When did content creators get to be such big whiny babies?
/I have a very boring origin story as a blogger: when I was in grad school, I got into travel hacking. After travel hacking for a few months, I realized that virtually all the existing blogs were dealing misinformation to their readers in order to sell credit cards, so I wrote an eBook laying out how travel hacking really works, and launched this website to promote the book (hence the clunky URL which we have all come to know and love).
Well, the book was a dud (thanks to all hundred of you who bought and borrowed it from Amazon over the last decade!), but the site took off, and I’ve been writing here ever since. So blogging for me has always been a case of learning by doing, and the same is true when it came to “monetization.” All the blogs I followed had Amazon affiliate links, so I signed up for Amazon affiliate links. All the blogs I followed had Google Adsense widgets, so I installed Google Adsense widgets. All the blogs I followed had credit card affiliate links, so I applied for credit card affiliate links. And, just in case, I also added the option to subscribe to the blog (originally through PayPal “recurring payments” of all things) and receive occasional subscribers-only newsletters.
It turns out, just like my book sales, Amazon, Google, and credit card affiliate links were all a bust. I don’t write about random crap on Amazon so I have nothing to link to. I don’t write about any high-value Google keywords, so Google only pays me once or twice a year when I crack the $100 payout threshold. And my credit card affiliate link provider immediately shut me down when they realized I was scraping the underlying links from their “preferred” ad copy.
Subscriptions, it turned out, were a model that worked great for me. Even after PayPal shut down my account (for unrelated hijinx), over 90% of my subscribers voluntarily migrated over to my new subscription manager, which I thought was very cool of them.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my point: even if it’s true your users are your product, rather than your customers, doesn’t it still seem awfully rude to throw a big fit when they don’t behave as you demand?
The travel blogger crybaby lost his bottle
All these thoughts came to me as I read Gary Arndt’s elegy on leaving text-space for voice-space. Gary lays out an incredible story arc:
“I was writing for an audience of real people who knew who I was and had made a decision to follow me. My website was an attempt to entertain and inform them about my travels.”
“…as social media began to take off, I like many other people jumped on that bandwagon.”
“This gave rise to clickbait and doing anything possible to grab eyeballs and clicks in competition with every other website on the internet.”
“This meant a slavish devotion to Google and writing articles optimized for bots and algorithms, not actual people.”
“My income dropped by 95% within a few weeks in March 2020. Traffic to my website dropped. Affiliate sales went to zero and still haven't really recovered for me. All the contracts I had lined up were canceled. An in-person event I had in the works was canceled. Reader tours I had planned were canceled as well.”
What’s astonishing about this story is the complete lack of agency Gary sees in his “downfall.” His website started off as a passion project for interested readers, but then he was forced to jump onto the bandwagon of social media by the “takeoff” of social media, forced to write clickbait to grab eyeballs, forced to slavishly devote himself to Google, and then forced to confront a sudden pandemic drop in his income.
But nobody did this to Gary. It’s not Amazon’s fault nobody uses my affiliate link, it’s not Google’s fault I don’t use high-value keywords or optimize my website for search engines (although Google also is apparently committing a lot of fraud through their Adsense auctions), and it’s not credit card companies’ fault I refuse to use their prewritten copy. My lack of affiliate income is a consequence of my own choices: that I write for the benefit of my readers.
Nobody ever stopped Gary from attempting to entertain and inform his audience about his travels! Everything that took that initial satisfaction away from him was the entirely predictable consequence of his own choices.
Matthew 6:24
Obviously I’m exaggerating a bit for comic effect. After all, I’m not a “personal responsibility” guy — after his income crashed in 2020, I hope Gary applied for EIDL and PPP loans, I hope he applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, SNAP, Medicaid, LIHEAP, and I hope he got all the social assistance he needed to pay his bills and stay safe throughout the pandemic.
But nobody made him reliant on social media, nobody made him reliant on search engine rankings, and nobody made him reliant on affiliate revenue. I don’t know Gary, I’ve never read a word he’s written before today, maybe he’s been doing dynamite work as a travel blogger for decades. But at the end of the day, he chose to sell his readers to advertisers, instead of selling his content to readers. That’s a choice millions of people make every day, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely. But please, don’t pretend he or any other affiliate marketer is a martyr for facing the obvious, inevitable consequences of their own actions.
