog, his thinking changed from ‘should I write tomorrow?’ to ‘what should I write about tomorrow?’.

I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable with drafting, writing and scheduling posts for the week ahead. Now I plan to build a healthy information consumption habit. My reading is too scattered, both in subject and in time. It doesn’t leave me with enough time to absorb things and think them through. I plan to trim my reading sources and structure my week so there are distinct chunks for reading, thinking and writing.

Community
This site has always explored questions about how you and I deal with technology in our lives. Those questions are so much more important in 2020 than they were eighteen years ago. My framework to understand this are the Five Megatrends and Five Big Questions.

Ultimately I’d love for the readers of this site to be a community that discusses and helps each other navigate opportunities that tech brings to our lives, and the challenges we face to our mental and physical health and to our relationships: by being conscious that tech serves us instead of us serving tech, or serving those that control tech. About Living Well in the Always-On.

Interested in being an early community member? Get in touch: Email or Twitter.

(Featured image photo credit: Jeff Golenski)

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

What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others?

This newsletter, available on the web, about building ‘personal moats’:

The post as a whole is a great read. Here are three standout pieces, in addition to the title, which came from the post:

1 . If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.

2. … it’s easy to lie to yourself & say that you’re a generalist when in reality you’ve tried a bunch of things and you’ve flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else. You want to be at least great at one thing, and then apply that lens or skill to other categories.

3. We talk a lot about “passive income,” but not as much about “passive social capital” or “passive knowledge gaining” — that’s what you gain if you build an asset that grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain i

One of the five megatrends we explore on this site is that of Audience as Capital.

The benefits of having a large humber of people who have consciously decided to listen to what you have to say have so far been limited to people with political power, or who ran large economic or social institutions. Today it is available to everyone – perhaps the Internet’s greatest dividend.

Having something of value to offer people, a personal moat, is a prerequisite to amassing this following, which is a prerequisite for building audience capital.

Featured image: Lake Palace, Lake Pichola, Udaipur, taken in 2011

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Play Store and Fair Play

Google has recently begun enforcing its policy about using Google Play’s in-app billing for apps that sell virtual goods. The problem is the 30% cut that Google, like Apple, charges on such transactions.

This Economic Times article has reactions from some app makers in India, including references to new-age colonialism via a foreign player imposing lagaan.

In my view, Google’s policies on which goods need to use in-app billing and which don’t is pretty clear. It’s also not different from Apple’s App Store policies, which have always been enforced strictly. It only applies to digital goods (with some exceptions even there), so statements like this don’t hold water:

“How can a company survive after paying 30% Google tax and Apple tax… Most businesses don’t have such margins. If enforced, this will spell an end to the startup dreams of a lot of Indian entrepreneurs.”

But there are new restrictions on communicating the existence of alternative payment methods, similar to Apple’s. I think these are onerous:

Apps other than those described in 2(b) may not lead users to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system. This prohibition includes, but is not limited to, leading users to other payment methods via:

  • An app’s listing in Google Play;
  • In-app promotions related to purchasable content;
  • In-app webviews, buttons, links, messaging, advertisements or other calls to action; and
  • In-app user interface flows, including account creation or sign-up flows, that lead users from an app to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system as part of those flows.

Because Apple enforces this policy, you can see the difference in Netflix’s signup instructions on iOS and Android. Once Google’s new policy comes into effect, I expect these to look similar:

What if the Play Store billing was completely optional in India, but a much better experience than any other method? The opportunity cost is low: an estimate of Google’s Play Store revenue in India for this year so far is USD 50 million. Its global 2nd quarter revenue was over USD 38 billion. The India business is a drop in terms of revenue, but led to 17 billion downloads.

In other words, the question Google should discuss is when app makers start designing workarounds for your policy, do you start plugging loopholes, putting you at odds with app makers, or so you change your policy, perhaps radically, so app makers welcome it?

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

On legal cover for independent journalists, censorship and self-hosting

I just discovered this – “legal support for Substack writers”

Important writing holds the powerful to account – and quite often, that’s an arrangement that the powerful would rather not support. In some cases, antagonists use threats of legal action in an attempt to stop the work that makes them uncomfortable. Recently, for instance, a high-powered lawyer representing a politician threatened a Substack writer for his coverage of the lawmaker’s questionable business ties. The threats disappeared when the writer, backed by our support program’s lawyers, stood his ground. At Substack, we want to make it crystal clear that anyone who uses such intimidation tactics will also have to reckon with us. We will use our financial and legal resources to vigorously oppose any bad-faith efforts to dissuade Substack writers from doing their work. 

Substack will make the ultimate choice on who is accepted into the [Defender] program and which cases to support. Once a case has been taken on by the program’s lawyers, Substack, at our discretion, will cover fees up to $1 million (in exceptional cases, we may cover even more). 

This is a bold, brave move by the company, and I would definitely rather this program exist than not. There are several major journalists (one, two, three are just highlights) moving to Substack, and they will need this sort of institutional cover to form 21st Century Media.

However, it puts Substack in the position of determining what opinions and positions should be defended and what not. Specifically, it puts Substack’s founders in that position. While the scale is very different today, the situation is little different from the Facebook leader being ultimately in the position of what is censored and what is promoted on the service and what isn’t.

In fact in Facebook’s case, we are taking about censorship of content. The Substack legal support program is not just about censorship but about the personal, potentially physical freedom of the writer – that is what writers are choosing to outsource, for lack of an alternative.

End-note: independent of legal protection, journalists should also invest time and effort in figuring out how to be uncensorable. We examined it a few months ago: Part 1, Part 2. If you publish on your own site and encourage your readers to read you over the open web, or subscribe to your writing via RSS, and pay you in cryptocurrency, you become a lot more difficult to shut down. You can of course continue to publish that content over Substack, and share it on Twitter and engage wit your followers there. Ultimately the truly censorship-resistance platform is the one you host.