From Blogging to Newsletters
What's old is new again for tools supporting creator owner-operators
COLUMN
One of the most consequential aspects of the global internet is its ability to democratize individual expression. Whereas once a person was limited in their ability to reach audiences by the physical distance and/or the costs required to reach them via mass media like the printing press, telegraph or radio, now any individual with access to the network has, in theory, the opportunity to communicate with any other connected user.
A mosaic at the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation building in lower Manhattan celebrates technology connecting the world with electricity
Beginning in the 1990s and flourishing through the mid-2000s, blogging was a form of expression that brought this promise of the global internet to fruition. Although there were costs associated with blogging (a computer, software licenses, monthly bills from an ISP to connect to the net, domain registration fees, hosting fees and more), the capital required to launch a blog was significantly lower than that needed to start an old school mass media enterprise like a newspaper or television station.
Some individual bloggers became literary and cultural celebrities, and generated significant income through their blogs, whether through advertising, subscriptions, merchandising, sponsorships, partnerships or other means. And beyond blogging by individuals, news organizations and even corporations began to use blogs as a means of communicating with their audiences in the somewhat more informal style common to the format.
This photo of a dog is reportedly the first image uploaded to Instagram
But the heyday of blogging was interrupted by the rise of social media. Anybody can start a blog, it’s true, but it is hard work to keep up! Much easier to upload some photos from your weekend or write one or two sentences about what’s happening in your life rather than spend time conceiving, researching, drafting, editing and publishing a blog post. Plus, your friends are all there on social media already, so there’s no need to attract them to come and visit your own website. And, significantly, while many blogs remain owner-operated with a variety of business models, social media activity always takes place on a proprietary network owned by a corporate entity that generates the lion’s share of its revenue via targeted advertising.
While blogs still exist on the web today, by and large internet users have shifted their attention to massive social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. For a significant fraction of internet users, these social networks effectively are the internet, and they infrequently step outside their walled gardens. This consolidation of user activity online reflects a power law dynamic wherein the vast majority of attention goes to a small group of services (the major social networks), and the large remaining group competes for a comparatively small proportion of attention.
Well, what was old is new again. Owner-operated blogs have re-emerged in 2020 as email newsletters, and a raft of new platforms have emerged to capitalize on this trend (you may notice that this newsletter is using one of them, Substack). This past week the Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, Casey Newton, announced that he will leave the site to launch a standalone newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Just a few weeks ago the writer Andrew Sullivan (who rose to fame during the high water mark of blogging) also made the jump from New York magazine to a subscriber-supported email newsletter. Even I, your humble servant and Colonnade & Entablature editor, have jumped on the trend!
The Pebble Time smartwatch is the most-funded Kickstarter project to date
There are other new-ish platforms that empower individual creators to follow the owner-operator model. Patreon helps artists, writers and other creatives to collect monthly payments from patrons in exchange for access to exclusive content and sneak peeks. Kickstarter connects people with ideas to their future customers or supporters (but not investors) with money to bring their ideas to life. Cameo gives buyers access to B-, C- and D-list celebrities who record videos delivering birthday wishes, graduation congratulations and practical jokes with their friends and family. OnlyFans… well, OnlyFans connects performers (often sex workers) with their fans to provide photo and video content that is not available elsewhere.
But what’s different here, compared to the beginning of the blogging era, is the nature of these platforms. Generally speaking they are privately-owned networks that take a cut of subscription payments, and effectively create massive collections of miniature walled gardens - each with its own cost of entry. In contrast to the founding idea of the internet providing a space where every user is able to communicate with every other user, through its evolution and commoditization, the internet has now become a space where every user can charge an access fee to every other user.
And while the overall costs of using the network remain low compared to a radio broadcast tower, today users must now expect to give up a cut of their revenue to an intermediary - even if they are using a non-proprietary internet standard like email. We see this same behavior on a greater scale in the current battle between Epic Games and Apple over app store payment systems (where Apple claims 30% of all in-app payments through its proprietary iOS platform), but that’s the subject of another newsletter.
The point is that, rather than charging creators a fee to access their content management systems and reach as many people as they can, the business model of these services for owner-operators has inverted itself to instead levy a fee on the demand side of the equation and profit in proportion to the size of its creator customer’s audience. The more you succeed, the more they profit.
LINKS
Emerging Media
Embattled social app TikTok earned a temporary reprieve from the US government’s plan to ban the service from American app stores. With mere hours before an executive order would force Apple and Google to remove the program from their app stores, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the government’s order. TikTok’s future still remains uncertain with future deadlines for a deal looming in November, and continuing disagreement about the ownership structure and whether ByteDance Global will have any ownership stake held by foreign entities. (CNBC)
Social
Professional social networking site LinkedIn unveiled a redesign of its website and apps with a new focus on community building tools and new ways of sharing career-related content, including a new Stories feature inspired by Snapchat and Instagram and an improved search experience. While many think of LinkedIn as a place to maintain an online resume and search for new jobs, LinkedIn is seeking to emphasize a ‘softer, friendlier experience’ in the way it facilitates connections and community. (LinkedIn)
Earlier this summer Twitter initiated a test to try and improve the quality of discussion around news articles by prompting users who were retweeting a link that they had not clicked on to read it first before tweeting. Sharing some early results of the test this week, Twitter reported users opening an article first before retweeting it increased by 33% among those who were shown the test prompt. As a result of the promising results, the prompt will eventually be rolled out to all users globally. (Engadget)
Influence
Activist employees at tech and social media companies continue to flex their power in influencing their employers’ business practices. After news broke internally at Hootsuite, a company that provides tools to manage social media accounts for businesses, that it was accepting a contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), employees began publicly advocating against the contract. Hootsuite ultimately issued a statement that it would not move forward with the deal with ICE. Microsoft faced a similar backlash by employees concerning its own contracts with ICE back in 2018 (TechCrunch)
Back in the days before Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace, HOTorNOT was something of a proto-social network slash dating site, and played a significant role in influencing the structure, format and goals of the coming social media revolution. HOTorNOT’s role in nurturing what was later called Web 2.0 even extended to providing web hosting for fledgling services like Twitter and Bittorrent. This retrospective, which has been blessed by HoN co-founder James Hong, goes deep on the origins of the site and its surprising role in shepherding the likes of Facebook and Twitter into existence. (Mashable)
Platforms
Following the supply crunch in grocery stores in the early days of the Coronavirus lockdown, grocers have taken steps to ensure a steady flow of product this winter when an expected second wave of Covid-19 infections may prompt additional lockdowns. This has resulted in a significant change in supply chain strategy, from the “just-in-time” model, which allows grocers to save money on warehousing costs, to an increasing effort by major retailers to stockpile key products and avoid the empty shelves that many shoppers encountered in March and April of this year when panic buying was rampant. (Wall Street Journal)
Speaking of empty shelves and supply chain shortages, while grocers and major retailers like Walmart and Amazon struggled to keep inventory available during the early days of the Coronavirus lockdown, merchants on Etsy were cranking out masks and other face coverings at an astonishing rate. According to the company’s second quarter earnings report (PDF link), mask orders on the platform accounted for 13% of all sales during the period of April to June. Usage of the platform grew by 40% as 18.7 million new and lapsed customers made a purchase, and with Etsy pocketing a 5% commission on every order, profits surged over 400% compared to the same period last year. (The Verge)
ENDORSEMENT
If you’re like me, you pay close attention to the trials, tribulations and evolution of our contemporary media landscape. From the emergence of social media and other internet phenomena, to the challenges to mainstream news media’s traditional business model, and the growth of streaming media services like Netflix and Disney+, all of these topics are entirely germane to Colonnade & Entablature’s mission to understand the processes that are changing and molding how we experience the world(s) that we share.
CNN’s Reliable Sources is one of the most invaluable newsletters that I turn to on a daily basis to stay up to speed on those trends. With a particular focus on the American news media, particularly newspapers, magazines and cable news channels, editors Brian Stelter (who also hosts a podcast and anchors a weekly Sunday show of the same name on CNN) and Oliver Darcy deliver a dizzying number of links and insights on a daily basis (with assists from a team of media reporters, including Kerry Flynn and Brian Lowry, among others).
Inevitably politics gets mixed in to the coverage, including a critical view of right-wing news commentary sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and One America News Network, and coverage of misleading or false statements by US President Donald Trump that have garnered plenty of column inches of late. The newsletter’s essay at the top has also tended to focus on political news in the final stretch leading up to American presidential election in November, but in my view it would be a mistake to dismiss Reliable Sources as a newsletter about politics.
Instead, what I find valuable about the newsletter is the new information about media mergers and acquisitions, renewals or cancelations of television programs, announcements of new editors or publishers of major outlets, and coverage of media criticism across a wide spectrum of views that it links out to on a daily basis. Reading Reliable Sources is the easiest way to digest a wide range of information and news about the American media ecosystem on a daily basis, and I recommend it!