On Jan 9, 2009, at 8:12 AM, D. Glenn Arthur Jr. wrote:
> Short version: AFAICT from feedback to LJ news posts, much
> of the *J audience likes feeling like customers and dislikes
> feeling like they're the _product_, whether this is a gut
> level reaction or fear that if big companies are the customers
> then the site is no longer serving its users first ("two
> masters" and all that), or both. While your proposal would
> not be selling individual "eyeballs" to corporate customers,
> it would still a dangerous, or at least suspicion-inducing, step
> thataways in the eyes of a significant portion of the user
> population.
>
> Or maybe I'm projecting.
>
> Somebody not suffering insomnia wanna try to make what I'm
> saying more coherent (and/or show me why I'm wrong)?
You're not projecting, and you're not wrong! It doesn't just happen
on LJ, either. What you describe is an inherent part of social media,
and is, in fact, one of the major reasons why third-party advertising
on social media is completely failing to make it out of the
"firehose" stage.
I offer my three-part tl;dr thesis, "Why Monetizing Social Media
Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure", beginning at http://
synecdochic.livejournal.com/238398.html , to frame the discussion.
The short (for me) summary is:
* Social media properties aren't selling content to their users;
they're selling the platform for their users to create content of
their own;
* Creative and social people create their own social economies, in
which creative material is distributed and creators are rewarded for
producing that content through whatever mechanism that particular
economy has derived (comments, links, feedback, etc);
* Social media properties seek to capitalize on the content being
produced by "monetizing" (I hate that word) that content through
third-party channels, such as selling advertising or sponsorships;
* Social media properties often do so *incredibly* poorly, because
they don't actually understand the actual social economy that the
users of their site have independently created and evolved, and thus
their monetization efforts often conflict with that user-created
social economy (or at the very least fail to properly support it);
* The moment that content creators realize that the site's focus has
shifted from providing a platform for creative content to profiting
from the content being created, those creators begin to weigh their
interaction with that site on a transaction-based level; where before
they only asked themselves "is this platform doing what I want it to
do", they are now asking themselves "is this platform providing me
sufficient benefit to justify the fact that I'm functioning as unpaid
labor";
* If the social media property cannot provide what the social economy
considers fair market value for that creative labor, the content
creators will feel betrayed -- stop providing that content, and start
campaigning against the property in question.
Basically, the minute a social media property's userbase feels that
the focus has shifted from "selling a platform" to "capitalizing on
the content created on that platform", in any way, it's like pulling
the pin on a grenade and tossing it into the center of the social
economy created on that property. And since social media relies on a
thriving social economy (to drive adoption, activity, and active
revenue such as subscription fees), that's almost certainly the
(eventual) kiss of death for the property.
This is why Dreamwidth is committed to doing this without third-party
sponsorship. We want to sell you the platform, not make money on the
content you create with that platform. We did a *lot* of research
before we embarked upon this journey to figure out whether or not we
could be economically viable by relying *only* on active revenue, and
we're pretty confident that we can.
If (God forbid) this should ever change in the future, and we *do*
need to turn to some kind of passive revenue collection, you can damn
well be sure that we won't do it without both significant amount of
thought *and* a careful and considered eye to the social economy that
Dreamwidth builds, and it almost certainly won't be through the
traditional advertising or sponsorship model. Both Mark and I believe
that it's not only actively detrimental to a thriving creative
community, it's also unfair to you-the-user. I don't want some
company profiting on *my* creative labor without giving me back
something that I think is worth it, and that fact doesn't change just
because I'm half-owner of the company in question.
--D
--
Denise Paolucci
[email protected]
Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations.
Coming soon!
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