Internet – Page 8 – HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

LIFE IS TENSION

To be alive is fraught with tension – a delicate balance of having your shit together and being moments away from everything falling over the rails.

People talk about the “hot new thing” because of tension. Taylor Swift has a big tour. Great! I’d love to go. Tickets are $1000, and the nearest tour stop is five hours away. That’s tension.

There’s no tension in posting a song on Spotify or uploading a video to YouTube. That’s the easy part. Telling someone, “I posted a new single on Spotify,” is easy. An AI bot could write that. No tension.

Time to up the ante. Send the link to only ten people, and then see what happens. Show your next film or gallery with only a cryptic map to a secret underground venue under the local college water tower. Limit the number of people that can attend your next Zoom meeting.

When everything is available for everyone, there’s little incentive to pay attention; it’ll be here tomorrow, digitally or available to purchase on Amazon.

FRIENDS SHARE

Great bit from Looking Sideways:

Let’s face it, being an independent creative person amid this onslaught of algorithms and homogenous content is bloody hard and endlessly soul-destroying. Sharing your friends’ work is good for the soul, hugely encouraging for them, and a vote for the type of creative world we actually want to live in.

DIG MORE

We talk a lot about not letting algorithms and AI take creative jobs – yet somehow we let robots curate “best of” lists and become tastemakers of music and media and art.

We subscribe to cool / smart / interesting people, right?

Then go to their Substack profile and dig through their subscriptions.

Dig around and find some blogs, click on the links in their posts – discover something new, fresh, and interesting from an actual human instead of a computer.

PROCREATE IS MULLET MARKETING

More mullet marketing, this time from Procreate.

Business up front (static website, text, one image, tiny button), party in the back (posting a compelling video on Twitter).
https://socialmediaescapeclub.substack.com/p/make-sure-youre-not-mullet-marketing

I still have a Twitter account on my desktop so I can watch videos like this, and that’s a good thing because, of course, it’s not on their website.

So if I want to share this video with a friend, I have to send them a link to Twitter, instead of Procreate’s actual website.

https://procreate.com/ai

Rather than driving traffic to their own website – a place where they control the branding, the story, the message – they settle for this:

“But Seth, if someone wants to know more they can just click the link!”

That post on Twitter has basically 3 MILLION VIEWS, and if they’re lucky 1% clicked that link, which is 30,000 people.

On the internet you get ONE SHOT to pull someone. Making them click a link to somewhere else might sound like it’s not a big deal, but you can’t be clicking links all day either – there’s just not enough hours in the day.

I’d like if I could just send the link to the Procreate page, so a friend could check out that video, or at least skim the text to see their stance on AI.

I bet Procreate would like to have 3 MILLION PAGE VIEWS, too.

But Procreate will fine. They have lot of smart people working on this stuff, I get it.

So, let this be a lesson for you as a smaller business or artist—your video probably isn’t getting 3 million views, which means you won’t get 30,000 clicks to your website either.

I’m not saying don’t post it on Twitter, but put the video on your website, too!

P.S. my god, the video isn’t even on the Procreate YouTube channel (they haven’t uploaded a video in almost a year), which is only the second largest social network on the planet.

Statistic: Most popular social networks worldwide as of April 2024, by number of monthly active users (in millions) | Statista

Find more statistics at Statista

APPLE EATS ITSELF

Jon Gruber, on the recent news that Apple is demanding a 30% cut of fan payments in the Patreon app (read about it here):

“How do you put a price on the number of Patreon iOS users — who are all, by definition, Apple customers — whose view of Apple will shift from “Apple is a company that supports small indie creators and artists” to “Apple is a company that uses its position of power to extract exorbitant rent from small indie creators and artists” because of this change?

I’ve been a Mac user since 2003, so that’s 20 years. I had an iBook laptop, and marveled that I could take it to a Borders book store and surf the web.

I had a U2 iPod, and bought songs via iTunes.

If I remember correctly, I stood in line for a 3G iPhone at the Apple Store on 5th Ave.

I bought several more Apple laptops – at least five or six, and now own a M3 MacBook Pro which I love.

Apple’s “services” category (stuff like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Care) reached $24.2 billion last quarter. Not year, but it took just three months for Apple to make just over $24,000,000,000 on digital goods.

And now, well, they need more. Like I said, growth is cancer. There must always be more money to squeeze, and now they’re going after the somewhat beloved Patreon.

This only applies to new subscriptions in the iOS app, so at least for now, direct your fans to sign up on the web.

As Derek Sivers wrote in ‘Use the Internet, Not Companies,’

“It’s so important and easy to have your own website. Instead of sending your fans to some company’s site, send them to yours. Get everyone’s direct contact information, so you don’t have to go through any one company to reach them.”

It was true seven years ago, it’s even more true today.

GROWTH IS CANCER

We always need more here in America:

“For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers.”

Like I started thinking about in 2008 and 2009, when running a music blog for AOL Music, “it’s like driving full speed up a mountain that doesn’t end, with two bosses in the back seat telling you to go faster.”

Growth or else. Cut writers, cut budget, but keep growing at 10% month after month. Be it traffic, or subscribers, or units sold, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

START OVER

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.

There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.

Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕

There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.

Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.

I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:

“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”