beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2011-07-04 08:46 pm
beccaelizabeth) wrote2011-07-04 08:46 pm
Been looking at the latest dude to try and monetise fandom
Dude has his 'customers' confused with his 'product'. Which, coming from Facebook, I can see how that can happen.
On ad supported sites the site owner gets paid by advertisers to provide them with eyeballs. People posting to ad supported sites are the product the site owner is selling.
Fandom does not, on the whole, want to be product.
Comparisons to Livejournal are missing the point, and missing the kerfuffles that led to people jumping ship. Because yeah, some of us are still on LJ... kinda sorta. But a lot of the reasons we went elsewhere involved not wanting to get sold.
Or to put it another way, he's confusing 'customers' and 'employees'. He looked at the archive and thought "wow, all these people make things for the site owner!" And dude, no. The site owner makes an archive for all those customers.
Employees can be fired. Product can be rejected if it isn't what the customers, advertisers, want. That leads to site owners deleting journals and financial pressure on advertisers having adverse effects, like all that with the difficulties Dreamwidth had getting someone to let us pay them. I forget the proper words, something to do with credit cards. If the advertisers are the customers, the customer is always right, and the content gets chucked.
We are, still, not content. Not product. Not employees.
We are the boss. ... not me personally, but collectively. We're the customers that are always right.
If you try and sell your customers, things go a bit horribly wrong. Which also leads to accounts being deleted. By the customers.
He does not grok this.
Also of use is the difference between 'opt in' and 'opt out'. Fandom has jumped ship over 'opt out only' features far less invasive than this. If you want to set up a for-profit archive and invite people to opt in you get a waaaaaaay different reaction than if you buy something and invite people to opt out. (The people that don't want to play with you won't play either way, but if it's opt out you just pissed them off mightily.)
Finally, how much money does he think there is around here anyway, and why does he think nobody living here since the birth of the internet knows how to get it? He fails to know the demographics of his customers. Which is a basic fail even if he means them to be product. Fandom includes a lot of highly educated professional women. So they can crit his business plan, his tech, and his misunderstanding of community values, often with PhDs and decades of relevant experience under their belts.
The lack of understanding of the details of the presumed product is lolarious. If the dude doesn't know what slash and canon mean then there's likely much lurking in any fandom archive that is entirely outside his imaginings.
And all that is only translating to ill fitting terms from the discourse of capitalism. Fandom is not a capitalist economy. Our value set is different from the ground up. We do not consider Profit a good thing, a desirable thing, or a goal; quite the contrary. We're all about the gifts. To be a Big Name here is to be one that gives the most, or gives the highest quality, or gives the most useful, or gives in a really highly networked way to the most people. Giving feedback and comments is good giving. Giving attention. If all the kudos are about giving and he turns up trying to get and does not understand why he's in the fandom equivalent of debt up to his eyeballs... that's a depth of misunderstanding that requires a lot of translation.
He also seems to be confused about this 'profit' we are objecting to. He believes that him getting enough money to live on is not profit. This is odd. I think the thing that people are objecting to is him getting. Many fandom projects, like archives, are run by the community for the benefit of the community. With donation drives, for instance, and mods contributions, and all the fanfic and comments, everyone puts a bit in together, and for their trouble they get out one archive. The efforts of the many create something everyone gets pretty much equally. That's the not for profit archive model that we're used to. Now he has bought a place that sounds like it was like that and wants to make it so he gets more out of it. He wants to be able to live off that archive. The efforts of the many are going to go to making him a living. That is his profit. The scale isn't the problem, the inequality is the problem.
*I've edited this post a bunch of times. Next time I should finish thinking before I post.*
On ad supported sites the site owner gets paid by advertisers to provide them with eyeballs. People posting to ad supported sites are the product the site owner is selling.
Fandom does not, on the whole, want to be product.
Comparisons to Livejournal are missing the point, and missing the kerfuffles that led to people jumping ship. Because yeah, some of us are still on LJ... kinda sorta. But a lot of the reasons we went elsewhere involved not wanting to get sold.
Or to put it another way, he's confusing 'customers' and 'employees'. He looked at the archive and thought "wow, all these people make things for the site owner!" And dude, no. The site owner makes an archive for all those customers.
Employees can be fired. Product can be rejected if it isn't what the customers, advertisers, want. That leads to site owners deleting journals and financial pressure on advertisers having adverse effects, like all that with the difficulties Dreamwidth had getting someone to let us pay them. I forget the proper words, something to do with credit cards. If the advertisers are the customers, the customer is always right, and the content gets chucked.
We are, still, not content. Not product. Not employees.
We are the boss. ... not me personally, but collectively. We're the customers that are always right.
If you try and sell your customers, things go a bit horribly wrong. Which also leads to accounts being deleted. By the customers.
He does not grok this.
Also of use is the difference between 'opt in' and 'opt out'. Fandom has jumped ship over 'opt out only' features far less invasive than this. If you want to set up a for-profit archive and invite people to opt in you get a waaaaaaay different reaction than if you buy something and invite people to opt out. (The people that don't want to play with you won't play either way, but if it's opt out you just pissed them off mightily.)
Finally, how much money does he think there is around here anyway, and why does he think nobody living here since the birth of the internet knows how to get it? He fails to know the demographics of his customers. Which is a basic fail even if he means them to be product. Fandom includes a lot of highly educated professional women. So they can crit his business plan, his tech, and his misunderstanding of community values, often with PhDs and decades of relevant experience under their belts.
The lack of understanding of the details of the presumed product is lolarious. If the dude doesn't know what slash and canon mean then there's likely much lurking in any fandom archive that is entirely outside his imaginings.
And all that is only translating to ill fitting terms from the discourse of capitalism. Fandom is not a capitalist economy. Our value set is different from the ground up. We do not consider Profit a good thing, a desirable thing, or a goal; quite the contrary. We're all about the gifts. To be a Big Name here is to be one that gives the most, or gives the highest quality, or gives the most useful, or gives in a really highly networked way to the most people. Giving feedback and comments is good giving. Giving attention. If all the kudos are about giving and he turns up trying to get and does not understand why he's in the fandom equivalent of debt up to his eyeballs... that's a depth of misunderstanding that requires a lot of translation.
He also seems to be confused about this 'profit' we are objecting to. He believes that him getting enough money to live on is not profit. This is odd. I think the thing that people are objecting to is him getting. Many fandom projects, like archives, are run by the community for the benefit of the community. With donation drives, for instance, and mods contributions, and all the fanfic and comments, everyone puts a bit in together, and for their trouble they get out one archive. The efforts of the many create something everyone gets pretty much equally. That's the not for profit archive model that we're used to. Now he has bought a place that sounds like it was like that and wants to make it so he gets more out of it. He wants to be able to live off that archive. The efforts of the many are going to go to making him a living. That is his profit. The scale isn't the problem, the inequality is the problem.
*I've edited this post a bunch of times. Next time I should finish thinking before I post.*
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but a different definition of 'profit' seems to be driving the ire of some people.
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http://esteliel.dreamwidth.org/407809.html?style=site
http://elf.dreamwidth.org/ doing linkspam
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