Peer Pressure

Hey, everybody from my Digital Media class, are you still here? I wanted to let you know that I'm abandoning this blog to posterity, but hey look! I'm still writing other things over on my other blog, Mistakes Being Made, and it'd be awesome if you'd follow me over there. If you read my blog, I'll read yours! Although, your blog is still on my Google Reader, so to be honest I'll keep reading you even if you don't read me, but anyhow . . .

Your blogs were sometimes pretty darn entertaining, so I do hope you all keep on writing them (or that you go back to writing them after your end-of-semester hangovers wear off, at least). Also, I need some words to read over summer, and your blogs are cheaper than newspapers. Come on – all the cool kids are still blogging! (By which I mean, Eleni and Marie! Those guys rock.)

So how about it, Steph & Duncan & Shilpa & Susie & everyone else whom I won't mention because a list with too many items in it would probably be too long and unwieldy to make a readable sentence out of? You know that blogging is cool. You do want to be cool, don't you?

:)

Money Money Money Money Money

Crikey pointed out this interesting article by Lars Bastholm* about the money troubles possibly looming for the content industry – "content industry" being Bastholm's neat term for the mass of commercial media on the net (press websites, TV streaming, etc). Wait, money troubles? What?

Although the content industrialists have been hoping to support their online content via online advertising, Bastholm says this might not actually work. But if online ads aren't worth enough, where does money come from? There's two big ideas: micropayments, where people pay a miniscule amount of money every time they access content, or a subscription / licence fee model, where people a larger amount of money at regular intervals.

Bastholm's big argument is that "micropayments will never work", because Gen Y aren't willing to pay for anything. I think he's wrong, though. The whole point of micropayments is that the payments are tiny and invisible, and that's the key. There's a real psychological difference between spending $10 all at once and spending it in $0.0001 increments, the same as there's a difference between eating a whole cake at once versus eating it slice-by-slice. People don't like paying $150 for a dictionary, but paying a fraction of a cent for every definition you look up? Much easier to swallow.

If the prices are low enough and the mechanism makes it easy for you, people will pay rather than pirate. Even Gen Y kids will pay – isn't iTunes the proof? Most people are willing to spend (a little) money for legality and convenience. People bought a Nine Inch Nails album via iTunes, even though it was available free & legal via nin.com!

Anyhow – Bastholm wants to abandon paying for individual websites, and instead to implement a "content fee" similar to the television licences paid in Europe and elsewhere: one unavoidable payment to cover everything, like a tax. He admits that Americans, notoriously tax-phobic, are unlikely to accept a new fee to access what's now free. Yet he envisions every American paying an extra $20 a month or so, which is then distributed to the content producers via some kind of $$-per-popularity formula.

That might be a fair model, but wouldn't it be incredibly complicated? Not to mention, impossible to work across the net's (lack of) international borders? Or will the web of USA content just wall itself off from the rest of the world? (This might already be happening – I'm constantly pissed off that I can't watch television via Hulu, for example.)

I don't think a licence fee is practical. And mini-licence fees for each website (or network of sites) are already unpopular – people hate subscribing to websites! That might change if the big sites make it unavoidable... but I'm not convinced.

Micropayments are easier for websites to implement and easier for people to accept, I think. If the money has to come from somewhere, I'm definitely expecting micropayments.

Would you pay $20 a month for all your web content?

Would you rather pay a fraction of a cent per webpage view?

What's going to happen?

*LARS BASTHOLM: Lars the Red, Blood-Lord of the Ice Wastes of Fangthor, Chief Digital Creative Officer at Ogilvy North America.

Molly Ringwald's Fault

A lot of John Hughes films were about the consequences of attention, or the lack of it: trying to get the attention of someone you like, what happens when parents don't pay attention to you, what it's like to be lonely and misunderstood. Blogging is all about attention, too – the blogosphere is like a 1980s high school movie where popularity is everything. Or, let's be more specific: your problem is that your (allegedly) wonderful personality is useless and irrelevant, until you can get your hot crush to notice you. Once you've been noticed, a happy ending is inevitable. Either your hot crush (i.e. internet audience) likes you too, or else you realise that you never really wanted them after all, and you end up with your best friend instead. (The internet is not your best friend.)

I got to thinking about this after I followed a link from here to here – a blog post by a woman who was became John Hughes' pen-pal after writing him a fan letter. (Seriously, go read it.) It's a genuinely touching post. But what struck me, looking at the rest of her blog, is how she's now gone from having practically no readers (3 comments on one post, 0 comments on the next post, 2 comments on the next, etc) to suddenly having 1000+ comments – which implies a readership of, say, presumably 10,000+? I know this is not a bad thing – the blogger in question is obviously sincere, it would be massively unfair to suggest otherwise* – but I can't help feeling weirdly uncomfortable about the implications.

Attention-seeking behaviour doesn't have to be nice to be successful. What are you willing to do in order to get attention (on the internet)?

• Will you lie about who you are?

• Will you say something controversial, even if you don't entirely believe it?

• Will you insult somebody?

• Will you post pictures of yourself naked?

• Will you promise something?

Here's my promise: if everyone in class comments on this post, I will bake you a cake.

On the other hand... are readers the purpose of blogging, or are they irrelevant? Plenty of people blog on despite only single-figure readerships (e.g.) – but do they care? Does it matter? Without readers, are they wasting their time? Presumably they're getting something out of it themselves, or they wouldn't continue. I guess the real question is: are these blogs readerless because they're no good, or because they're not trying hard enough to get attention? (Whether an audience matters either way is a different question, I think.) It's possible to regularly read dozens or hundreds of other people's blogs, so it must be possible for every single blogger to have dozens or hundreds of regular readers. Why don't they?

What aren't they willing to do?

*Although that hasn't stopped some people, apparently.