It’s fitting, I think, that my final entry on this blog is about how I am experimenting with a paid email newsletter. Perhaps business school had more of an effect than I thought.
For me, starting a blog was an experiment to see if anyone “out there” would be interested in reading what I had to say about various technology and startup-related topics. And I mostly wrote about what I wanted at first. I knew the maximum audience for what I was writing about was maybe a few hundred people anyway.
But then this weird thing happened that I like to call “page view whoring” (PVW), where I started to scheme about how to up my page view counts instead of just writing about some weird topic that I thought was interesting (bit.ly speculation, anyone?). PVW is a vicious cycle where you realize that effectively monetizing your content means you have to appeal to a wider audience, dilute your voice and probably alienate your early adopters - the ones who appreciated your niche content to begin with.
I don’t even run ads on this blog! It wasn’t about money right away. But it WAS about motivation. Why was I putting in the time to write stuff? Well, for non-ad-driven blogs they usually start out as a for-the-love side project and then the good ones can turn into branding tools for the authors who leverage “their brand” in some creative way (shilling products to their audience, lead gen for various businesses, “deal-flow”, speaking engagements, book deals, etc.).
But I don’t want to build “a brand” - I just want to write about kind of weird stuff that I like and have people appreciate it. And the PVW was starting to creep me out. Like, “If I write something about privacy and Facebook it will get some points on Hacker News!” And then I did. And then it did. Turns out you can get pretty decent at PVW if you put your mind to it.
And that’s when it stopped being a purely for-the-love side project.
It became “Hey! 5000 page views this month! If I can just get that to 10,000 maybe I can start making money from this” and that was the moment when I agreed to dilute my message for the sake of maybe making a little cash off this side project. I hate admitting this in public, but it’s true: I am a fucking capitalist.
My hypothesis is this: by introducing the money part at the beginning of the cycle instead of the end, one can avoid the vicious PVW cycle. When I heard about Sam Lessin’s new side project Letter.ly, I was intrigued.
The model is just a bit different, but I think awesome. You state your price (mine is $2/month) and people can pay it if they want to subscribe. Not a new idea necessarily, but extremely well-executed and easy to set up.
Example: John Gruber gets 3 million page views at Daring Fireball and charges $4500/week for sponsorship. I only need 9000 subscribers to make the same amount of money, which coincidentally is probably the maximum number of people who’d be interested in what I have to say anyway. It’s just as much work to get to 9000 paid subscribers as it is to get to 3m page views, but the paths are *very* different. I think mine will probably top out at maybe a few hundred, but the drastic difference between 3 million and 9000 is notable.
I am already starting to see the difference - I feel a true sense of responsibility to my new subscribers - to produce something that I think is quality niche content and that’s mine. I am only writing for people who care enough about what I have to say that they paid for it, which creates a new sort of incentive cycle that to me is more likely to produce interesting stuff. It’s also a new way to filter an audience - effectively eliminating those “off-the-Google” spammers who stumble on your blog and try to hype Viagra in the comments section. And for those of us this far down the long tail, it’s an interesting option.
And isn’t it bizarre that switching *away* from the free model might be a way to keep niche content truly niche? The internet surprises you sometimes.
Sign up if you want: http://letter.ly/amanda.
**Sidenote: I don’t think this model will work AT ALL for big media properties. Paywalls for publications like the NY Times are, I think, likely to fail. But that’s another post for another time.
First of all, I’m moving my blog. I oscillated quite a bit - right when I’m starting to get the right Google juice I give up? Yes. I have always been a huge fan of clean slates - how else are you supposed to know if you can build yourself back up again? So after graduation, my blog will be the much-less-witty http://amandapey.tumblr.com. See you 7 readers over there.
Right, graduation. The last one I experienced was 2005 from undergrad and I can’t say I am any more sure now about my future than I was then. I certainly had no job then (what employable skills does a 21 year-old History major have, exactly?) and spent the summer following graduation lying around my parent’s house wondering how I could take over the world while still watching 3-4 hours of daytime television. Not so successful. This is when I learned an extremely important life lesson: nothing productive EVER happens when you’re living with your parents. So I headed to Beijing to stir up some trouble.
After some time in Beijing figuring out how to do basic things like eat and buy train tickets, and a stint in Austin, TX I found myself at MIT in August 2008, ready to drink some more academic kool-aid.
Two years later, and I’m not dreading graduation like I was before. Maybe it took an extra two years of school (some of us are slower than others), but I am pretty excited to land in the startup world with no structured “career path.” Instead, this summer I’ll be living in a rental house near Stanford working on cool web stuff. It is going to be amazing, and it will be nice to get back to “survival mode,” academia was beginning to spoil me.
But there’s something about putting on a cap and gown - it’s one of the few American traditions that people still keep pretty sacred. As my third graduation, this may be the first one I am actually excited about. Not because I have any more of a plan than I did before, but because I have finally learned that uncertainty is something that should be cherished.
All of the commentary around the recent Facebook announcements from their f8 conference has been really fascinating (Senators care?), specifically the relationship between the new FB and privacy. It just seems to me that FB is under absolutely no obligation to provide any sort of privacy protection to its users. It’s an opt-in service. It’s free to sign-up and their site is awesome! Photo sharing is so fast and all my friends are on there!
But wait, they employ approx 1000 people, prolly more at this point. They are a business. So if I’m not paying them anything, how am I in any position to make demands? Sadly, although I am every bit as “entitled” as every other Gen-Y-er out there (thank you Jason Calacanis), I really can’t.
If their business model is to take my data and do whatever they please with it, I have almost no negotiating power to tell them to do otherwise, except maybe delete my account and try to convince my friends to do the same. Like any other business, if you don’t like what they’re doing you vote with your feet.
I don’t think “privacy is dead”, but I do think that just like in the real, physical world, privacy is expensive. And the internet is moving that way.
If you want to eat at a restaurant in a room all by yourself, you have to pay extra for that. If you want a house that’s so secluded that you can’t see any of your neighbors, you pay for that too. If you want your phone number unlisted? Extra $$$. Security systems, big hotel rooms, etc. etc. etc. all require cash.
So then how is it that privacy on the internet is anyone’s obligation? I love privacy and I love all those internet business that don’t sell my email address to porn and Viagra peddlers. But they don’t do that because they have to - they do it because it has been a competitive advantage to do so and telling your users that their data is safe with you is a way to get more users (and in my opinion part of what makes the internet great).
While Facebook started out by exploiting this desire for privacy, I think they’ve realized that it’s just not a sustainable business model - privacy costs money, yo! And living in an internet utopia sponsored by Digital Sky Technologies just can’t last forever.
What this change has created - in my mind - is a very unique opportunity that I’m sure many savvy entrepreneurs will exploit. As much as I hoped the internet would continue to remain this amazing force where privacy is assumed and valued and treasured, I think that - just like in the physical world - privacy will become something strictly available to the haves, and there will be this new kind of “digital-divide” where instead of just an issue of broadband access, it’s a divide centered around the types of services that you use and their level of privacy.
It’s an unsettling thought, because for me the reason why I love the internet as an industry is because of its quirky dissimilarity to real-world businesses, and I really hoped it would stay that way. Guess I was wrong.
