publishing

The Invested Strategy

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
DALL-E did give me another option on this, but it lacked pubic roots and so I opted for this one because… Well… Onion.

One of my favorite websites that I never seem to visit enough is TheOnion. I don’t see it often enough these days, but a story about it caught my eye. “Give This Rich Dude $1 or The Onion Disappears Forever” almost sounds like a title of an article on TheOnion – except it’s Wired.com’s article on the strategy of Jeff Lawson, who recently purchase TheOnion.

The idea is simple. If you pay a dollar, you’re more likely to treat the The Onion as an investment, as something you have paid for, and darn it, you want your money’s worth.

It’s a good strategy. The article points out that WhatsApp used it when it started. It’s a good example.

A small investment, lots of laughs. It’s not a bad deal. I might have gone with 99 cents, but since The Onion is tried and true for originality and a good laugh – even the site’s name is a metaphor of sorts of the content that they create – that one cent shouldn’t matter too much.

The world is generally crappy for many people as we view it through the flat screens. We desperately need to laugh. An investment in good writing that gives you a few moments of joy everyday is pretty good. I like the idea. I wish I were as consistent and as well written as TheOnion.

What’s more, it gives an indicator to the writers and editorial staff how much you enjoy their stuff. And it’s better than advertising impressions of advertisements that… well… are annoying1. Writing original content needs a better business model, and I’m looking at those.

I can’t even get people to buy me a cup of coffee yet. 🙂

Someday…

  1. I’ve been experimenting with the WordPress.com advertising despite it’s payment limitations – and that has netted all of $6.19 in the last year. Hosting costs are over that a month. Not a sustainable business model. ↩︎

When the Cheese Is Announced By Book.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Some days ago last year, someone posted on Facebook that they were getting their team copies of “Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Work and You’re Life“.

What he may not have known – I’m not sure how this will turn out – is that since it’s publication in late 1998, it had become synonymous with layoffs in corporate America. This is enough so that Wikipedia has some notes on it in the reception portion of the Wikipedia entry on ‘Who Moved My Cheese’:

In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of “structural reorganization“, or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book “the classic of downsizing propaganda” and summarizes its message as “the dangerous human tendencies to ‘overanalyze’ and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.”

‘Who Moved My Cheese‘, Wikipedia, accessed on January 1st, 2023.

It’s not a reflection on the authors. It’s not a reflection of the book itself. I remember when it came out, standing in a bookstore and reading it in it’s entirety in a bookstore rather than buying it because corporate America was going through buyouts, including the company I was working for at the time, and this book was being given rave reviews by everyone in human resources. I’m a fast reader, and it doesn’t take very long to read it.

Upon reading Ehrenreich’s summary in Wikipedia, I tend to agree with her. There is this flare of ‘positivity’ and ‘change your mindset’ that people in authority tend to use whenever they change things with negative connotations for others.

Taken out of that context, it’s not a bad book and probably something everyone in high school should read. It’s written that simply.

I thought that maybe this was all dating me when I read the response to the comment I left on the original post, which pointed out that when a company hands these out, update your resume because things are about to change. It ends up I was wrong.

The book has consistently been used this way, enough so that if you search for “Who Moved My Cheese Layoffs”, you’ll presently find a review by someone named Nancy who thoroughly trashes “Who Moved My Cheese” in 2009 for that reason. The comments on it are sadly entertaining, including someone named Evan stating, “I need to write the sequel: If I’d Known, I Would Have Stolen More Office Supplies.”

Honestly, if your employer distributes this book, you don’t need to ‘sniff the changes in the wind’. They just slapped you and told you changes were coming.

In all of this, I was surprised at the vehemence the original poster had when responding to people saying the same thing I was. It was disturbing, and nowhere did he say that he wasn’t going to be laying people off.

I assumed good and told him in one post that if his intent was not to lay people off, to tell them up front because they could easily get the wrong idea. This resulted in ad hominem attacks, which were a little surprising, and then he went into full Elon Musk mode without being Elon Musk. That’s something I should write about as well at some point, I suppose, this Elon Musk fetish.

Yet it brought to mind many things I have seen management in different companies do over the years. Most of these people live in their own little bubbles, incapable of viewing the world around them, and it’s simple to think of other people as rats looking for cheese. It’s a bit dehumanizing, too, and I have to wonder whether the popularity of the book isn’t linked to the fact that corporate America was mass purchasing it or whether people just liked the book. It draws the whole thing into question, and I would not like to be the author associated with it.

Change is a reality. Most of the time, change is sold and marketed as a good thing. When a company needs to become profitable, one of the first things they do is gut the company’s employees. Sometimes they gut the right ones, sometimes they gut the wrong ones, usually they get a mix of both but to them it’s a matter of the bottom line – about how much money they save. So if you’ve played ‘the game’ well enough that you’re pulling in good money, you’re most likely the one who will get caught in the rat trap.

There is a certain hypocrisy to creating a game in a corporate environment and then getting rid of the winners. I don’t have a real perspective on it because every company will be different, but I do know that I know good people who have gotten the book, who were good at their jobs, and who did in fact move on to do much better elsewhere where management was not obsessed with simple books. In that way, it can be a blessing.

In the end, I am a little disturbed that the book is still used that way. Corporate America, with all that is happening with artificial intelligence, is likely to have ‘corporate restructuring’ (aka ‘layoffs’), and if this book lands on a desk near you, you should have already updated your resume.

In the end, if they don’t want you there, you don’t want to be there. Unfortunately, that means it’s risking your income and copies of the book are not accepted by any bill collectors I know of. Adapt and overcome, and while I do agree it’s insensitive and comes from a place that is dehumanizing by making people metaphors for rats and vice versa, getting wound up in that isn’t going to pay the bills.

Pay the bills. Find somewhere that wants you, and if you don’t find it, maybe you can build it or find people willing to build it with you.

As for the people who work for that person – well, shucks, just read his responses and make up your own damned minds.

US News sites, GDPR, and Paywalls.

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ReutersInstituteonGDPRReuters Institute posted a thread on Twitter regarding how news sites in the United States reacted to the General Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the fallout. It’s an interesting thread, but the article linked to is actually quite thought provoking.

…One publication, USA Today, rationed EU users’ access, redirecting them to a GDPR-compliant bare-bones version of their site. Other US news sites, like The New York Times, immediately adapted to the GDPR and didn’t block. Although some of the hundreds of US sites that blocked remain blocked to this day, others, like the Los Angeles Times, restored full access after a number of months, and others after a number of years.

The differing strategies of these news sites allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects on consumption of temporary website withdrawal and temporary rationing…

This holds interests for other reasons, which I’ll get to later. What they found was:

…In conclusion, our study supports the theory that, under particular conditions, unavailability can reduce a product’s desirability, affecting future choices. Sour grapes, in this instance, had the upper hand…

So this demonstrates how making something exclusive doesn’t always make it more sought after.

The full study, “Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union“, is also worth a read if you want to get into the details – as I think you should.

The reason I brought this up is that we often consider site technical issues or business decisions as something that impacts whether a site’s content is seen. It has a latency issue after correction, it ends up, and while there’s not enough information from the study, it does seem the proportionality of return to use is proportional to to how long the content was unavailable. There are two issues I’ll bring up, the first being…

Paywalls.

I take issue with paywalls.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in writers getting paid, and I would like to get paid sometime for writing. I subscribe to a Iona Italia on substack and Unherd.com presently, and have been toying with going back to subscribing to Scientific American. I’m tough when it comes to subscriptions. I subscribe to Iona because I think reading her can make me a better writer – and while the same is true for Unherd.com, I enjoy the articles because they’re not just run of the mill, even those I find issues with. It’s original.

However, today I saw an interesting article on Twitter by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which dutifully distracted me by pointing out it was my last ‘free’ article for the month as some sites do. They have been getting me to click, according to the HBR article limits at present, 4 times this month and it’s the 19th.

I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the other articles I read on HBR. Still, what’s the cost, then?
$12.50 US a month.

So for 4 articles in 19 days, that would put me at 6.3 articles in 30, which comes up to $1.98 an article for me. I’m sorry, HBR, I just don’t see spending $2/article, when an article might take me 7 minutes to read. Now, this is not to say HBR doesn’t have good articles, but how often are they interesting enough for me?

Short answer: not enough for me to subscribe.

Does that mean I’m unwilling to pay HBR for articles? No. It means I don’t want to pay their monthly price because I can’t depend on them to be interesting to me every month. This was the problem with magazine subscriptions I had (and why I’m still debating renewing my ancient Scientific American subscription), whereas with Unherd.com I spent around $49/year, and while I’m not reading them every day, I peruse the site at least 3 times a week, reading at least12 articles a month. Quick math, dropping a dollar off the annual subscription gives us $48/year, which comes up to $4/month, where I’m reading 12 articles in a month and paying… $0.33/article.

More importantly, given it takes me the same amount of time to read an article on HBR as Unherd, I’m getting more time reading for the price. Now, this is unfair. HBR is a niche market and few of their articles would appeal to me – but the few that do, I might pay for, but I’m not going to pay more than I do for a can of Coke for something that lasts me 7 minutes. I’m a reader, not some client visiting a hooker.

New York Times does this, as do a few other sites, and each time I go through a similar process. I call it ‘signal to noise’ because for me, that’s what it is. I get better signal to noise with Unherd than I do with HBR, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the signal from HBR. I’m just not willing to pay for what I consider noise. Attenuate, attenuate!

So in my mind, people are leaving dollars on the table. I might start an account for $10 and pay 33.3 cents an article, and replenish the account if I get value for it. If I’m reading enough, the subscription price might be a deal.

This all lead me back to the days when I sat with Phil Hughes in Nicaragua and discussed revenue for print publications with him, then publisher of Linux Journal. He of course had a lot more experience than I, and he told me why print and web advertising were such different beasts – it has to do with verifiable views, which at the time were easily gamed by simply refreshing the pages. Now they can be gamed by bot farms, so the cost of web advertising began low and has credible reason not to increase except for one major thing: User accounts, which the newspapers and magazines have unimaginatively done without considering the money they’re leaving on the table.

Why am I so concerned? My real issue with paywalls is that they keep me from accessing information, or knowledge, and that affects how I make decisions – just as it affects how you make decisions. When you cut out segments of society and create silos of information, the Internet simply is repeating the same thing that print publications do except… you can’t let me read your magazine when you’re done, and I can’t do the same. There was a time when people would find valuable things in old magazines laying around.

So what happens when I see that I’m out of articles on a site? I roll my eyes, move on with my life and ignore links to the site for an indeterminate period, much like the Reuters Institute paper shows. It could be a month, it could be 2 months… and I’ll simply forget I have ‘free’ articles to read.

Yet even with that, I have the luxury of spending 33 cents on an article. Some people don’t. Some people may not even have access to a credit card in some countries, and just like that, the digital divide becomes an informational divide. The only real answer in my mind is to increase advertising costs to cover that of the writers, the editors, and the boss’s nephew manning the photocopier and fax in the basement.

Derivative Knowledge

Now, all of this impacts something else.

It impacts AIs being trained on the Internet, who are unlikely to see paid content and thus are stuck reading free websites. That seems stupid, but in the house of cards of business, maybe there’s an upside to having an AI trained without subscriptions. I just don’t know what it is.

There was a time when I thought all information should be free. There was even a stab at a Creative Commons license for developing nations, which would have been more equitable and allowed those who could afford to carry the cost for those trying to catch up. This could also work for AIs being trained, but, with the popularity of VPNs as they are, information accessibility in developed nations could easily be subverted by simply using a VPN server in Haiti, as an example.

And all of this leads up to derivative knowledge, because that impacts decision making – not just of machines, but that of people.

If the media industry on the Internet wants to actually be read and interacted with… understanding these things better makes sense. Or, that latency of not visiting could catch up, or… we could just leave a bunch of people behind because we couldn’t find a better solution.