Category: Making Money Online

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

On the independence of editorial and business during business model transitions

This Financial Times article on the effect of the pandemic on the already precarious state of newspapers’ finances is a good read overall. And at least during the pandemic, it is not behind the FT’s strict paywall.

This little bit in particular stood out for me:

While the audience for online news jumped to new highs during the pandemic, most sites convert fewer than 1 per cent of website visitors into paying readers. Although there are no sector-wide figures, some publishers admit most of those that do pay in America and Europe are older, more wealthy and white.

If it is the dominant class in any market that is the one that pays, there is a risk in the newspaper biasing its coverage towards the interests of that class. Today’s advertiser-driven model carries the same risk – does the move to paid subscriptions simply swap one set of patrons for another?

All media has had tension between business and editorial, and good media has always had a wall between the two sides. But that tension is heightened at times of major business model transitions like this. In the new model, you have a direct relationship with your audience, which pays you. When you lose them, you lose both your readership and your revenue. Independence of editorial gets harder.

This is going to be the big test for both news organizations and independent publishers with the inevitable move to pay-to-read.

End note:

One model is to rely entirely on donations, and force them to be anonymous, like via cryptocurrency. We explored this briefly in part 4 of our series on 21st Century Media. Now neither side of the news organization has any way of knowing who the audience is. It is unclear if there is a natural upper bound on how large of a news organization can run on donations alone. That altruism seems to be the natural governance model for the internet doesn’t mean it is a viable business model.

Another variation of this model could be for news organizations to move to subscriptions, but for a third party neutral organization to act as the trustee of the identities of subscribers. Now this organization could be supported by donations, but now we’re talking about one or a handful that need to be supported, not every news org.

(ends)

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Audience as Capital Making Money Online

Voice

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress stated in a simple blog post about the blogging platform’s 17th anniversary

The main feedback we got at the time was that the blogging software market was saturated and there wasn’t room or need for anything new.

but that

WordPress did have a philosophy, an active blog, a license that protected the freedom of its users and developers, a love of typography, a belief that code is poetry, fantastic support forums and mailing lists and IRC, and firm sense that building software is more fun when you do it together as a community.

There are niches, even large markets, where customers will pick the provider whose voice and values they identify with even in a crowded cost-conscious marketplace. It may, in many cases, the only company that even has a voice. In some cases that voice may express itself in the product so that it doesnt match your workflow as a customer, and that’s OK. Make a different choice. But when it does, it makes for a great relationship with the product/service. Evernote used to be that sort of company. Apple still is, even though it’s a dominant giant, no longer the perennial underdog. And WordPress is too.

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

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 2

(Part 1: RSS, Google Reader, Friendfeed, WordPress)

Medium, created by one of Twitter’s founders in 2012 “initially… as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter’s 140-character[s]“, is built around both discovery and publishing. In its early days it appealed to both sides:

In 2014

But having now establised itself as an attractive destination for writers, its home page focuses entirely on discovery. Each of the tags points to a Medium collective blog:

As an aside, Medium’s monetization model is somewhat contrived, based on a metric named Member Reading Time, 

As a user reads, we measure their scrolls and take care to differentiate between short pauses (like lingering over a particularly great passage) and longer breaks (like stepping away to grab a cup of coffee). Reading time incorporates signal from your readers without hurdles. You don’t need to ask your readers to remember to clap, or click, or do anything other than read.

It is a bold take, but does not inspire confidence.

This is in contrast to Substack, which allows its publishers to set their own prices and takes a 10% cut plus Stripe’s card processing fees.

Which brings us full circle to Substack’s discovery. Unlike WordPress, Substack’s incentives are in fact aligned with its publishers build a paying audience. But so far it’s followed a WordPress-like publisher-centric positioning. As with most marketplaces, it’s starting with building supply.

This will likely change over time if and when Substack feels confident it has cemented its position as the dominant independent publishing platform.

The big unsolved problem and opportunity is yet a neutral discovery destination of great writing for your specific niche interests, whether that writing is on Substack or Medium or a WordPress hosted or self-hosted blog, or a Threader-collated Twitter thread.

(ends)

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 1

Substack, the newsletter platform, is going to need a discovery engine. As it becomes increasingly popular as a publishing service, discovery becomes both a problem and an opportunity.

Substack “readership and writership has doubled there in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic.” according to its CEO. 

This made me think about discovery of indepdendent publishers. 

RSS, the original pub-sub standard, had no discovery built in, primarily because it was the web. 

Google Reader had your social graph as a result of Gmail, and towards the end of its short life ended up with some good social discovery:

Friendfeed took that further. You could link a wide wide variety of social accounts to your own Friendfeed account, giving your friends a single destination to ‘follow’ you. People could mix and match friend feeds. In fact, you could even create a ‘shadow’ profile for people who weren’t on Friendfeed. It was a loss for both the social and the open internet when FF sold itself to Facebook.

Regardless, both Google Reader and Friendfeed were both near-social discovery services.

Today Feedly is the dominant RSS sync – and reader – service. Even today, Feedly’s discovery seems like an afterthought compared to its fairly well built subscription and reading capabilities:

And while Flipboard does support RSS – you can, as far as I know, add and follow an RSS feed into the app, it’s hardly one of the top publishing platforms for independent publishers, and its discovery is very broad, but also very shallow. 

I really want WordPress to succeed as a discovery service. They’re a great way for an independent publisher to start a blog. But I think their positioning is somewhat muddled with regard to discovery. It’s up-front-and-center in their mobile apps, which I would imagine a blog writer would use to publish on the go, not read.

But on their website it’s virtually hidden. 

Part of the reason for WordPress’ ambivalnce about pushing discovery is that its business model doesn’t involve intermediating the relationship between publishers and readers. It’s clear it views itself as a blogging platform, and its paid plans have entirely to with with added features for publishers. There are few incentives to actively increase audiences for their publishers.

(Part 2: The new generation: Medium and Substack)

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Real-World Crypto

On the coverage of cryptocurrency in India

The Economic Times reported that “A note has been moved (by the finance ministry) for inter-ministerial consultations” regarding a legal framework for cryptocurrency. 

Other news sites (Bloomberg, MoneyControl, MoneyLife, ) have published their own articles, all citing the Economic Times. Naturally, the crypto press has picked up on the same story overseas. To the casual news reader, the ban is now inevitable.

The only piece of actual news in the ET article, though, is that a note has been drafted by the finance ministry for inter-ministerial discussions on a legal framework for cryptocurrency in India. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything beyond this is speculation.

This has led to these articles being shared on social media over and over with similar speculative discussion. It’s another example of today’s media’s SOP to use sensation to drive page views, as we have seen in the series on 21st Century Media.

This could have been a chance to own a discussion, become the destination that people trust, about India’s approach to cryptocurrency. Any one of the media sites could have distinguished clearly between the news – the note – and the context: the RBI’s banning of cryptocurrency in 2018, the IAMAI petition in the Supreme Court to reverse it, the SC’s judgement earlier reversing the ban, the difference between a legal framework and the RBI mandate, what a good legal framework could look like. Coverage like this combined with the trust and brand recognition of any of these news companies could have heviuly influenced the awareness about, and therefore the debate on, cryptocurrency in India.

This is a lost opportunity.

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Data Custody Making Money Online

Digital Tenancy

We have discussed earlier how different generations approach media like books, movies, music. The young today are comfortable with streaming services:

 …they have never had to store anything, never had to back it up. They lament a TV show or music album no longer being available because a service chose to not renew a licenss, but they move on quickly because they know it’ll just show up sooner or later on another service. Impermanence is not a bug, it’s just part of the experience. 

But even in the cases where they do ‘buy’ a song or a book or a movie or a TV show, they never own it – it’s at best a license for an unpredictable amount of time. They are renters, digital tenants:

Unlike many other streaming services, Prime Video not only gives you access to selected content with your monthly subscription, but it also allows you to rent or buy movies. The latter is explicitly advertised as a purchase and its price reflects that… [but instead] Amazon grants you a “non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, limited license, during the applicable Viewing Period, to access and view the Digital Content in accordance with the Usage Rules, for personal, non-commercial, private use.”

In addition,

The company also states that it cannot be held liable “if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.” In other words, you are not buying a product, you are simply “licensing” the right to view the content on Amazon’s platform and your access can be revoked at any time.

This is true of your collection on the Kindle and Apple Books stores too. It’s also true of digital games that can only be played on a particular platform and need connectivity to a vendor-run server, like Valve’s Steam. It is very like the ownership issues with connected appliances we discussed only a few days ago.

The iTunes Store may be the big exception here. It has always offered DRM-free purchases of songs. When you buy a song from the iTunes Store, you download the MP3. You can back it up to an external hard drive, you can play it in a different music player, you can sync it to a non-Apple MP3 player – no problem. It truly is yours to own. The Store is such an outlier in this space that I wonder how long it will last.

End note: At a time when the music industry had realised how big the piracy problem was, I recall Steve Jobs made the argument by saying that the time taken locating, downloading, adding ID3 metadata to and organising an album’s worth of music files versus the cost of downloading it from iTunes (USD 9.99) meant you were making less than minimum wage – that you should just pay the USD 9.99 and earn more in that time. It was so simple and powerful that it has stayed with me nearly twenty years later.

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Data Custody Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity

Data Ownership vs Custody for the 21st Century – Part 2

(Part 1)

The question is which party/parties you trust. It’s a question of who the right custodian of your data is. Because that is the question we are dealing with here:

Our terms of engagement in the connected world make it impractical and even unnecessary for you to have sole ownership and control over the sharing of the data your actions and transactions generate. But you do have agency over who you transact with. Whether you allow Google to build your social graph as a result of your email, video chat and text messaging or whether you allow Facebook is up to you. Whether you subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify is up to you. Whether you buy groceries from Amazon’s Whole Foods or from Trader Joe’s is up to you. So is who you bank with. All companies will use your data to enrich themselves directly or indirectly. But whether they will do it at your cost is something you can evaluate.

The question is Custody for the 21st Century.

For example as of May 2020, you can argue that it makes business sense for Apple to protect your data with them because their revenue – whether from hardware or from services – does not depend on selling your data to advertisers who may build harmful, incomplete, incorrect profiles on you. It makes logical sense then for you to entrust your personal information, say that generated by your everyday usage of your phone, to Apple instead of other companies. Extend that to the other places where you share your data or get your media.

The decision is also simplified – in many cases it may not be who to trust, it may just be that I don’t care enough.

Viewed as a choice of custody, it becomes an issue that people in tech, maybe even the broader public, can be coaxed to consider the importace of.

Endnote: Framing the issue as a choice of custody also makes it easy for people to realise where they have little or no practical choice: One’s ISP. One’s choice of phone. One’s choice of online store.