The difference between Instagram and Flickr can be summed up in one short phrase: publisher self-esteem. And in the next decade that’s going to be a make or break factor for all large publishing sites…
What do WordPress.com and Flickr have in common? They’re among a small number of very large publishing platforms that target the publisher as their main source of funding. They seek to browbeat the creator who provides them with the very substance of their value, into directly paying their bills, and lining their pockets with profit.
Ethically, asking content-creators to pay for your site is a bit like asking the vicar, transport-providers, tailor/dressmaker, stylist, caterers, entertainers, photographer, etc, to club together and pay for your wedding. How rude a request would that be? Pretty damn rude. And yet traditionally, in the realm of online publishing, content-providers have not only refused to be insulted by such a suggestion – they’ve actually handed over the money.
Creator prosperity is platform prosperity. There’s no line between the two.
The providers of the value are then left out of pocket, while the rest of the world not only gorges on what they provide for free, but also steals it, re-distributes it, and makes money out of it. The platform itself makes a tidy sum too, as I mentioned. The only person who loses financially, is the one who contributed the value. It’s known as vanity-publishing, because it depends on a motivational priority unique to creative workers. Namely, a deep desire to be acknowledged, applauded and appreciated as a talent.
The vanity publishing platforms always knew how vital it was that the content-creators felt appreciated. Indeed, they knew that without a feeling of appreciation, creators would not pay to publish their work. So they set up internal vanity reward systems, which appeased the creators with largely artificial expressions of appreciation. Favourite buttons, Follow buttons, Comment facilities, etc.
Because the external audience (if there even was one) had no access to these functions, only the internal audience could use them. And who was the internal audience? Signed up members – other content-creators. So this wasn’t a provider/consumer relationship. It was a provider/provider relationship – which by nature had to be synthetic to function. Fundamentally, you’d have providers somewhat feigning interest in other providers, in the hope of being noticed, and receiving the same somewhat fake or exaggerated praise for themselves. Which they would regard as genuine praise, because… Well, because people have egos, and will believe whatever most benefits those egos.
ENTER SOCIAL MEDIA
But then came a dramatic shift in the status quo. The rise of social media had a monstrous, multi-faceted effect on dedicated publishing platforms. Here’s what social media did…
Attract masses of attention-seekers away from dedicated publishing sites. The people who just wanted to post their opinions and tell others what they got for their birthday, as effortlessly as possible, could do so much more conveniently on social media than they could on, say, a blog. And with greater egotistical reward. And for free, without any nags. And since, in transactional engagement systems, the attention-seeker was not only a publisher, but also part of the internal audience, the engaging audience on vanity publishing platforms went into decline. That made it harder for vanity freemiums like WordPress and Flickr to prize money out of content-creators, because… Well, first rule of creative motivation: there has to be applause. Take away the applause, and you take away the motivation. No applause; no money.
People with high self-esteem have fans. People with low self-esteem don’t. Fans are what grow a platform. It’s pretty much that simple.
Steal the attention of the external audience. The short-form punch and viral distribution of social media was a faster and more powerful way for celebrities and influentials to get their message across to the public. And the mass audience will go wherever the celebrities and influentials go.
Highlight the sham of transactional engagement. Social media showed more clearly than ever that people will “Like” or “Follow” a complete void if it means them getting more attention for themselves. This burst a webwide bubble, diminishing confidence in engagement on publishing platforms like WordPress and Flickr, and making the “everyone loves you” illusion harder to swallow. That in turn made paid “plans” even harder to sell to publishers – more so still since on social media they weren’t required at all.
Freemium, social-engagement-driven publishing platforms thus drew to a crossroads. Should they switch to funding through data-leverage (a la Google/Facebook/Instagram)? Would they have any hope of competing with those massive brands if they did? Or should they head in the opposite direction and phase out free plans, so that all content-creators would have to pay to publish?
Both Flickr and WordPress.com sought to re-focus their market. Flickr a number of times. WordPress generally gave up on the serious blogging community and chased small business users who needed a first website. This has changed the core nature of the tech from blogging software to website-building software. WP is now a totally different business from that of a decade ago, with a completely different target market. Why? Because it lost its old market to platforms that offered the community a better experience or a better deal.
Ethically, asking content-creators to pay for your site is a bit like asking the vicar, transport-providers, tailor/dressmaker, stylist, caterers, entertainers, photographer, etc, to club together and pay for your wedding.
Flickr, meanwhile, initially chased the mass market by shifting towards an entirely free-to-use model. Then after that failed to gather momentum, the platform swung dramatically in the other direction, heading towards subscription-only territory. Now Flickr is in a proper mess. Having lost a big chunk of its userbase, it’s trying to persuade paying publishers that they should accept third party advertising against their work, to avoid a further increase to a subscription fee which has already doubled in the past year or so. Realistically, there’s only one way that’s going to go, and it’s not going to involve the word “growth”.
You can’t look at either story without concluding that the old-school model of freemium vanity publishing, as originally imagined by two hugely successful platforms, has now failed.
CONSUMER SUBSCRIPTIONS
If social media’s data-leveraging model didn’t completely kill old-style vanity publishing, then consumer subscriptions have surely wielded the lethal sword. With consumer subscriptions, rather than the content-creator paying to publish, the consumer pays to access what they value, and both the creator and the platform are financially rewarded. It’s ethical, and it clearly works. The likes of Patreon and Medium have made a big splash in online publishing, drawing a lot of the most important creators away from vanity publishing sites.
Why does it work? Well, because once you equip creators to earn, rather than asking creators to pay, you get creators with higher self-esteem, and that is a critically important factor.
People with high self-esteem have fans. People with low self-esteem don’t. Fans are what grow a platform. It’s pretty much that simple.
THE ESTEEM MACHINE
Whether you analyse Instagram, or Patreon, or Twitter, or Medium, or YouTube, you see one common factor. The growth is driven by creators with high self-esteem. Creators with high self-esteem not only enjoy personal success – they also drive the platforms forward. They draw in a real audience which is not simply feigning interest in the hope of servicing its own aspirations, but which genuinely and passionately cares about a) the content, and A++) the people who deliver the content. They draw in a fanbase.
Everyone with sufficiently low self-esteem to vanity-publish is a “nobody”, so there’s no one for the fan to connect with.
High self-esteem is self-fulfilling. If you love yourself, people will love you. So when the creators have high self-esteem, the platform is considered by the general public to have higher value. It gains a buzz, which makes it grow. But when the creators have lower self-esteem, the platform is considered by the general public to have lower value. It does what WordPress.com and Flickr did, and becomes an artifical, transactional environment where the creators end up consuming their own work in reciprocal fashion…
“You Like mine, and I’ll Like yours.”
The vanity publisher’s success is roughly proportional to the applause they give to others. And the time investment required for that is prohibitive. Creators who should be spending their time creating, end up spending their time trawling round content they really don’t care much about, and engaging with it, purely to earn applause for themselves. AND they’re expected to pay as well! It’s a terrible economy.
Meanwhile, the platform sits in a stalemate with the all-important external audience – the true consumers. The consumer won’t sign up, because everyone with sufficiently low self-esteem to vanity-publish is a “nobody”, so there’s no one for the fan to connect with. But if the platform locks the consumer out in a bid to force them to sign up, they become entirely oblivious to the whole thing and soon forget the site exists altogether.
THE SOLUTION
We’ve seen in recent years that there’s very little mileage left in exploiting creators with low self-esteem. As we enter the 2020s, all publishing platforms will need to find ways to bring the fan on board, because that dedicated consumer is the only real audience that exists. And it’s a vastly, vastly bigger audience than a group limited only to other publishers. The evidence that high self-esteem among publishers is the difference between growth and retraction of internet brands, is now incontrovertible.
Let’s hope the 2020s begin with a universal realisation that self-esteem is vital in publishing, and that content-creators should be encouraged to value themselves rather than being continually told they’re lucky to be allowed to publish at all.
There’s one simple solution for vanity freemiums, which divides into two parts…
- Re-incentivise the platform to attract publishers who already have high self-esteem.
- Encourage higher levels of self-esteem in publishers who already use the platform.
Neither of these measures, in any shape or form, involves charging content-creators money to publish their content on sites they don’t control.
First we saw traditional forums die a death – mainly because their administrations were far too controlling in comparison to social media sites. So the people with high self-esteem moved to social media, and the consumer followed them. The consumer will always follow high self-esteem.
And now we’ve seen vanity publishing environments going into decline – once again because they’ve lost the self-respecting publisher, and with her/him all hope of attracting fans.
Let’s hope the 2020s begin with a universal realisation that self-esteem is vital in publishing, and that content-creators should be encouraged to value themselves rather than being continually told they’re lucky to be allowed to publish at all. And yes, I’m talking to you, Flickr. The platforms that value creators are going to prosper, and the platforms that don’t are going to fade. As indeed they should. Creator prosperity is platform prosperity. There’s no line between the two. None at all.