Attention is the Oxygen of Content
Blogging for me is a hobby. I’ve only been doing it a short while, and it’s not my day job or something I try to promote. I’m pretty sure most of my readers are friends and family who humor me by visiting on occasion. So this morning, on seeing my blog traffic running at 10x its normal level, my initial reaction was fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
After poking around with my stats package (StatTraq on WordPress) and then searching for clues with Technorati, I found the source: on Sunday afternoon the Mini-Microsoft blog linked to my recent posts on employee compensation. Those links immediately lead to a huge jump in visitors to the site. In the pantheon of blogs, Mini-Microsoft isn’t an A-lister, but it sure is much higher up the power curve of attention than MyOwnPirateRadio.
Which brings us to the topic of this post. For the past few months I’ve been discussing attention with various friends who produce artistic content: Brian Kalbfleisch, a friend who writes his own music; painter Saul Becker; Coach House Books editor-in-chief Alana Wilcox, and PlanetBeat / KEXP DJ Darek Mazzone. They all face a common challenge: how to get new work noticed. How to get the spotlight of attention to shine, if only for a moment, so that new work has a chance to live.
For many small fry content creators that brief spotlight is a make-or-break event. It can lead to the development of a small audience: a few tens or hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people. And for many content creators that can be enough… enough to make the act of creation personally gratifying, enough to validate the work as art (for art needs both a transmitter and a receiver), and hopefully enough to generate funding for future creations.
Why should we care about the small fry and their obscure content? Well, if you think art is important, you ought to encourage the creation of a broad diversity of art, so that good new stuff can survive and perhaps even bubble to the top. But there’s a broader implication: if you think ideas are important, you ought to encourage the creation of a broad diversity of ideas, so that good new memes can emerge and thrive.
So… in today’s world, how does an idea, or its expression as content, get discovered, so that oxygen (attention) may then be breathed into it? Consider this spectrum of content promotion and discovery methods:
- Content search: Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Technorati, IceRocket, etc.
- Metadata search: White pages, Delicious, Flickr, library indices
- Subscription/syndication: TV, newspapers, BBC.com, RSS feeds, magazines, newsletters
- Browsing: either directed or undirected/serendipitous, e.g. channel surfing, visiting galleries, shops, online portals
- Recommendations: word of mouth, collaborative filtering, etc.
- Evangelism: self-powered advertising, scaling up to medium-sized audiences
- Professional intermediaries: talent reps, publishers, gallery owners, critics, etc.
- Paid placement: advertising, lobbying, product placement, radio payola, and so on
At the latter end of this spectrum, consumers are passive and content producers are in control. The big guns of content production and publishing operate here, using money and connections in “push mode” to secure visibility. And with sufficient money and connections, content both good and bad can be propagated far and wide. Even really rotten stuff can be flogged hard enough to give it oxygen, at least until the illusion can no longer be sustained. (Milli Vanilli. Jack Abramoff. Top 40 radio.)
Small fry can’t operate for long at the push end of the spectrum, because they’re generally too money- and connections-poor. Instead they rely heavily on word of mouth and low-budget evangelism, and try to build relationships with those who do operate at the push end of the spectrum. For instance, as a radion station DJ Darek Mazzone receives hundreds if not thousands of CD promo packages every year from aspiring artists who send them out shotgun-style. Each artist hopes to connect with one tastemaker who likes their work enough to put it on the air. Budding visual artists do much the same with art galleries, as do writers with publishers. It’s a random, costly, and frustrating exercise, both for the content creators and the people they’re beseiging.
At the other end of the spectrum the consumer is in maximal control — “pull mode” — and the publishers are largely passive. About the most a publisher can do at this end of the spectrum beyond making their work available in the right places is attempt to game the system with spam.
Implications:
- Next time you discover a new idea or piece of content, think about how you found it. The context does matter: it should inform your level of trust. Be especially wary of mediums in which your attention has been paid for via product placement.
- Improvements on existing promotion/discovery mechanisms are welcome, and in high demand by content creators. Services like GarageBand.com, for instance, remove friction from the evangelism path.
- Mechanisms that shine a spotlight on obscure content are good, for they promote diversity. This is true for ideas too: in politics, for instance, wouldn’t it be great if you had an easy way of getting your ideas to your elected representative, and giving those ideas enough oxygen to survive? Without such a mechanism we leave lobbyists to hog the airtime.
I’m going to go watch StatTraq for a while and boggle at all this traffic. Oh, the irony! I hope someone leaves a comment.
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Steve said,
February 20, 2006 @ 8:09 pm
Hi Osh - I noticed the MiniMSFT mention and then saw this article right after :) Congrats on getting some oxygen! I’ve been following your posts on transparent compensation but didn’t comment because I don’t believe such a thing is possible (at scale.) Will be interested to see if you work something out! ;)
I think you’re right about the poles of your push-pull spectrum but missing the most interesting part for those needing O2. Yeah, for traditional marketing at the “latter end”, $$ has always equaled attention. Pretty soon that will be true for the “former” end, too. Pull mode is definitely *not* passive for publishers - the trick to marketing to pull, as you say, is to know where to be… and that takes work. But the search engine cos are the ones collecting that data, so they’re the ones monetizing it. We’ll have to work harder and harder to find bargain keywords until it’s no easier than finding good PR.
So if both “Pull” and “Push” are, or at least are becoming, big-money operations then where’s the cheap attention? It’s right in the middle where you have listed things like subscriptions & recommendations. Basically, blogs, forums, & community-specific sites plus technology built around them. Good: These harness global discussion & massive decision-making efforts without really charging you for participation (so far.) Bad: They discriminate, so if your content really isn’t any good then you will have to fall back on paying $. Good & Bad: You only get out proportional to what you put in (factored by some multiplier) because reputation requires investment. It’s a sweet spot because, at least for now, technology advancements (collab. filtering, meme trackers, etc.) are helping to better your own effort-in / value-out efficiencies without charging you, because the house always converts a % of attention to cash via contextual ads…
I can imagine a lot of ways in which this will eventually dry up - for one thing, as AdSense-like technologies mature you might even find that main story content faces competition from the paid sidebars? In other words, influencer sites start letting people pay to post topics to their page, just like search engines did for ads. But for now there’s nothing like the bang-for-buck of becoming a part of “A-list” discussions. All you have to do is be consistently interesting, in the context of a particular community.
BTW in my restated spectrum, I wouldn’t put “browsing” in the middle, it really belongs at both extreme ends, since most links are directed by $$
Anyway, sorry for all the generalities, but when you include all forms of marketing in a single spectrum then I guess you’re asking for a load of BS ;) I have some specific ideas (some of which I’d mentioned to Darek actually) if we get a chance to chat later!
Steve said,
February 20, 2006 @ 8:20 pm
Oh and right now the main obstacle to promoting yourself via community participation is having to pick a few communities and stick with ‘em. If your ads aren’t doing well, you can just re-list them somewhere else, but you can’t take your reputation with you (at least until it grows bigger than your community.) That’s good for communities because it means you’re pretty committed to them by the time you really start recommending, but it’s hard for someone trying to break in ASAP. Also some really interesting apps are coming along to help jumpstart budding tastemakers by letting them associate their content with established communities without giving it away. This progression started with trackbacks, then meme trackers, and now things like co-comment.
PS Since I don’t have a blog, I can’t even get any fractional oxygen for all this writing!
Oshoma Momoh said,
February 21, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
Steve, you’ve found me out: I am not a marketer. On a good day I could maybe market my way out of a wet paper bag… barely.
I really should have written this up as two separate dimensions / spectra: how content gets promoted, and how content gets discovered. It’s all so blurry, though, at least to me.
I’m all for survival of the fittest as regards content and ideas. The puzzle to me is how best to nurture newborn content for a little while… long enough to give it a real chance at surviving on its own merit. (In many animal species, parents nurture and protect the kids until the kids are mature enough to fend for themselves. Same idea here.)
“All you have to do is be consistently interesting, in the context of a particular community.” From what I’ve read, this understates how hard it is to break into the A-list. Being consistently interesting is necessary but not sufficient. Being first mover helps. Reciprocal linking helps. Evangelism. PR. Etc.
New York Magazine has a relevant article “Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom” http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/15967/index.html The article supports your point on money being thrown at both ends of the spectrum. It also describes how the process of creating of blogs for commercial gain is becoming more and more sophisticated… just like it did in other mediums. In particular read about the Huffington Post.
Thanks as always for the insights. Love co-comment. We need portable reputation in the online world, just like we need portable identity.
P.S. No fair dissing the comp ideas without saying why they won’t scale. I don’t actually know of any comp system that scales well, especially over the long term. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it sometime.
Steve said,
February 21, 2006 @ 8:25 pm
:) I’ll start with the middle first again! “All you have to do is be consistently interesting, in the context of a particular community.” Actually I wasn’t talking about how to break into the A-list (which is very very hard) but instead how to get noticed by the A-list once. Sites like BoingBoing and Scobleizer are always looking for content to link to, and there are similar sites for every genre from politics to arts to …
“Break-in” opportunities:
Your put your name, hyperlinked, next to lots of interesting comments on popular blogs, or linkposts (like Digg, but start with smaller specific communities) etc
You make a mixtape, including your own song alongside really popular (commonly searched for) songs, then put it up on P2P with easy way to identify your site
You create a really interesting top-level domain idea such as the million dollar homepage or cool mashup, and then link to your blog
You go to events that A-listers attend, and talk to them about their great ideas so they link to you on their blog
You sign up in communities using your website as your username
You team up with two or three other people to pool your oxygen
Those are just some random ideas. I’m pretty sure that it’s actually not that hard to get a notice or two for anything you do - and easier the more work you put into it w/in a community context. And really my point was not that it’s easy but that community is the only place where you can associate your own content with higher-value content without paying for it ;)
Next though you have to get people to come back. That’s mostly a matter of branding: tightly couple the content and the author/site/etc. For instance sometimes I’ll get mails from someone, two links on different days, and they don’t even realize that the two articles they’re sending me were by the same person or from the same site. That’s a missed opportunity for the original author. So is using someone else’s branding - for instance, people send links to an art photoset on flickr, which is convenient, but when someone looks at the art it’s often a few clicks away to the person’s profile and gallery website etc. Instead use the Flickr APIs to automatically include the art on your own site.
It’s also about making two-way conversation. For instance: I revisit random blogs that I’ve commented on. Of course it’s expensive (time-wise) to make every marketing effort a two-way conversation.
Anyway these are all pretty generic suggestions ’cause there’s no one way. I’ve never really tried to market things but I do know that when I’ve created a useful utility or whatever, it gets traffic (was getting 5-10 mails per day at one point on some scripting tools I wrote… I don’t *want* that traffic.) And I was never trying to make $$, so I might approach it differently if I wanted to do that. Words are easiest to “market” but hard to monetize. Something like music is harder to host, and there are fewer places where you can place it in context of other popular items. Actually it’s probably pretty hard to sell, too, since it’s so easy to create music today, so there’s a lot of free, “OK” stuff available. I guess my play there would be to market to industry rather than individuals, like my friend who got his stuff on the Matrix DVD soundtrack by heavy participation in a music community, or mashup artists who got radioplay & remix jobs by way of participating in DJ nights. Etc.
I’ll save my rambling on compensation for the next time we’re hangin’ out… which I hope is soon!