QA Special (E)

0:01Why is an orange like a bell? You know what this means, don't you? The Riddler. Right, Chief O 'Hara, the Riddler. That infernal prince of puzzlers who's outwitted this a dozen times. Konnichiwa. It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:26Yes, it's time for another all Q &A session of Akimbo, your favorite podcast. We haven't done one in a long time. We got so many good questions over the last few weeks. I thought it would be fun to do an all Q &A episode. We'd love to get questions from you. If you've got a question, please visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button. Okay, here we go. Hey, Seth. Brendan from Eugene, Oregon here. The internet butchered many things, one of which was newspapers. Not journalism per se, but definitely newspapers. And with all the corporate purchasing of newspapers and local coverage shrinking and power and corruption going unchecked by the Fourth Estate, how might you advise someone who might want to start a nonprofit newspaper, most likely online only, in this sort of new age of journalism?

1:19Asking for a friend. Thank you, Seth. Journalism has taken a big hit. Some people blame Craig of Craigslist because when Craigslist took off free classifieds for everyone, everywhere, the source of most newspapers' revenue completely dried up. In some cases, newspapers were making 110 % of all of their profit, meaning it was covering all of their expenses and then some from classified ads. And then they went away. But newspapers, newspapers have a problem. And their problem is they're expensive to print and deliver. That just 20 years from now, when we talk to people about going outside in our bare feet to pick up something that was printed in the middle of the night and then driven to our house so we could read the news of yesterday or the day before, that's nutty.

2:16In many cases, it costs more to print and deliver a newspaper than the newspaper costs, which means that ads have to make up the difference. But we all know what happened. We all know about Google News. We all know about short attention spans and the desire for convenience and speed. We all know that news that's an hour old isn't even breaking anymore, never mind news. And so the nature of what it means to read something from a journalist has shifted. Because journalists used to have to deliver us the thing that was fresh. And a lot of the newspaper was about that, what just happened. But there's another part of the newspaper, the part that wins Pulitzer Prizes, that's about more thoughtful analysis or commentary.

3:04There's another part that's got recipes. There's another part that's got the comics or the crazy astrology section. So all of those things came together in this perfect bundle for 100 years. And what we know is that the internet, like all revolutions, destroys the perfect before it enables the impossible. And the amount of news we're getting, news that's real news, news that's designed to manipulate us, is enormous, far greater than any of us ever consumed just 20 years ago. So onto your question, the thing is that advertising can't support real journalism with a few exceptions. That we're going to need a New York Times, a Washington Post, and a Wall Street Journal for the foreseeable future, places where large numbers of people will get their information.

3:57It's entirely possible those few places, the short head, will be able to pay their bills with advertising. but it is extremely unlikely that if you're out on the long tail, if you are covering something special for the general public, that you will be able to pay for it with ads. I think that B2B is different. I think there's huge opportunities to create news and analysis, industry by industry, and not only charge a lot for it, but find a sponsor. But that's outside the realm of what you were talking about. If we get rid of real estate costs, ad sales costs, newspaper costs, delivery costs, the cost of that little plastic bag you have to put on the paper when it's raining, it turns out that actual journalism is a tiny portion of what newspapers spent money on, which means you don't need that much revenue in order to make a living.

5:00Hence the idea of Patreon, of subscriptions, of a few people caring enough to pay for what you have to say. This is not glamorous or glorious. The magic of newspapers was that because they were so expensive to create, there weren't that many in a given town. And since there weren't that many in a given town, Every newspaper was important. But if you're a journalist with only 2 ,000 subscribers, it's hard to feel important. That is, until you break a big story, until you contribute something to the larger conversation. So as Kevin Kelly pointed out, 1 ,000 true fans is enough. 2 ,000 patrons paying you$100 a year, that pays for three or four underpaid journalists or one or two really well-paid journalists who are covering something that matters to the people who are reading it.

5:58We have to get back in alignment. We were out of alignment for a long time because Macy's or other people who were buying full-page ads in the newspaper, they didn't care if the newspaper was good. They just cared if people read it. And so we chased down the advertisers to our own chagrin because once Google showed up, once the web showed up and the advertisers left, we weren't left with very much at all. hey Seth I feel like sometime in 2019 websites all over really cranked up the dial when it comes to advertising on their site like YouTube now allows two ads to play before video starts and sometimes those ads go for 10 minutes and of course news websites are horrible with more ads than ever before and now when I log into PayPal or my bank I'm getting I get an ad every time I log in they're trying to upsell me on some service or something this is really frustrating to me and I wonder what your thoughts are on this.

6:57I mean, shouldn't the market shake itself out when a company mistreats their customers so badly and tries to milk them for every penny that they have? Shouldn't less people use the system? I would love to see when ads go up, then user activity goes down, but it just doesn't seem to be affecting it. And I would love to see young startups with faster websites and cleaner interfaces and less ads take over, but they're struggling to compete. It's almost as if nobody cares they're flooded with ads when they go to a website now. What's wrong with my worldview here? Thanks. Continuing on this advertising theme, and it's something that I think about a lot because sometimes there are ads on Akimbo.

7:38In 2020, look for all the ads to come from myworkshopsakimbo.com. But for now, we've been running ads, mostly as an experiment, partly because our partner needs to make a living, and they make a living by selling ads. But here's the thing. Once you decide to sell ads, once you are hooked on the revenue that comes from ads interrupting the thing that you sell, it is really tempting. There is a lot of pressure to make that number go up. And there are two ways to make the number go up. You can make more money per ad, and you do that either by getting more listeners or readers, or by charging a higher CPM cost per thousand.

8:23I don't know why it's not called CPT, that's sort of old-fashioned, cost per thousand, or you run more ads. And this is what we found is going on on the web. That when Hotwired first started running banner ads, they were the the very first ones, along with GNN, my friend Lisa Gansky's global network navigator. When they were running banner ads, it was a big deal to run one. And then some genius came up with the idea of running two. Small aside here, you may have heard of Mary Wells, one of the great ad geniuses of the 1960s. She's most famous for Alka-Seltzer. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is.

9:06How did she double Alka-Seltzer's sales? She doubled their sales because people only used to take one Alka-Seltzer at a time. And her jingle, plop, plop, fizz, fizz, said you should take two. So it wasn't elegant, but it worked. And the same thing was true for websites. Run two ads, and you can make twice as much money as if you run one ad. And so we see the same thing happening on podcasts. So we see the same thing happening on YouTube, that when you are under pressure, particularly if you're a public company, the pressure is a race to the bottom. Run more ads, run more ads, because everyone else is doing it too.

9:45The advertisers, the ones who are surrendering to algorithmic media buying, are paying a price. That's because they're not measuring the right thing. They're measuring eyeballs or ear balls. They are measuring impressions. What they should be measuring is trust. And so advertisers are about to wake up. They're about to wake up to the fact that they're in an auction that they cannot win, that the efficacy of more interruption is fading, that they can't pay for it anymore, and that some folks are going to show up and offer sponsorship instead. And sponsorship and advertising are not the same thing.

10:21Sponsorship isn't about how do I interrupt more people more aggressively. Sponsorship is how can I be affiliated with something that I am proud of and that the people who are engaging with it see me supporting something they want supported. There's a lot of room for sponsorship to grow. When sponsorship grows, it supports better content and better interactions, which is the opposite of what is happening now in the downward spiral of advertising auctions. Hi, Seth. This is Jill from Minneapolis. I just finished listening to your most recent podcast and was riveted by it. I myself am a publisher and I, you know, relevant to the last question that the person asked about their daughter not being picked for plays.

11:14Growing up in Buffalo, New York, I was that kid who never got picked, but had this sort of untapped potential. And I think that is what drove me to take that risk to do that hard thing, to become the publisher. And I wanted to know your perspective on that. What do you think the correlation is between stepping into doing that hard thing, publishing, that next step, that going beyond making, and the kind of resilience that not being picked gives you? It's that idea of being a packager, It's coming at publishing in a different way, not that traditional path. So if you could speak to that, I would love to know what you think about that.

12:01Thanks for all you do. And this podcast was the right one that I needed to hear at exactly the right time. Big thanks. I'm so glad that question resonated with you. It really did with me as well. The thing is, if we talk to people who are successful, most of the time they have stories to tell about rejection, about not getting picked, about things not working. Part of it is survivor bias, that the people who are left, who have succeeded, have been through something that didn't work. Because the people who gave up when it didn't work, we're not talking to them. But leaving that aside for a second, we have to be careful that we then don't come to the conclusion that the secret to succeeding is having an unhappy childhood, that the secret to succeeding is not having support.

12:54Because there are plenty of people who had unhappy childhoods or had no support who didn't succeed, but we're not talking to them. I think the key is learning what to do when things don't work out. And the way we learn something is not by having someone tell us. The way we learn something is by doing it. So if we can get the support we need to feel buoyed enough, safe enough, encouraged enough to figure out how to keep going forward anyway, that is the key to getting to the point where you're making a difference. That what we need to do is teach our kids, our peers, our employees how to find the feeling of resilience.

13:46Not to be, quote, special snowflakes and whine about the fact that they don't know what to do next, but instead to take what happened and figure out how to make something better out of it. So I am certainly not rooting for unhappy childhoods, but I am rooting for a culture that builds resilience. Hi, Seth. Sean from Fountain Valley, California. Sometimes what's best for the people we serve may demand extra work and effort from the people doing the work, or it may otherwise inconvenience them in some way. For example, if I asked the grocery clerk where the hot sauce is, it would help me if they accompanied me directly to the hot sauce shelf, rather than just pointing me in a direction and telling me which aisle it's on.

14:34So how might we convince the people doing the work to prioritize the needs of the people we serve over their own self-interest or convenience, especially when the work they do is rarely observed by managers or owners or their pay isn't tied to that type of quality of work? Thanks, Seth. Well, they call it work for a reason. The thing about a hobby is you get to do it for yourself and you get to do it when you want to do it. The thing about work is you have to do it if you're at work. It involves labor, heavy lifting, emotional lifting, some sort of presentation of labor that you don't feel like.

15:10So what we're seeing here is not a failure of management, where management is about monitoring every single frontline worker you have at all times, but instead a failure of leadership. That too often we hire the cheapest available person. Too often, we shortchange training and development, thinking that we can get it over with in a three-hour seminar. Too often, we hire for skills instead of attitudes. But if we're willing to do the inconvenient work as leaders of undoing all of those mistakes, of hiring friendly people, of hiring people who are committed to making change happen, of paying extra not just for the people we hire, but for the development that we encourage them to engage in, at some point, they want what we want.

16:03And what we want is the inconvenient thing. The inconvenient thing of showing up for a customer even though it's not in the spec. The inconvenient thing of presenting emotionally even though it's not in our job description. Because these inconvenient efforts by us are why people will shop with us or do work with us instead of just clicking on a stranger's website. That what we have is the opportunity to not be industrialists. Because industrialism has always been about replacing workers, replacing them with someone cheaper, replacing them with someone more compliant, replacing them with a machine.

16:46But going forward, we have the opportunity to do the opposite, to celebrate people for the work they do because they care. And what it means to care is to use your best judgment, to find people that we trust enough to do the thing that we would do if we were there trying to serve the customer. And it's not easy, which is why it's rare, and because it's rare, it's valuable. We do love to hear from you. If you've got a question, please visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and click the appropriate button. We'll see you soon. Why is an orange like a bell? Answer, because they both must be peeled.

17:30Right. You peel an orange and you peel a bell. Get it?