From: Amanda Palmer
Re: Social Media Manipulation
a few months ago a friend of mine was fired from one of the top online tech/buzz magazines. he'd been busting his ass there for a year, working long hours and cranking out incredibly well-written, deeply researched content about his interests and also turning in obligatory stories about gadgets and video games and so forth. one day they called him into the office and told him that while his writing was stellar, he wasn't generating enough page views. they'd crunched the numbers. and he was fired on the spot.
a few weeks later, a writer for the same outlet wrote a particularly bizarre piece slamming me and my kickstarter. it was so weird and the criticism so unusually off-the-wall that i instinctively reached for the retweet button, to share it and laugh about the weirdness with my fans. right after i did, my recently-fired writer friend shot me a tweet, reminding me what we'd just learned. this article was eyeball-bait. by sharing the trash they'd written, i was keeping the trash writer in the job.
so i deleted the re-tweet.
since then, i just don't link to the trolls or the journalists who are clearly out for a fight which brings page views.... i don't take the bait from sites who hoping that people (like me) with high-number followings will feel offended/defensive enough to spread the pain around to their own base and therefore alleviate some of the ego-pain that comes being slammed in the press (and i've had my fair share this year... it's very tempting to share the outside criticism with your core audience.)
i also got into a really interesting conversation about this stuff with a journalist in new york the other night, and learned something i didn't know.
"ad views" on sites like TMZ are considered worthless compared to ad views on an outlet like...i don't know, new york magazine, let's say.... but NOT because people don't click on the ads.
NOBODY EVER CLICKS ON THE ADS.
the ad placement is only about impressions and associations, and nobody wants their impression to be associated with TMZ, even if they're happy to go there to look at plastic surgery disasters.
but when you buy online real estate to splash your new cadillac/apple gadget/name-a-product across the front of new york magazine online, you're just..... buying a more credible spot on the planet. but nobody, ever, EVER, clicks on that cadillac ad. (that's the theory, anyway.)
rock on bob
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