kung fu grippe

Entitled to Care

I see a staggering amount of entitlement every day in the form of arguments and blog posts like the latter.

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

Straw man, Marco.

It’s not a question of entitlement. It’s a question of clear vision about the inevitability of painful, weird change, and whether we can each find the courage to face it without folding.

If anyone’s acting “entitled” right now, it’s the many publishing companies who are perfectly happy to leverage every conceivable economy of scale on the internet (free marketing, free distribution, free testimonials, orders-of-magnitude growth opportunities etc.) — but, then somehow find the monarch-sized stones to piss and moan about how they can’t make money off of it as fast as they’d prefer.

Hard cheese, guys. Join the club.

If you follow your customers, you’ll follow the money. If you follow the medium, you follow the traffic. But, if you follow nothing but your own deranged preferences about controlling every aspect of how your material is consumed and paid for, you might as well dust off your resume and sharpen your spatula.

Here’s my point: businesses don’t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap. It’s insane to me that these businesses’ fans see this so much more clearly than their actual stakeholders do. The fans want desperately to see these places stay alive, and many, like me, pay tons of actual cash every month or year to support that.

But, then we also find ourselves having to beg them to face the non-negotiable reality of a scary, complicated, and hard-to-monetize new environment where nobody cares how attached you are to your spreadsheet. Bravely vowing to continue pretending it’s 1972 is a terrific treatment for a film, but it’s a crap way to run your growing business.

To me, all this is hardly any sign of a greedy or skinflint consumer. “Entitlement?” Please. More like a last-ditch intervention from the rapidly shrinking number of folks who actually care. They’ll keep reading and buying something for decades after these dinosaurs are on their way to fossils.

(I’d also mention, just in passing, Marco, that your two primary businesses I’m aware of rely very heavily on all that expensive content being freely available and munge-able. A magazine article that can’t be reblogged will never make it onto Tumblr, and a more (theoretically) monetizable world of teaser-only websites and feeds turns Instapaper into a beautifully-implemented PR aggregator)

Source: marco.org