Thanks Itay Dreyfus for bringing this to my attention:
“The internet makes me blind to the scale of things. If I write a blog post that is read by 2000 people that feels like crickets (these days). But last night we had 200 people come to the opening of a new exhibition at the gallery. It was overwhelming.”
Henrik Karlsson
Let’s not forget why 2,000 people on the internet don’t feel like a lot: cost per thousand ad impressions (Cost per mile [CPM]—mille is Latin for thousand).
As that CPM rate went down, more ads went on the page. Two display ads. Three. A pop-under.
It wasn’t that 2,000 people reading your work was bad. The CPM rate was “bad,” so something that got read by 20,000 people was considered “good.” After all, we have to keep the lights on!
The problem was, as more corporate interests crept in, we didn’t just need to keep the lights on. We had to pay the salaries of lots of dude bros in sports jackets and the electric bill for keeping 27 LED TVs running day and night in the office.