How Reddit is launching the careers of unknown artists

Billy the Fridge

William Berry always knew he wanted to work in entertainment. For years, he had aspirations to have a career as a professional wrestler and even began to train for it, but the wrestling scene in Seattle, the city where he’d grown up, was small. There was, however, a strong local hip-hop community, with artists like Macklemore, Grieves, Blue Scholars, and Grayskul reaching national fame, and in the early 2000s Berry found himself working behind the scenes at recording studios and live events. “I wasn’t really trying to be another white rapper,” he told me recently. “I was working with all these guys and we’d go out to these shows and then people started getting me in on their songs because they thought I was funny. It was just something I enjoyed, so I went with it.”

Berry adopted the rap moniker of Billy the Fridge — a reference to his 500-pound frame — and began producing his own music, starting with a mixtape in 2009 and then an actual album in 2012. He built something of a name for himself in Seattle, even getting local radio play, but his brand didn’t extend far outside of the city. That all changed in late 2012.

“Mostly just me and my friends ran out with some video cameras and started filming in places we thought were funny,” Berry said. “We had a budget of next to nothing. It was very do it yourself.” They were shooting a music video for “Just a Bill,” a song from his recent album. Using a remixed version of the classic Schoolhouse Rock song of the same name, the video for “Just a Bill” is a paean to Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a district that was settled by gays in the 1960s and later hosted a vibrant musical culture that exists to this day. Despite its low budget and amateur production, the video is immensely watchable, propelled primarily by Billy the Fridge’s talent as a rapper and the hedonism of his on-screen character.

Berry posted the video to YouTube, and it wasn’t long before Reddit users stumbled across it and began submitting it to the social news site, where it made it to the front page of r/videos, a subreddit with over 9 million subscribers, on three separate occasions. The video’s views ballooned to 50,000 views and then 400,000. Finally, after reaching the front page again last July, “Just a Bill” passed the million view mark.

Almost immediately, Berry began getting recognized on the street, even outside Seattle. “I was in the middle of Indiana at a White Castle one day at 3 a.m. and someone there knew who I was,” he said. “Once the video blew up, anytime I’d go out I’d run into someone who’d call out, ‘Hey Billy, what’s up man?’” More importantly, his phone started ringing. “I’m getting shows booked everywhere. People are hitting me up for TV spots, and I got booked at the Whiskey a Go Go,” the famous West Hollywood nightclub that served as a launching pad for everyone from Metallica to The Doors. His album almost broke into the top 100 for hip hop on iTunes. Berry’s videos continued to do well on YouTube, with several having passed the 100,000 view mark.

With thousands of new submissions every day, it’s not easy to make it to the top of Reddit, but several artists who’ve found their work featured on the “front page of the internet” are seeing their careers blossom as a result. According to its about page, Reddit receives over 230 million unique visitors a month who generate 7.5 billion pageviews on the site. Making it to the top of a default subreddit — most of which have millions of subscribers — can drive upwards of half a million outbound views, and it’s quite common for content featured on Reddit to then spread across Facebook, Twitter, and news websites. For instance, a humorous video arguing that Daniel, the protagonist of The Karate Kid, was actually the villain of the film, reached the top of r/videos and then was later embedded in over a hundred news articles and blog posts, eventually reaching over 5 million views.

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Given the size and influence of Reddit’s audience, it shouldn’t be surprising then that it has the power to thrust a previously-unknown artist into the national spotlight. In 2014, a YouTube user named Jake Dietrich uploaded a cellphone video he’d recorded in the New York Subway of a trio of musicians calling themselves Too Many Zooz. After it made the front page of Reddit, the band’s Facebook page ballooned up to over 200,000 followers, and it recently completed a successful Kickstarter in which it raised over $100,000 to fund a new album. In an episode of Upvoted, a podcast hosted by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a musician who calls himself Smooth McGroove detailed how his acapella renditions of well-known video game music were embraced by the Reddit community. He now makes his entire living from his YouTube videos through a combination of advertising and Patreon subscriptions.

But musicians aren’t the only artists who have built their audiences on Reddit. One of the more popular subreddits, with over 400,000 subscribers, is r/comics, and while it’s common for it to feature already-established comics like xkcd, Cyanide & Happiness, and The Oatmeal, many of its most popular submissions come from relative unknowns. And some of those unknowns, because of their success on Reddit, are no longer unknown.

Chris Grady launched his web comic Lunarbaboon in the midst of what he described as “not quite a midlife crisis.” “I was bored,” he told me. “And so my wife and I had this idea that as a way to communicate better I would draw a comic from my point of view every night for an entire month and she would do the same from her point of view. And then we would share our comics with each other at the end of the month to see how we were looking at the same issues from different points of view. So I started doing it and she decided she hates drawing and didn’t want to do it anymore.” Grady, an elementary school teacher in Toronto, built a Squarespace website and began posting new comics to it.

A Lunarbaboon comic from Chris Grady

At first, Grady’s viewership was virtually nonexistent, limited to friends on Facebook, but then he noticed that on the share button Squarespace automatically generates for each post there was an option to share to Reddit. “I was like, ‘What is this Reddit thing?’” he recalled. “So I started submitting it there.” This was about three years ago, and his earliest submissions garnered only a few upvotes, driving little traffic. But as he began to get accustomed to the community and what it wanted, he began to see some traction, first on the smaller r/webcomics subreddit and then later on r/comics. “I remember the first time it had maybe a hundred upvotes on r/webcomics. That led to 1,000 views that day … Once it started doing well on r/comics, then traffic got out of control.” On a particularly good day, he would see upwards of 100,000 visits, and while that traffic was fleeting at first, he began to grow a recurring, loyal audience as Lunarbaboon consistently did well on Reddit. And when Grady began monetizing his work, through both Patreon and Kickstarter, that audience ponied up. His first Kickstarter project, for a printed collection of his best comics from that year, generated $44,000 from backers. The second Kickstarter raised over $64,000.

Most of the artists I spoke to for this piece, while grateful for the attention Reddit has given them, have focused on diversifying their readership across multiple platforms so they’re not reliant on one website. Shenanigansen, the pseudonym for the person behind a web comic called Owl Turd (he asked that I not use his real name), hosts his comic on Tumblr and has grown it to 180,000 subscribers. He also has 30,000 fans on Facebook and 9,000 followers on Twitter. “Most people in my comics circle try to be on every viable platform,” he told me. “I don’t know if I’d recommend using Reddit as a primary platform. It’s not easy to navigate someone’s submissions in their profile, at least not as easy as what you’ll find on WordPress or Tumblr.”

Of course, making it to the front page of Reddit is only half the battle. Many who do only see fleeting fame; it’s those who are able to ride that momentum and continue producing quality work who see lasting benefits. Billy the Fridge, though he experienced a career boost from his Reddit exposure, hasn’t put out a new video in over a year and expressed at least some regret to me he hasn’t done more to capitalize on his own web popularity. “I’ll be out on the street and a certain group of people will say, ‘Oh wow, Billy, I saw your video on Reddit, it was freaking awesome.’ And then at the same time a lot of people I work with in the city, they’re not Reddit people, so they don’t know anything about it. The internet messes with me. I’m doing something that I love to do and would do regardless. Anything extra is icing on the cake at this point, but maybe I should get out more and start throwing cake in people’s faces.”

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

The rise of the YouTube video essay

Evan Puschak, host of The Nerdwriter

To understand how J. Matthew Turner ended up creating a viral YouTube essay arguing that Daniel LaRusso, the young hero of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, was actually the villain of the movie, you first need to know the story behind the video he posted to YouTube a month before that one. For years, Turner, a video editor from New York, harbored a conviction that the movie Mortal Kombat was so similar in plot and themes to the Bruce Lee cult classic Enter the Dragon that they were virtually the same movie. “It was in the background of my head for a long, long time,” he told me recently. “And for whatever reason, I happened to think of it again last year and I suddenly saw how it should be done.” He had always envisioned a 15-minute video in which he would methodically build a case for his thesis, but he knew it would be difficult to keep viewers entertained for that long. “But now I realized that I should just show all the shots side by side and then try to explain the plot of both movies as one movie at the same time.”

The end result, a video that’s barely over a minute long, took Turner only a day to edit together. In it, he uses a split screen that simultaneously displays scenes from both movies while the narrator, Turner himself, briskly walks the viewer through the plot. The similarities, piled up in such rapid succession, are almost overwhelming, and it quickly dawns on you that, no matter how improbable, these movies, shot two decades apart, are exactly the same. He submitted the video to Reddit where it quickly amassed 3,000 upvotes. Within a week, the video had attracted over 100,000 views. “That blew my mind,” he recalled. “My immediate reaction was that I wanted to follow it up with something else. I was trying to think what else I should do, and that’s when I thought, ‘Hmm, I always thought Daniel was kind of asking for it, so maybe I should do something about that.’”

Daniel, of course, is the pugnacious teenager from The Karate Kid who forms a rivalry with a local bully named Johnny and, under the tutelage of his mentor Mr. Miyagi, eventually defeats that bully at a martial arts competition. But in Turner’s video, which he released a few weeks after his first video took off, Daniel is the bully and Johnny is the flawed hero. The argument is, of course, absurd, but Turner does such an adept job at piecing together his thesis that you finish the video doubting every assumption you’d previously made about a movie that had been a staple of your childhood.

Though the Mortal Kombat/Enter the Dragon essay was a veritable success, this new video was a viral blockbuster. Within hours it was posted across hundreds of news sites and it collected over 5 million views. Irate viewers, unaware that the video was tongue in cheek, flocked to the comment section to argue with its conclusions. “I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a joke,” Turner said. “Apparently it wasn’t.”

Turner didn’t fully realize it at the time, but by creating these videos he was contributing to an expanding genre that has become especially popular during the YouTube era: the video essay. Though the approach varies, video essays almost always feature a narrator who presents a thesis via a series of still images, animations, and video clips. Nearly all of them involve some sort of cultural criticism, and many of the most popular within the genre focus on film. Sometimes, as is the case with the “Honest Trailers” produced by a YouTube channel called Screen Junkies, this involves criticizing a single movie with the same approach that you might see in a text review in a newspaper or magazine.

But many of the best video essays go beyond mere reviews and take a much more academic approach to cinematic criticism. For example, consider a recent video published to the YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, which is helmed by a former MSNBC producer named Evan Puschak. Titled “The Evolution of Batman’s Gotham City,” it walks us through the various incarnations of Bruce Wayne’s metropolis, first introduced in Detective Comics and then later expanded upon in television series, cartoons, video games, and, of course, films. “When the Adam West show failed,” argues Puschak, “Batman writers brought a darker tone to the stories. They brought an extended continuity, and continuity meant that individual locations in Gotham gained importance and the city itself began to breathe as a character.” He then guides us through the gothic luridness of Tim Burton’s Gotham, the garish portrayal of the city in the horrible Batman and Robin, and then finally the hyperrealistic New York City depicted by Christopher Nolan. “A Gotham that resembles our own world,” says Puschak, “can be even more terrifying when it’s shown to be fragile in the face of a violent disregard for the established order.”

While this essay certainly would have worked in written form, Puschak’s use of still images and video adds an entirely new dimension to his argument that makes it much more arresting. It’s because of this more engaging format that video essays are much more popular than their textual counterparts. Of the dozens of videos produced by Puschak, on topics ranging from the emotional theory in Inside Out to what it means when people say Seinfeld is a show about “nothing,” three have amassed more than a million views and many others have at least a few hundred thousand. Though it’s impossible to know how well he’s monetizing the YouTube channel, he’s raised over $2,400 per video on Patreon, which, given that he produces about one video per week, means he’s pulling in north of $120,000 per year. Most newspaper film critics don’t make half that.

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The Nerdwriter isn’t the only YouTube channel focused on video essays to have achieved this level of popularity. Every Frame a Painting. Wisecrack. Screen Junkies. Red Letter Media. The School of Life. Each has amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers and many millions of views.

Though the video essay’s popularity is a recent phenomenon made possible through the advent of YouTube, one can argue that the medium predates the internet. In a paper titled “Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay,” Dr Andrew McWhirter, a lecturer of media and communications at the Glasgow School for Business and Society, says that the form fits within the larger genre of remix culture and harkens back to what the filmmaker Hans Richter coined as the “essay film” in 1940. “Remixed footage has been part of experimental cinema and contemporary art for a number of decades,” wrote McWhirter, pointing to several decades-old political mashup videos posted to a YouTube channel called politicalremix. A 1984 video titled “Death Valley Days: Secret Love,” for instance, uses a mixture of news footage and the Shangri-Las song “Leader Of The Pack” to reframe Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s relationship as a romantic one.

A 1984 political mashup video.

McWhirter also argues that the video essay’s antecedents can be traced to the audio commentaries from directors and actors that are commonly included as “extra” features on movie DVDs. The Criterion Collection pioneered this form of commentary with the 1984 laserdisc release of the original King Kong movie. Film critics and historians like Roger Ebert and Rudy Behlmer recorded audio commentaries for famous films, and indeed McWhirter notes that this tradition has carried over with some of today’s traditional critics, although many have yet to dip their toes into the medium. “Two major impediments to the continued growth of the video essay are the lack of appropriate skill sets … and the various legal complexities concerning the repurposing of intellectual property,” he wrote.

Of course, not all video essays are about film. The YouTube channel The School of Life began initially as a school in London that “taught classes which have a practical application of philosophical ideas,” said John Armstrong, a former philosophy professor living in Melbourne, Australia who now writes scripts for the organization’s YouTube channel. Though it was founded and still operates a brick and mortar school (it’s gone on to open campuses in a dozen cities spanning from Sydney to Istanbul), School of Life began to experiment with propagating its philosophical teachings online, first in the form of text-based essays published at a website called The Book of Life. “We accumulated a large number of essays that are relatively short and each tries to deal with a significant issue,” he said. “And then we began adapting some of those topics to a video format. The idea of presenting things visually has always been a big ambition. I remember years ago discussing with [School of Life founder Alain de Botton] the idea of making books with lots of images where the intellectual content and the images would play off each other very strongly so that it would be a visual experience as well as a reading one.”

Initial videos uploaded to the organization’s YouTube channel were merely recorded talks and lectures, similar to what you’d find in your average TED Talk video, but a video published in September 2014 was distinctly different. Titled “How to Save Love with Pessimism,” it uses a combination of animation and narration to argue there’s no such thing as a perfect mate and it’s only through a healthy dose of pessimism that we can accept someone’s flaws and settle on a significant other. Like most video essays, it could have easily been rendered in text form — all you would need to do is publish the narration as a standalone article — but doing so would subtract from the richness afforded by animation. It also likely wouldn’t have attracted over 150,000 views as a piece of text.

Since the publication of that initial video essay in 2014, The School of Life channel has steadily grown, with over 800,000 users now subscribing. Armstrong is responsible for writing each video’s script and then sends it off to a team of freelance filmmakers and animators to create the visuals. The channel now produces upwards of three new videos a week on topics ranging from the joy of sexting to what makes a country rich. Unlike many of the other video essayists I’ve mentioned in this piece that rely on already-existing footage from films and pop culture, The School of Life produces much of its visual imagery from scratch, either with animation or even paid actors.

For Armstrong, the video essay is merely an evolution of its textual counterpart, a way to breathe new life into a literary tradition that stretches back hundreds of years. “I think that we’re certainly bringing ambitions that were formed by the history of writing, by the history of the essay,” he said. “We see Youtube as offering a better artistic medium for what we’re trying to do. I certainly think it’s comparable to, say, the invention of the paperback in the middle of the 20th century, which changed people’s access to reading and changed the kind of writing that went on.”

For years, traditional newspapers have been laying off their film critics, and other forms of art criticism have become even more scarce, at least in mainstream publications. Yet combing through dozens of YouTube channels that specialize in the video essay, it seems apparent that pop culture criticism is thriving to a degree heretofore never seen. Millions of YouTube users, many of whom are Millennials, are subscribing and tuning in to an art form that was once relegated to film snobs and art enthusiasts. “The huge intellectual challenge is how to get the ideas you’re really interested in and think are important to really work in this new form,” said Armstrong. “And that’s the big opportunity and we feel very much like we’re at the beginning of exploring.”

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

Email newsletters are the new zines

Caroline Crampton isn’t lacking for an audience. A longtime political journalist, she’s been a web editor for the New Statesman, the 103-year-old British political and cultural magazine, since 2012. In addition to penning articles for the magazine, she also co-hosts a pop culture podcast with her colleague Anna Leszkiewicz. She has an active Tumblr blog, 4,000 followers on Twitter, and even occasionally appears as a commentator on mainstream news programming.

Yet every week Crampton sits down to write So far, I’ve had no complaints, a newsletter she sends out each Friday. With most issues clocking in at about 1,000 words, So far, I’ve had no complaints is broken down into several eclectic and mostly unrelated sections — “Things to read,” a mixture of blockquotes and commentary on what she considers the best journalism published that week; “Things to listen to,” a roundup of podcasts she recommends; “Things to watch,” assorted web videos; “Compulsory medieval thingamabob,” a strange image that I can only infer came from a medieval painting or illustration; and “The guest gif,” which is basically just an amusing GIF to close out the newsletter.

Crampton launched the newsletter in 2014 after noticing how newly-popularized link aggregators that focused on highlighting serious, in-depth journalism — Longform, Longreads, The Browser — were rather homogeneous with their selections. “They were patrolling the same beat where everything serious or good coincidentally happened to be written by men about men,” she told me in a phone interview. “And this made me so cross because there are so many other great things out there on the internet written by all kinds of people doing all sorts of things.” She’d complain to her colleagues about this but they always replied with the same solution: “They said, ‘If you care so much about this then why don’t you point people toward things that you think are great?’”

Crampton used Tinyletter, a simple newsletter platform owned by Mailchimp, to distribute So far, I’ve had no complaints, and she initially sent it out to about three dozen people she knew in real life. She didn’t do much to promote it on her other channels, but she began to see an uptick in subscribers as readers passed it around; occasionally the newsletter would experience a sudden spike when someone influential recommended it on Twitter. Today, it has several thousand subscribers, and it’s consistently, if slowly, growing. “I just logged into Tinyletter for the first time in a couple weeks and saw that several hundred more people signed up,” she told me. “I have no idea where they came from.”

Though it seems absurd in some ways to talk about an “email newsletter resurgence” in 2016, especially given that they never actually went away, there’s a certain kind of newsletter that’s seen renewed adoption in recent years. Though they served as a vital medium for independent writers in the late 1990s, the advent of Web 2.0 resulted in many would-be newsletter scribes launching blogs instead. While brands continued to leverage email in their marketing — and publications provided options for readers to subscribe by email — there were few high-profile newsletters that launched as standalone entities. During this time blogs served as a vital counterpoint to the mainstream media, and we saw the emergence of powerful independent voices who went on to build sizable readerships and influence: Josh Marshall. Andrew Sullivan. John Gruber. Michael Arrington.

But by the end of the decade the web had fundamentally changed. Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter became viable stand ins for casual blogging while popular bloggers either decamped to high profile traditional news jobs or tried to scale their websites into viable media companies. The blogosphere no longer felt like a cohesive, anti-establishment community, and it became quite common to see headlines proclaiming the “death of blogging.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was around this time when media watchers began taking note of a newsletter renaissance. Writing in the New York Times in 2014, the late David Carr observed that “email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march.” While the piece focused primarily on newsletters operated by mainstream news organizations, others highlighted the growing number of email newsletters that had no official connection to an existing media entity.

This trend was made possible, in part, by Mailchimp’s acquisition of Tinyletter in 2011. Previously, most major newsletter platforms cost money to use and, with their robust functionality, were intimidating to novice users. Tinyletter was free (at least until you had amassed at least 5,000 subscribers) and had stripped-down offerings similar to what you’d find with your average blogging CMS. As a 2013 Fast Company profile of the company put it, “TinyLetter is to MailChimp what Tumblr is to WordPress: It’s newsletters for dummies.” The simplicity made it that much easier for new entrants to dip their toes into the medium. “I went with Tinyletter because it was free and it provided the least distance between my writing and me getting it out there,” said Nick Quah, who writes the podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod. As of late 2015 there were over 141,000 Tinyletter accounts with a combined 14 million subscribers.

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts. But I actually think its antecedents stretch back further to the zine culture that thrived in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s.

Though media historians disagree over who published the first zine (some would argue that pamphleteers like Thomas Paine were early zinesters), their current iteration came into practice in the 70s as a form of promotion for the burgeoning punk scene. With names like Sniffin’ Glue and Maximum Rock & Roll, these zines covered what mainstream music publications wouldn’t, and their counter-culture vibe rejected the established norms for how magazines should be presented. “Often they are odd sizes,” wrote zine enthusiast Kirsten Anderberg. “Zines are characteristically unconcerned with a glossy presentation, often handwritten, and xeroxed. There is a homemade charm to zines.”

Similarly, many of the newsletters I reviewed for this article seemed to purposefully reject the standard approach for how an article should be presented, and they eschew what many journalism practitioners would consider web “best practices.” Your average news article totals about 700 words, has a clear thesis (in the form of a lede or nut graf), and presents a linear procession of facts that form a narrative. Many newsletters feature a hodgepodge of unrelated sections, images, and GIFs, and they take a distinctly informal tone in their writing. Journalist Ann Friedman’s eponymous The Ann Friedman Weekly starts off with an almost stream-of-consciousness paragraph linking to her favorite web content and then presents a hand-drawn pie chart, a “GIFspiration,” and even a classifieds section.

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Or consider a slate of recent headlines from Gawker, Vox, Business Insider, and Buzzfeed, respectively: “Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI”; “Why one woman stole 47 million academic papers — and made them all free to read”; “Many parents are increasingly terrified to feed their kids Nutella”; “This Trainer Gained 70 Pounds So He Could Lose Weight With His Client.” Each is optimized for clicks and written with the sole intention of grabbing your eyes as you’re scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed.

Now take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters I mention in this article: “Seasonal Pods, NPR One, Hazlitt, A Spreadsheet”; “Trimmed for Space”; “You’re so well-preserved”; “Anthropology, Artichokes and Aftermaths.” They’re almost begging you to not click on them. Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired.

Zines, with their shoe-string budgets didn’t have massive distribution channels, nor were they easy to follow. They relied mostly on word-of-mouth and chance discovery. Typically, you stumbled across one stacked at a record store or at a science fiction convention. Zine creators pushed issues on friends and acquaintances. If you were lucky there was an address printed somewhere within an issue’s pages so you could subscribe, although it was difficult to know whether a new issue would ever be published.

Speaking to newsletter writers, it struck me how attracted they were to the newsletter’s inefficient means of discovery. Unlike articles, videos, and images, it’s difficult for a newsletter to go “viral” since it doesn’t live on the open web. “I intentionally made it hard to find,” said Nick Quah of his Hot Pod newsletter. “I don’t find value in virality. I don’t want people reading me because something went viral. I want the right people to read me.” Quah told me he likes when people unsubscribe each week because it’s making his distribution list more “dense” and weeding out uninterested subscribers.

Ernie Smith launched his newsletter, called Tedium, last year because he expressly wanted to escape the pressures of virality. Smith has spent most of his career working as a graphic designer at newspapers, both regional and national. He launched the ShortFormBlog, a daily aggregator of links and content, in 2009 when he was in between jobs, and after he migrated it to Tumblr it took off. Buzzfeed featured it in its list of top Tumblr blogs of 2011. Time quoted it in its print issue. Over its six-year lifespan, ShortFormBlog amassed over 160,000 followers on Tumblr.

But by 2014, Smith was feeling burnt out. “Because it was a news site, everything that I did on it had a short half-life and by the end of the day it was basically dead,” he told me. “It didn’t last the test of time.” The thrill of seeing a post go viral also wore off. “I really wanted to see if I could create something that focused on an evergreen approach and also allowed me to do things that were a little bit riskier,” he explained. When he announced Tedium on ShortFormBlog, it almost seemed as if he were daring his readers not to subscribe. “I’m going to try to find the most obscure, boring stuff on the internet and throw it in your inboxes,” he wrote. His goal was to find subjects that no other writer had thought interesting enough to pursue. True to form, recent issues have focused on anodyne topics such as mattresses, the history of the salad bar, and the sauce packets you get at fast food restaurants. Don’t expect these issues to be discussed on a CNN panel anytime soon.

Yet despite all this, Tedium’s readership continues to grow. A web version of the mattress issue got featured at the top of Hacker News and eventually attracted tens of thousands of views. Smith convinced more established outlets like Atlas Obscura and Neatorama to syndicate it, and it has an open rate north of 40 percent, which is well above the industry average. Last year, Smith sent a survey to subscribers who frequently opened Tedium. “Many of those readers really enjoyed what they were getting and found the subject matter was interesting,” he said. “That made me realize I was on the right track with this thing.”

So why are readers responding so well to these newsletters when they seem to fly in the face of everything we’ve learned over the past decade about what web users want? It could be that, like those within the zine community, newsletter readers enjoy feeling like they’re in some sort of exclusive club. Sending a newsletter seems more like a private, intimate conversation compared to when you write for the open web. “I feel more connected to people in the private space because I’m able to be a little bit more authentic or more honest,” said Quah. “If you say something you believe might be controversial on Twitter, and if you have a big enough following your mentions will become a fucking disaster. It’s one thing to be able to manage that at a very public level, and it’s another thing entirely to manage it in an inbox.” Crampton also liked producing something that wouldn’t be chewed over by social media users. “Only the people who’ve opted in actually receive it,” she said. “It’s not sitting there on the internet for any drive-by random person to have a go at it. That’s the appeal of it.”

The question is whether that appeal will persist as newsletters continue to gain in popularity. Lena Dunham recently debuted a for-profit newsletter, called Lenny, and partnered with Hearst to deliver ads. The Skimm, a popular newsletter launched a few years ago by two former NBC journalists, recently hit 1.5 million subscribers. Every day we hear about another traditional media outlet debuting a morning newsletter. As our inboxes grow more crowded, the high engagement typically seen with email (which has an average 25 percent open rate) might fall down to the levels found on Twitter and Facebook (where only between 1 and 5 percent of your followers will see your post). Any anti-establishment medium that becomes sufficiently popular eventually gets adopted by the establishment. Given our renewed obsession with Inbox Zero and the general feeling that we already receive too much email, it might soon become harder for new independent newsletters to break through the noise.

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

I tried Facebook’s revamped Notes tool for a month. Here’s what I learned

For years now publishers have fretted over Facebook’s increasing emphasis on native content and what it means for the outbound referral traffic they’ve come to rely on. Back in 2012 I noticed that publishers, rather than pasting a link that would auto-generate a headline and thumbnail for their articles, were instead uploading a photo natively to their page and then including a Twitter-like headline and link. Here’s an example of what I mean:

The reason? They had noticed that Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm favored native photos over embedded links and would expose the native posts to a greater percentage of followers. The practice became so prevalent that Facebook eventually rolled out a major update to its algorithm to encourage publishers to go back to embedding links.

Recently, Facebook has introduced two new native content products that have caused no small amount of consternation among publishers: video and Instant Articles. Once Facebook implemented auto-play for videos, page owners almost immediately noticed a huge disparity between the newsfeed exposure of native vs third party video players. An experiment carried out by Search Engine Journal found that native Facebook video is exposed to double the number of users compared to posts linking to YouTube videos.

Meanwhile, some media watchers have gone so far as labeling Facebook Instant Articles the final death knell of the news industry. By favoring Instant Articles over outbound links, this thinking goes, Facebook will eventually force all publications onto its platform, at which point they will have lost any remaining leverage they had and would now be trapped in Facebook’s playground. Writing for the Awl, John Herrman argued that it “will have transferred economic competition into an environment managed by one other company [Ed: Facebook], which is itself engaged in a separate economic competition.” To bolster these arguments, critics point to recent data showing that Facebook referral traffic to top publishers has fallen drastically in the last year.

But there’s been one native Facebook offering that’s received considerably less attention: its revamped Notes tool. A vestigial, long-neglected leftover from the days when status updates had strict character limits, Facebook gave Notes a facelift late last year so that it now has the same basic functionality of a blog. Though the press covered these new offerings upon their launch and even ruminated over whether this would result in more longform blogging on Facebook, I haven’t encountered much follow-up coverage, nor have I spotted many Notes in my Facebook newsfeed.

Unlike those who argue against “digital sharecropping,” which is when you build a following on a platform you don’t own, I’ve long been an advocate of uploading native content to platforms that allow it. Back in July I argued that you should crosspost every blog post to LinkedIn and Medium, and since implementing this practice I’ve seen a dramatic increase in readership for my articles. A recent profile I wrote on Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, for instance, received 4,000 views on Medium and 35,000 on LinkedIn. It received nowhere near that level of exposure on my own blog.

So needless to say, I was pretty excited when I heard about this new functionality and eager to find out whether uploading my articles to Notes would provide me any kind of home field advantage not afforded to me when I simply link to my articles elsewhere. So starting in January I began uploading every article I wrote to Notes. I have my personal profile that’s set to public and has around 600 friends and followers, and I also run a professional page with an additional 300 followers. Thus far I’ve published three articles to Facebook Notes. Here’s what I’ve observed so far:

Should you publish Notes to your personal profile or page?

One question I’ve always struggled with is whether to place more emphasis on promoting my personal profile or professional page. Back when Facebook only allowed mutual friendships on personal profiles, the professional page seemed like a no-brainer, but then Facebook began allowing users to follow personal profiles without mutual friendships (similar to how the follower relationship works on Twitter), so I’ve constantly faced the dilemma of how I should manage the two differently.

At first glance, it seemed like the Notes tool wasn’t available for pages, thereby forcing me to first publish the article to my personal profile (which, again, is set to public) and then from there share the article to my professional page (to understand what I mean, here’s an article I published to my profile and then later shared to my public page).

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But then, after noticing that the Guardian had somehow published a Note to its page, I investigated further and found out that you could publish a Note to a page if you knew the specific URL. Here it is: facebook.com/YOURPAGEUSERNAME/notes

After I made this discovery I published my next article to my professional page and then shared that note to my personal profile.

So which is better? I don’t know! My first article I published to my personal page received the most engagement and views compared to all subsequent articles, but that may just be because a source I tagged in the article then went on to share it to his network. I think moving forward, however, I’m going to continue publishing the notes to my professional page.

If there’s a home field advantage to Facebook Notes, it’s small

The main question I wanted to answer with this experiment is whether my content would see an explosion in Facebook engagement. Typically, my articles haven’t performed very well on Facebook, and given that it’s by far the largest social network I certainly would have welcomed some sort of boost.

If there was a boost, it was slight. For the month of January, my articles on Medium and LinkedIn collectively received 60,000 views. On Facebook, they received a paltry 263 views. I also didn’t see any indication that they were being shared outside Facebook, whereas my Medium and LinkedIn articles are often widely shared on Twitter and other platforms.

That being said, if I had instead simply embedded the links to the articles published elsewhere I doubt I could have driven 263 clicks from my Facebook page and profile, so there may have been some advantage. But it certainly didn’t have the snowball effect I was hoping for.

You can’t run a Facebook Note as a targeted native ad

Occasionally I like to boost my Facebook posts with between $25 and $100 in targeted advertising. Results have been mixed, but I’ve seen this lead to a substantial number of organic shares if I’m targeting correctly.

But Facebook doesn’t give you this choice with articles published as Notes. When you’re in the Facebook ads manager, it won’t even acknowledge that your Note exists. I found this to be a real bummer since a paid boost would have given me the opportunity to really take Notes on a test drive and see what happens when they’re exposed to a larger audience. It’s hard to tell whether this was a conscious decision made by Facebook admins and if this functionality will be made available in the future.

The blogging functionality is similar to what you’ll find on Medium or LinkedIn

I first heard about the revamped Notes tool months before it was actually released to the public, and I was immensely interested in what kind of blogging functionality it would contain. Facebook has long eschewed hyperlinks, for instance, and has restricted how you can present photos. Would Notes operate like a true blogging CMS and allow for more flexibility?

Yes, it does. While the slick look and feel is very similar to Medium, I actually think a better comparison would be to LinkedIn’s blogging platform. Notes prompts you to input both a cover image and headline (Medium encourages both but requires neither). It allows you to include hyperlinks as well as basic font modifications (bold, italics) to the text. You can blockquote sections and provide bullets. It even allows you to use right and left alignment as well as captions for photos.

It doesn’t appear that you can edit with HTML, however, so it doesn’t have the same level of functionality that you’d find on, say, WordPress. For instance, what if I wanted to embed a widget that would allow you to sign up for my newsletter without clicking out of the article? I can easily do that on my WordPress blog, but doesn’t appear possible on Notes. It’s still not even clear to me whether I can embed a YouTube video into a Note.

Analytics are sparse

Facebook will give you a basic count for how many people viewed your Note (as well as the number of comments, likes, and shares), but that’s pretty much it. Compare that to LinkedIn, which will show me an industry and title breakdown of members who viewed my articles, or Medium, which tells you how many people read to the end of the article as well as referral sources.

Of course none of this compares to what I get from Google Analytics on my website blog.

Conclusions

I think it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions from this experiment. For one, I’ve only published three articles so far, which is a tiny sample size. Also, I don’t have a huge following on Facebook, and it would certainly be interesting to test out Notes on a page with tens of thousands of followers (that being said, I didn’t start out with a huge following on LinkedIn and yet saw a pretty sizable impact from publishing there).

Ultimately, I still plan to continue publishing content natively to Facebook. I don’t blame publishers for growing wary of the walled garden Facebook has created and the increasing stranglehold it has over the open web, but at the same time I want to bring my content to where the people are rather than attempting to corral them back to my own website. As much as I’d love for you all to hang out on simonowens.net, I know you all have better things to do. No hard feelings.

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

How Boing Boing adapted to the social web

A question started bugging Mark Frauenfelder in November of 2014: Could you take marijuana onto a plane in a state where it was legal? Would the TSA let you through? Earlier that month, Alaska had joined three other states and the District of Columbia by voting to legalize marijuana use for citizens over the age of 21, but given that the drug was still banned at the federal level there were all sorts of murky legal questions yet to be answered, this being one of them. So Frauenfelder, a co-editor at Boing Boing, once considered the most popular blog on the internet (by the rankings of blog search engine Technorati), approached Caroline Siede, a frequent freelancer for the site, and asked her to tackle the question. “So she did her usual thing and reported the story out, which involved calling Homeland Security and finding out what the deal was,” he told me.

The outcome of that research, a 1,300-word article preluded with a full-width image of a plane superimposed with a marijuana leaf, reported that whether you can carry legal marijuana onto a plane is often up to the discretion of the TSA agent, but in many cases you’ll be fine. While this information certainly was interesting, what I found more interesting as a media journalist was that a decade ago you wouldn’t have found anything like this article on boingboing.net.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, Boing Boing’s tagline has been “a directory of wonderful things,” and for much of its history it was just that: a directory, one that almost always pointed you away to other websites. A 2005 blog post outlining how to send submissions to the site states, “Don’t send in stuff without links. If you saw something cool on TV or received something interesting in email, you need to either find it on the Web or publish it on the Web before suggesting it. Boing Boing publishes links — so if there’s no link, there’s not much chance we’ll link to it.”

But here was a post that, while containing links, resembled less a blog post and more a feature-length article, one specifically designed for others to link to. And it wasn’t a fluke; Frauenfelder told me he has a steady stable of freelancers he turns to to produce original content. “They’ll hit me up with ideas, and I’ll decide whether we should do it,” he said. “Some of our other editors occasionally introduce me to someone they know who has written a book or something and wants to write an essay for us to help get word out about their book.” Boing Boing, he said, publishes at least one of these original articles per day, and sometimes as many as five in a single day. Though it still publishes plenty of short blog posts meant to draw attention to outside content, Boing Boing certainly can no longer be described as merely a directory.

***

A version of the Boing Boing print zine

Boing Boing’s origin story is by now well documented. Frauenfelder and his wife Carla Sinclair launched it as a print zine in 1988, and it eventually reached a peak circulation of 17,500 copies before it was abandoned in the mid-90s in favor of a website. According to an article in Fast Company, it was after Frauenfelder pitched a magazine editor on a story about a then-fledgling company called Blogger that he got the idea for the site’s bloggier iteration, which launched in 2000. During that first year posts were authored almost exclusively by Frauenfelder, but he would soon be joined by a coterie of co-editors who are now all partial owners in the site: Cory Doctorow, a Wired contributor turned novelist and digital rights activist; Xeni Jardin, a journalist and NPR correspondent; and David Pescovitz, a researcher at the Institute for the Future (a fourth editor, Rob Beschizza, joined much later).

Its readership quickly grew. In a 2003 interview, Doctorow bragged that Boing Boing was receiving half a million pageviews a month. That number soon rose to several million. Hosting costs ballooned to about $1,000 a month, all paid out of pocket until the blog started accepting advertising in 2004. Within a few years, it was a seven-figure business.

So why was a blog that merely aggregated links, mostly to content pertaining to non-mainstream geek culture, so popular? To answer this question, one must first consider how the internet operated a decade ago. Back then, if you wanted to regularly read a news website or blog, you had basically two options.

The first was that you could subscribe to its RSS feed. RSS was a great tool (I still remember the epiphany I had when I signed up for Bloglines, an early RSS reader, and immediately grasped its utility). You could subscribe to as many blogs as you wanted, and rather than having to constantly reload each one to see if it had been updated, all new posts were delivered directly to your feed. In many cases, you didn’t even have to click away to read the entire post. But as great as RSS was, it had extremely low adoption rates, so much so that bloggers would hold an annual RSS Day to try to raise awareness that the functionality existed.

The second method, and by far the most common, was to simply bookmark the site in your browser. But this quickly became unwieldy once you bookmarked more than a dozen blogs, which meant that, despite the existence of millions of blogs by the mid-2000s, it was incredibly difficult for most of them to build a consistent readership.

Hence the utility of link blogs like Boing Boing. They became a major mode of discovery for more obscure blogs and content. Nearly all of these curation blogs — from Boing Boing to Slashdot to Laughing Squid — had some sort of submission form for artists and writers to submit their content. The lucky few who would get featured on these sites were rewarded with thousands of new readers (I had a blog back then and I would see between 2,000 and 5,000 visitors after receiving a Boing Boing link). Readers were happy because someone else was doing all the hard work of surfacing the best content.

You know what happened next. Facebook debuted its news feed and began allowing media organizations to launch their own pages. Twitter entered the scene with its own high-metabolism feed. Suddenly you could not only easily subscribe to blogs and news sites, but also to the individual authors who wrote for those sites. Where RSS failed to catch on, social media succeeded. Now, anyone could be a curator of content.

At the same time, mainstream news companies, which were starting to get serious about generating web traffic and wanted to attract shares from all these Twitter and Facebook users, began to ramp up their own aggregation. A journalism grad used to cut their teeth by starting at a weekly newspaper and then working their way up. These days, they’re just as likely to snag an entry level gig at a New York media company and spend their days repackaging GIFs and videos first surfaced on Reddit. This is why you’ll see upwards of 60 news sites posting the latest John Oliver rant every Monday. And these new curators weren’t as scrupulous about giving credit as their blogger ancestors.

“Many 22-year-old interns do not care about attribution,” said Scott Beale, the founder of Laughing Squid. “There’s no repercussion for them either. They’ll be at some media organization for six months, give no attribution, and then move on to the next job.” When they do give attribution, he said, it’s usually just a link to wherever they found the content, which often isn’t its original source. “We’ll actually do the research and track down a video or image to the person who created it and give them credit.”

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Laughing Squid, like Boing Boing, established itself as an early curation blog, focusing largely on art and geek culture. And as the independent blogosphere deteriorated and gave rise to social platforms and VC-funded news startups, Beale has tried to resist adopting traffic-boosting strategies that he feels would cheapen his blog posts. “The basic structure of our blog posts is essentially the same” he said. “If you look back at our oldest posts, you’re going to see the same things. Headlines have never been sensational. We don’t insult our readers’ intelligence. We don’t tell readers how to think or what to do. Take a look at the blog posts out there. How many of them use headlines that tell people that something ‘will restore your faith in humanity’? It’s a trick they use. We don’t do it and we never will. These things come and go — and they do all come and go — while we keep doing our thing.”

***

Boing Boing wasn’t resting on its laurels as this new internet emerged. As the blog entered the late aughts, it began to test out new offerings. It launched a gadgets vertical headed up by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. It debuted Boing Boing TV, a daily video show hosted by Xeni Jardin which did things like interview tech execs at the Consumer Electronics Show about the latest gadgets. The editors hosted a regular podcast, called Boing Boing Boing. Many of these projects were either shuttered or rolled back into the main site. “The videos were incredibly time intensive,” said Frauenfelder. “You get bogged down with post production, editing it, going on location. When you compare the number of views we got for a video to the traffic for blog posts and articles which cost us much less time and money, then it became clear that video wasn’t a good investment.”

The editors applied the same cost-benefit analysis to their podcast. “It was hard for us to actually get enough listeners to make it worth doing,” he said. “For a while our listener numbers weren’t being counted properly. We thought we were getting 50,000 to 100,000 listeners per episode, but really it was closer to 8,000 listeners per episode. Podcasting ads pay about $20 per thousand downloads, so making a couple hundred dollars to do a podcast that takes all together eight hours to create isn’t worth it when we could spend those eight hours doing text-based content.”

In 2014, on Boing Boing’s 25th anniversary, Rob Beschizza published a commemorating post on the site. In addition to promising a “renewed focus on original features,” he announced a new homepage design, one that would steer away from the reverse-chronological presentation that was the hallmark of most blogs and place more focus on featuring original content the editors didn’t want buried in the stream. This new Boing Boing, at least on the homepage, looked more like a magazine than what we would traditionally consider a blog. “We had been doing [curation] for so long,” said Frauenfelder. “It can get a little monotonous to do that nonstop, and original content was something that was personally rewarding for us.”

The blog still devotes significant space to shorter items. While the features and the aggregation posts draw about the same amount of traffic overall, Frauenfelder has given up trying to predict when a particular article or post will do well. “We could put a ton of work into a feature article we love and that we think is important, and it will get like 7,000 views. And then we’ll post something silly that’s a one-line joke and link to someone else’s story, and it’ll get 600,000 pageviews.”

One thing I wondered is why successful blogs like Boing Boing and Laughing Squid chose to stay small. Other early blogs like Huffington Post, Mashable, and Gigaom took on VC investment in their efforts to scale. Even Gawker’s Nick Denton, who long resisted outside investment, recently sold a sizable chunk of equity. “Sure we could get investment if we wanted it,” said Beale. “But we see companies destroyed by it too. You give up a lot of control and then there are demands put on you by people who don’t know anything about your company.” He pointed to Gigaom, a tech site that ran out of money and laid off its entire staff last year, as an example of what happens when a media company can’t scale at a rate that would satisfy investors.

Frauenfelder was similarly disdainful of the idea. “We were just paying bandwidth out of pocket before we started selling ads, and then we became profitable right off the bat in 2004,” he said. “We’ve never been interested in getting funding to grow it in a big way like those sites because it’s just not sustainable. There’s no way they’re making enough money from advertising to pay whatever their burn rate is. There’s an obscene amount of money they have to pay for their office space and salaries. We all work in our home offices and spare bedrooms, and everyone makes a living on the advertising income we bring in. I am just looking at these huge companies that rely on a lot of VC money, and they’re unsustainable, artificial things, and they’re going to die off.”

If they do die off, they’ll end up in a graveyard alongside the millions of tiny blogs that have shut down over the past decade as users migrated to social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Sure, some will find homes on Medium or Tumblr, but many bloggers these days don’t feel the need to go beyond the 140 characters afforded to them. As for the remaining holdouts, those writers who continue to pen screeds at their own obscure web domains, bloggers like Frauenfelder and Beale will continue to scroll through their feeds looking for the nuggets worth featuring to a larger audience. “At some point I just really realized there aren’t very many independent blogs left,” said Beale. “The more obscure ones that I subscribe to on RSS, they’ll just suddenly announce that they’re stopping and can’t do it anymore.” Meanwhile, Facebook just announced it’s reached 1.59 billion users. The blogosphere is dead, long live the blogosphere.

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

Image via Mark Frauenfelder

How this blogger became one of the most influential voices in tech policy

Mike Masnick

In May 2003, the legal website The Smoking Gun posted a short item titled “Barbra Sues Over Aerial Photos.” Kenneth Adelman, an environmentalist who takes aerial photographs of California’s coastline for the benefit of scientists and researchers, had inadvertently captured an image of singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s home. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleged that by posting the image to his website, Adelman had provided a “road map into her residence” and “clearly [identified] those routes that could be used to enter her property.” On page 9 of the lawsuit it states that “there is no telling how many people have downloaded the photograph of [Streisand’s] property and residence on their computer.”

In the coming weeks it would emerge that, up until the lawsuit was filed, the image of Streisand’s house had only been accessed six times, two of which were by her lawyers. And because of the engendered press from the lawsuit, it was then visited more than 420,000 times in just the first month after it was filed. Not only did Streisand later lose the lawsuit, but it had produced the very result her lawyers had set out to avoid: drawing attention to her property.

The entire imbroglio, humorous as it was, may have ended up a mostly-forgotten historical footnote if not for a seemingly unrelated incident that occurred two years later. A website called Urinals.net, which posts user-generated photos of urinals, had received a legal complaint from the Marco Beach Ocean Resort claiming that, because Urinals.net had mentioned the resort’s name in one of its photos, it had infringed on the company’s trademark. Mike Masnick, a blogger who covers issues dealing with intellectual property, wrote about the complaint on Techdirt, a website he’s run since the late 90s. At the end of the post, which is only a few hundred words long, Masnick reached this seemingly innocuous conclusion:

How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.

Masnick didn’t realize it at the time, but he had just coined a term that would continue to endure to this day. On the neologism’s 10th anniversary last year, Gizmodo commemorated the event by documenting the most egregious examples of the Streisand Effect in action — examples that included the Church of Scientology trying to suppress an embarrassing video and Beyonce’s attempts to remove unflattering photos of herself from the internet.

Few of us ever get the chance to coin a phrase, much less one that enters the popular lexicon. The reason this one didn’t get lost in the ephemera of the internet is that Masnick by that point had spent more than half a decade establishing himself as a must-read source on all things tech policy. Whether it’s intellectual property, telecom and broadband policy, or digital rights, Techdirt has been at the forefront of these issues, covering them with a brand of fiery opinionated journalism that has made him no shortage of enemies. If there’s a consistent theme to be found in his work, it’s that large technology and media companies often wield their power to benefit themselves at the expense of consumers, and it’s only by shining a light on their abusive behavior that it can be stopped.

In recent years, Masnick has been one of the most prominent figures in a growing activist movement that advocates for digital rights issues ranging from net neutrality to open source technology. Most importantly, he played an instrumental role in the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short), a bill introduced in 2011 that was broadly supported by the media and entertainment industries. As Marvin Ammori, a lawyer who advocates on internet freedom issues, put it to me, “I’m not sure anyone did more to educate the public about SOPA than Techdirt.”

***

In its earliest iteration, Techdirt didn’t go by that name, nor was it even a website. In 1996, Masnick enrolled in Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management to obtain an MBA. “I was on the East Coast in the middle of nowhere, not near a major city or anything,” he told me. “I was hoping to get a job in the technology field after graduating, and I thought that actually writing about current events in technology from a business perspective would help me in getting a day job.” At the time, he was a big admirer of an irreverent UK newsletter called Need to Know, and so the newsletter he launched, called Up to Date, adopted a similar approach. “It technically started as the newsletter for the technology management club at the my business school,” he said. “I had been elected the president of that club, so that gave me an audience of 75 business school students. And with the first newsletter I put a little note at the bottom that said, ‘If you’d like to subscribe, send me an email.’”

Within three weeks, Masnick had over a thousand subscribers, and for the first seven or eight months it was simply a newsletter he sent roughly once a week. At some point, he decided it should be a website, so he spent much of his last semester in business school teaching himself how to build one. This is around the same time he became obsessed with Slashdot, the tech forum that is now considered one of the earliest blogs. After settling on the name Techdirt, he and a friend tried to install the open source code that Slashdot’s editors had released, called Slashcode Version 0.3. “It was a mess,” he said. “A friend and I took it and we spent months trying to get it to work, and we finally got it working in early 1999.”

Though not exactly a mirror image of what it is today, the early Techdirt still explored many of the themes that would later form the bedrock of its current worldview. Masnick became close to a grad school professor of his, Alan McAdams, who had served as senior staff economist with President Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers and provided witness testimony for the government in United States v. IBM. “He was ahead of his time,” he recalled. “This was ‘95 or ‘96, and he was really interested in open source and what that meant for the economics of software. He was very focused on broadband implementation and talking about getting fiber to the home applied universally.” Today, we call this broadband universal service, and it’s an achievement for which nearly every developed country strives.

I find it interesting how many of the earliest blogging pioneers, some of whom are now household names, didn’t consider themselves early adopters when they first started writing for the web. John Gruber, the writer behind the tech blog Daring Fireball, said recently that “when I got started in 2002 I had this sinking feeling in my heart that I was just way too late to the game.” Daily Kos, which is known as one of the earliest netroots political blogs, debuted a half decade after the term “weblog” was first coined. Similarly, Masnick thought by the time Techdirt hit the web in 1999 all the important tech policy issues had been dealt with. “The original encryption wars had already happened before we started. The DMCA” — Digital Millennium Copyright Act — “was already in place before we started. The Communications Decency Act was already done before we started. So I felt like I’d missed many of the big important things.”

He was wrong. The early 2000s would see the rise of the Michael Powell administration at the FCC and consumers trading in their phone lines for broadband internet. The internet’s transformation to Web 2.0 — first coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 — produced a Cambrian explosion of new content as millions of internet users suddenly gained access to publishing platforms that required no coding skills and were free to use. Network neutrality. Comcast v. BitTorrent. Viacom v. YouTube. SOPA. Smartphone adoption. CISPA. All had the potential to drastically shape how we use the internet for decades to come and all were aggressively covered by Techdirt.

It was in 2000 that Masnick first tried to turn Techdirt into a sustainable business. After grad school he’d moved out to Silicon Valley, and while there it dawned on him that many of these companies would benefit from the kind of analysis he was performing on his blog. “We called it Techdirt Corporate Intelligence,” he explained. “We helped companies better understand the issues we were covering. We were basically writing mini Techdirts for those companies — just writing a newsletter about different news and events that might impact our clients’ businesses.”

For several years, the corporate intelligence offerings were the only method by which Techdirt made money. In 2005, however, the site experienced a sudden explosion in traffic, and a year later it was able to diversify its revenue with ads. This was around the time Masnick began to revisit the very idea of what it meant to be a blogger. “For the first few years on the blog, I had this really stupid rule that I struck to that every post had to be only a single paragraph,” he said. “I couldn’t really dig in. It was only a few years in when I was like, you know, there’s no reason for this artificial limitation, and I can clearly write more.”

This new Techdirt began to cover issues in more depth, and those alarmed by abuses from ISPs, telecom companies, and patent trolls would turn to the blog as a tool for exposing these abuses, in some ways making Masnick a kind of unofficial spokesman for this burgeoning activist community. In 2009, the U.K. government proposed new legislation that would install a “three strike policy” and restrict repeat offenders of online piracy from accessing the internet. The singer Lily Allen then launched a blog, called It’s Not All Right, in support of the Digital Economy Act, and its chief aim was to shame online pirates. But shortly after the blog went live, Masnick was informed by one of his readers that Allen had reprinted, in full, one of his Techdirt articles without attribution, and he took to the web to point out her seeming hypocrisy. His blog post ricocheted around the internet, forcing Allen to dash off a quick apology. But then, two days later, another Techdirt reader alerted Masnick to a much more explosive example of hypocrisy: For years, Allen had been uploading “mix tapes” full of other artists’ work without their permission. The resultant ridicule was so fierce that Allen quickly deleted all her blog posts and announced she would no longer participate in the debate.

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That same year, Masnick traveled to Cannes, France to speak at a music industry conference about new business models for artists. The 15-minute presentation, the video of which was uploaded to the web, focused on Nine Inch Nails singer Trent Reznor and how he ditched his record label to experiment with several (ultimately successful) methods to get his fans to pay for otherwise free music. Though Masnick wasn’t the first person to highlight business models that rely on distributing free content, the speech struck a nerve and was covered by hundreds or blogs and news publications around the world (later that year, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, a book by then-Wired editor Chris Anderson, debuted on the New York Times despite being distributed for free online).

By the turn of the decade, Techdirt was a central repository for all news relating to tech policy, and Masnick was one of the most prominent figures in a growing but-still-mostly-unorganized movement that cared fervently about issues relating to digital rights. And thus he was perfectly positioned in 2011 when House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar S. Smith, a Republican from Texas, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act with 12 co-sponsors, four of whom were Democrats. The next day, Masnick published his first post about the bill, titled “E-PARASITE Bill: ‘The End Of The Internet As We Know It’” He would go on to write over 520 more.

***

For those who opposed SOPA, those early days after the bill was first introduced were grim.

Marvin Ammori served as general counsel for Free Press, an organization that advocates for net neutrality and other open internet issues, from 2007 to 2010 before leaving to teach law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He decided he didn’t enjoy teaching very much, however, and moved back to DC to launch his own law practice focusing on internet freedom. Since then he’s worked with pro-net neutrality coalitions, large tech companies like Google and Apple, and Engine Advocacy, a pro-startup organization. As the SOPA battle began to heat up, Ammori told me, he spoke to one of his contacts who worked in the Judiciary Committee. “They told me point blank that there was no way we were going to win on SOPA,” he recalled. “It’s clearly going to pass. There are 40 co-sponsors in the Senate. At the same time, my friends in Silicon Valley were getting calls from their friends in Hollywood saying you guys have to back off on SOPA, we’re going to win, there’s no way we’re going to lose this one.”

But by this point Techdirt and a growing number of tech blogs, many of which typically didn’t spend much time writing about policy, were providing drumbeat coverage of every new development relating to the bill, and there were signs that a seemingly arcane piece of legislation that wouldn’t normally generate much interest outside of the Beltway was attracting notice from a growing number of Americans. Within weeks, a coalition of major tech companies that included Facebook, Twitter, and eBay had come out against the bill, and soon you began to see political movements ranging from the libertarian Right to the liberal Left announcing their opposition.

Suddenly, anti-SOPA stories were appearing almost daily on the front page of Reddit and as trending topics on Twitter. More often than not, those posts linked back to Techdirt articles. “After SOPA failed, a Harvard Law Professor named Yochai Benkler wrote an analysis of the SOPA fight,” said Ammori. “And it was really the story of Techdirt. Things would pop up in different blogs and Masnick would give it attention and then the eyeballs were moving in whichever direction Techdirt was sending them.”

Ammori argued that Masnick has found success because he managed to run a tech policy blog that didn’t read like a tech policy blog. “Being able to explain arcane legal and technological issues to a blog audience is not easy,” he said. “Doing it day in and day out on lots of different issues is something he’s able to do, and I think no one else has been able to do it quite as well.”

“I read Techdirt every day, sometimes several times a day,” Corynne McSherry told me. “And I think everybody in this space relies on Techdirt regularly.” McSherry is the legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, litigating free speech issues against what she refers to as “copyright maximalists.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, is likely the most well-funded and visible organization that fights on digital rights issues, and during her decade there McSherry has watched as the movement has gradually matured into what it is today. “I feel like there’s been a sea change,” she argued. “DC remains difficult to engage with if you’re not inside the beltway, and while it’s still true that lots of negotiations and discussions and horse trading go on behind closed doors, I do think Congress is more aware than they used to be that there could be a massive public outcry that they would have to deal with.”

Case in point: On December 15, 2011, the House held a hearing to address several of the issues raised against SOPA. As recounted in The Fight for the Future: How People Defeated Hollywood and Saved the Internet – For Now, the book by Edward Lee:

Reddit, the news-linking social network, put a link on its home page to the live stream of the markup from the House Judiciary Committee website. Reddit’s link helped to drive a great deal of traffic to the Judiciary Committee website, making the markup one of the most watched in recent memory. It was a spectacle…

…Far from being open to compromise, the sponsors of SOPA appeared to be digging in their heels. They rejected nearly every amendment that was offered to provide more due process to protect against erroneous claims. EFF live-tweeted the entire markup, while Techdirt live-blogged it. The hearings were a complete spectacle, in a frightening way.

The bill didn’t die that day, but it was clear the tides had turned. What may have been the final death blow occurred on January 18, 2012 when Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of other websites participated in an internet “blackout” in which their websites became inaccessible save for anti-SOPA messages:

Two days later, the New York Times reported that Congress was shelving the bill. Congressional leaders vowed to one day return to it, but this was a clear victory for opponents. “The Internet Wins” declared a Techdirt headline. Never one to rest on its laurels, the blog continued to publish six more posts about the bill that very same day.

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With the benefit of four years of hindsight, it seems clear that the SOPA victory signaled a legitimate shift in power. In early 2015, after more than a decade of internet advocacy for net neutrality, the FCC classified broadband providers under the same regulations that govern telephone networks, thereby allowing the agency to ban blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. After years of successful lobbying, telecom and cable companies had definitively lost the fight.

That’s not to say Masnick feels his work is done. He still posts about new efforts to resurrect SOPA. Techdirt still covers issues with copyright abuse and defends encryption technology. He now has a team of freelance bloggers who help him produce dozens of posts a day, and, unlike most other news sites on the web that are seeing fewer homepage visits as more and more of their traffic comes from places like Facebook and Twitter, Techdirt saw its ratio of direct traffic rise from 30 percent in 2014 to 38 percent in 2015 (“direct” traffic is usually a sign of a more loyal readership). Yet Masnick still runs his blog with the same mindset as when it was just a newsletter sent to 75 business school students:

“I kind of operate under the assumption that nobody sees what I write,” he said. He recalled his days working at his college radio station. “There’s this interesting thing when you’re on radio and you’re speaking into a microphone out into the world, and you have no idea if anyone is listening. And so I always went under the assumption that nobody was. To some extent my blogging has been sort of the same way. I just assume nobody is reading, and I’m a little surprised when anyone does.”

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

Image via Dennis Yang

How novelists are monetizing their short fiction through Patreon

Speculative fiction writer Kameron Hurley

Tim Pratt cut his teeth writing short fiction. The science fiction and fantasy author spends most of his days now working on novels — his website bibliography says he published three in 2015 alone — but a little over a decade ago, when he was still in the early stages of his writing career, he would regularly write short stories for small zines with names like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. In 2004, a short story he wrote for a small press anthology was chosen by Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon to be reprinted in the annual Best American Short Stories, which is arguably one of the most prestigious and venerable anthologies for short fiction. This feat was especially impressive when you consider the fact that the anthology series has historically printed very little genre fiction. “I’m a competent novelist,” Pratt told me in a phone interview. “I’m getting better. But I’m a really good short story writer.”

So why did he abandon the format to focus mainly on longform fiction? The answer boils down to economics. There are few publications that publish short fiction and fewer still that pay well. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, a trade organization for genre writers, considers a “professional” rate for short fiction to be 6 cents per word (any freelancer will readily tell you this is nothing close to a living wage). Major New York publishers are reluctant to publish short fiction collections, mostly because they don’t sell very well, so it’s common to see even established authors turn to the small press when they want to publish short stories. “It got to the point where most of my time went toward writing novels,” Pratt said. “I would still occasionally write short stories, but only when I was commissioned by an editor to write for a themed anthology or special issue. That’s cool and I like doing that, and for a while I thought that was a way I could keep my hand in, but the thing is, almost all of those have some sort of restriction; for a themed anthology I might have to write a story that’s Lovecraftian or one that involves robots. I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they’d go.”

Tim Pratt

But then several months ago Pratt noticed that more and more artists he knew of were signing up for a site called Patreon. The platform was co-founded in 2013 by Jack Conte, a well-known YouTube musician who struggled to make a living on YouTube ads and wanted to develop a way for an artist to leverage their fan base for financial support. Unlike Kickstarter, which is geared primarily toward raising a lump sum of money for one-off projects, Patreon allows fans to provide ongoing support for creators who regularly produce new work. There are two forms of “patronage” on Patreon: a fan can either pay a certain amount per month or per artistic creation. The site simply charges the agreed-upon amount to the person’s credit card. Many YouTubers, for instance, configure it so their fans pay a set amount per new video.

Though it has nowhere near the scale of larger crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Patreon has seen growing adoption among indie artists and creators; it’s particularly popular with YouTubers and podcasters who use it to supplement their advertising income. One of its most high profile users, the singer and artist Amanda Palmer, launched a campaign in 2015 and today generates over $31,000 per “thing” from 6,300 patrons. In a 2014 blog post, Patreon announced that its patrons were paying out over $1 million a month to creators, and that figure has likely grown significantly since then.

Pratt had already seen some success funding his novels on Kickstarter (I wrote about his efforts back in 2011), so he figured Patreon might provide an opportunity to create short fiction regularly and fund it with a steady stream of income. “I tried to consider how much time I could devote and I figured I could probably write a story every month,” he said. “I could find a weekend or take a break from other projects.” So he launched his Patreon account and blasted it out to his email list and social media followers. Right now, he has 121 patrons who pay roughly $536 per story, which is about what he would be paid from an anthology or magazine. “Now, I’m once again carrying around a notebook and jotting down ideas that occur to me,” he said. “And now I have enough short story ideas to last me for a couple more years.”

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If this model becomes more widespread, then it could significantly alter the cost-benefit analysis that any author applies to writing short fiction. Kameron Hurley, a speculative fiction writer who has published five novels and won two Hugo awards, is constantly inundated with requests from her fans for new short stories. “There is no money in short fiction,” she told me in a phone interview. “You’ll spend 30 or 40 hours on a short story, and you’ll get paid $200. It’s just not worth your while. People would ask me, ‘Hey Kameron, why don’t you write more short fiction?’ Well, short stories were a nice way to get my name out there in the early 2000s, but then I realized I’m getting $200 for an incredible amount of work. I started doing a lot of copywriting work, and I charge $90 an hour for copywriting. If you look at the costs and benefits, you realize writing short stories doesn’t have any financial benefit and it doesn’t make sense.”

So when Hurley launched her Patreon page in 2015, she had one goal: “My bare minimum was $500,” she said. “If I could get that much for a story, and if I could resell it as a reprint or as an original to the short fiction markets, you’re starting to make something that resembles a fair wage.” One reason she found Patreon to be particularly appealing was that the reward fulfillment is easy; you simply provide the piece of short fiction your subscribers are paying for (it’s become quite common for those who have completed successful Kickstarter campaigns to complain that they underestimated the time and money that would go into fulfilling all the reward tiers they set). Whenever Hurley is ready to publish a new story, she simply uploads multiple versions — PDF, EPUB, and MOBI — to Patreon, and it alerts her subscribers so they can download it. While there are more involved rewards if you pay more (for $25 per short story you get one printed chapbook mailed to you per year), she doesn’t anticipate the fulfilment to be too onerous.

Before launching her campaign, Hurley polled her fans (she calls her followers “Hurley’s Heroes”) to ask whether they’d rather pay a certain amount per month or per new piece of work; they chose the latter. So she put together a short PowerPoint video explaining the project and then began promoting it on her social channels. Though she generated a few subscribers from Facebook, Tumblr, and her website, Hurley got most of her traction from Twitter, where she has over 6,000 followers; whenever someone new would subscribe they’d often announce it to their own Twitter following, and it snowballed from there. “We hit $500 within a week, and $800 within three weeks,” she said. “After the first story dropped it jumped up to $1,200, and it’s now up to $1,600.” About half of the 340 subscribers pay the bare minimum of $1 a month. The rest pay $3 or higher, with over 60 patrons paying more than $10 a story.

What does this mean in practical (read: monetary) terms? “It’s meant I can turn down some freelance copywriting jobs,” she explained. “Instead of writing marketing emails or website copy, I just spend my time writing stories, which is what i really want to do. So that’s how it changed my day-to-day life.”

One question that has yet to be definitively answered is whether a short story uploaded to Patreon should be considered “published.” Though the $500 Pratt receives every time he uploads a short story is comparable to what he’d get from a magazine or anthology, the story is only seen by the 120 patrons who subscribe, and he’d ideally like it to reach a larger audience. But not all short fiction publications take reprints, and even those that do often pay significantly less for them. “Some are a little more open to it, saying if it’s a sufficiently small audience, we’ll still pay for it,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t worry about it that much, because I’m getting $500 for the story anyway at this point, so if I’m going to get paid less, that’s fine.” In 2014, a writer named Andrea Phillips polled several magazine editors as to whether a Patreon story would be considered published, and most said that it would. At the time we spoke, Pratt said a magazine editor was considering publishing one of his Patreon stories as a reprint

Before you set out to launch your own short fiction Patreon campaign, first take note that the two writers I profiled here were already established prior to setting up their own. “It is certainly easier to attract a crowd if you already have a crowd,” said Pratt. “Even when people already know who you are, crowdfunding is still tricky. This is probably not a great way to build an audience.” Hurley agreed: “The people who do the best do tend to be the folks who have some sort of following,” she said. “They’re a blogger, a writer, a musician. They already have a core audience who they can go to and who will help socialize it for them.”

And though Patreon has had a not insignificant impact on their incomes, both Pratt and Hurley agreed that it should remain just one of many irons to have in the fire. “Whenever I talk to people who ask about freelance writing, the first thing I tell them is to have multiple revenue streams,” said Pratt. “Do not have just one editor who likes you. Don’t just write for one magazine or one company. Because things are going to go away. So for me, [Patreon] is just one more thing. When you combine this, novel sales, editing gigs, and freelance work, all these little trickles add up to helping me keep a roof over my head and food on my family’s table.” But even if the pay is supplemental, it’s brought these writers one step closer to a career many aspire to but never achieve: making up stories for money.

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com

Images via roundtablepodcast.com and fantasy-magazine.com

How I leveraged my journalism skills for a career in content marketing

From time to time I’ll be speaking to someone I’ve never met before, and the “What do you?” question comes up. I’ve always struggled to answer. If I tell the person I’m a journalist, then invariably the next question is, “What publication do you work for?” Simply telling people I work in marketing could mean a variety of things depending on how familiar the person is with that industry. Well, though I haven’t thought up a more concise way to sum up my career, I now at least have an article I can point them to that discusses it at length. MediaShift asked me to write a first-person essay on how I leveraged my journalism skills for a career in content marketing. Here is the end result:

Why Freelance Journalists are Shifting Their Careers to Content Marketing

Silicon Valley once steered clear of original content. What changed?

By the time news outlets began reporting that Apple is actively negotiating with Hollywood executives to produce exclusive programming for its fledgling television platform, none of us seemed surprised that a major tech company would invest so much money in original content.

If anything, Apple is late to the party. In 2011, Netflix, which until then had been just a tech platform that allowed one to stream already-released movies and old seasons of television shows, plopped hundreds of millions of dollars into the creation of premium shows, greenlighting them before even seeing a pilot. Amazon wasn’t far behind, launching a bevy of shows to mixed reviews. In 2012, YouTube shelled out $100 million to both lure established media companies onto its platform and allow its already-existing stars to up their games. These days, not a week goes by without a major tech company announcing a major content play, whether it’s Yahoo’s resurrection of the show Community or Facebook’s offering of huge advances to YouTube stars in order to entice them onto its native video platform. Twitter recently attempted to purchase the millennial news site Mic, and prominent venture capitalists have bought huge stakes in companies like BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox, valuing these news outlets in the billions of dollars.

Viewing all this activity, it’s hard to believe that, a mere decade ago, the tech sector considered original content anathema to everything it stood for, a vestigial hangover from the days when the barrier to entry for content production and distribution was relatively high and therefore lucrative.

Circa 2007 – 2008, the practice of creating original content seemed to be a dying profession. The music industry had been completely eviscerated in the wake of Napster and other file-sharing programs. Newspapers were well into their decline, already kneecapped by Craigslist and facing a print advertising exodus. Magazines weren’t far behind them. The book industry, while not exactly suffering, wasn’t thriving either, with most sales coalescing into a handful of conglomerates who were already bracing themselves to have their asses handed to them by Amazon. The television industry seemed relatively sturdy but most assumed its day of reckoning would eventually come.

This is when we saw the rise of platforms that were fueled primarily by user generated content. First Myspace, and then later Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Media companies that were suffering looked at Keyboard Cat and assumed that this was the future of content, and Silicon Valley didn’t seem to disagree. Original content was expensive and difficult to scale effectively; why hire 60 journalists to create content when you could spend that money on 30 engineers who would then build a platform on which millions of users would generate content for free?

So what changed? Why are we seeing the sudden emphasis on premium programming in a world where everyone with a GoPro seems willing to upload their videos for no payment?

Well, it turns out that original content actually is scalable, particularly when it’s hosted on the right tech platform. Netflix just announced in July that it had reached 65 million subscribers, a number that would have been difficult to attain when it was merely licensing reruns, especially as other low-cost streaming services have entered the market. And sure, it’s possible that your amateur video of cat could hit the viral stratosphere, but most don’t, whereas YouTube stars can guarantee millions of views for each video posted. The majority of BuzzFeed listicles reach at least a million views, which means that your average BuzzFeed staffer can reach an audience that’s similar in size to The Daily Show’s.

And though viewers have flocked to user-generated content, advertisers still prefer premium programming, especially if it attracts hard-to-reach demographics. The critically-acclaimed USA Network show Mr. Robot only attracts about 3 million viewers per episode, a mediocre turnout when compared to the network’s other hit shows, but it’s having to beat away advertisers with a stick. “It’s a hot property right now,” network president Chris McCumber told New York Magazine. “We have more demand than we can handle for Mr. Robot, and it’s bringing in new advertisers.” And with brands increasingly shifting budgets toward native advertising and away from display, it suddenly behooves tech platforms to have in-house content expertise.

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Finally, tech companies have discovered that exclusive content is a great way to lock users into a platform. A decade ago, there were only a handful of social networks that had the millions of users needed to effectively scale user generated content. Now let’s consider the number of platforms today that have at least 50 million active users: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Foursquare, YouTube, Flipboard. I’m likely just scratching the surface.

We now have dozens of networks competing for our attention, and our loyalty to any one platform is tenuous at best. Exclusive content, even if it makes up a relatively small percentage of the content posted to the platform, gives us that much more incentive to choose one platform over the other. Medium, the blogging platform launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, employed this strategy well when it hired top-tier freelance journalists to write on its network before opening it up to the masses (I and call this the “mullet strategy”). Of course, nobody has capitalized on this approach better than Netflix, which is now spending north of $700 million on content you can’t watch without a Netflix subscription.

The question now is how traditional media companies, many of which have been producing original content for decades, will respond. Already we’re starting to seeing seismic shifts in the media landscape, whether it’s HBO launching a standalone app or magazines like Forbes transforming themselves into platforms. News companies are also inking content distribution deals on platforms like Facebook and Flipboard with promises of revenue sharing.

Perhaps the late David Carr was right when he said, in 2012, that “big news is still the killer app,” by which he meant original content. Given how much we keep hearing about the current “golden age of television” and the rise of millennial-focused news companies that are reaching billion dollar valuations, I can’t help but agree. A new dawn is upon us, and if you’re a content producer like myself, then take a few moments to rejoice.

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Recruiting on LinkedIn? 4 things you should stop doing immediately

If you have a profile on LinkedIn and have taken the time to upload your résumé and list all your technical skillsets, then chances are you receive somewhat regular inquiries from recruiters who have leveraged the social network’s premium services to seek out possible job candidates. What makes LinkedIn such a revolutionary platform is that it gives you access to millions of working professionals who might not be actively seeking new employment but are still open to new opportunities. Prior to LinkedIn’s launch, a recruiter needed to rely purely on word-of-mouth to locate these kinds of candidates, but now it’s a simple matter of typing in a few keywords and a geographic location.

I’m one of those people who isn’t actively seeking new employment — I’m a self-employed consultant — but I’m always open to hearing about new positions as you never know when a potential dream job could land in your lap. And so that’s why I’m generally warm to recruiters who show up in my inbox, even if the job for which they’re approaching me isn’t a good fit. I’ve even taken the time to connect a recruiter to someone I think would be a better candidate.

What I have less and less patience for are the growing number of recruiters who have flooded LinkedIn and cast wide nets without conducting the preliminary research needed to determine whether the person they’re reaching out to would be even remotely interested — or qualified — for a position. These recruiters simply type keywords into LinkedIn’s search field and will contact dozens of users at a time, often without taking more than a cursory look at those users’ resumes.

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So if you’re a recruiter who wants to leverage LinkedIn to flesh out your list of candidates, here’s what you should avoid doing:

Requesting a résumé

I often have recruiters reach out to me and then, after I’ve expressed interest in hearing more about a position, ask me to send them my résumé. To which my incredulous response is always: “But you found me through my résumé. Why am I sending you a document you’ve presumably already looked at?” I understand that once you’re ready to introduce me to a client then you’ll want a better-formatted version that you can hand over, but there’s no reason I should have to spend an hour updating my résumé before I can even learn about the position.

Reaching out to candidates before reading their résumés

There’s a lot more to a job candidate than just his résumé; otherwise why would you even bother with the job interview process? But the résumé is a good starting document for determining whether someone is a potential good fit. So why do I find myself getting on the phone with recruiters only to learn the position they’re recruiting for is aimed at someone with only two or three years experience when it’s quite clear from my LinkedIn résumé that I’ve been out of college for a decade?

Being vague about a position

I understand you want to protect your commission and avoid anyone going around you to get the job for which you’re recruiting, but being all cloak and dagger about who the employer is just ends up wasting my time and yours.

Ghosting

It’s not just for dating. Apparently recruiters love to reach out to a person, ask them for a good time and phone number to discuss a position, and then never reply again once the person offers up his availability. I can’t think of anything more unprofessional than proactively emailing someone about a job and then never bothering to reply when that person is kind enough to email you back.

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This isn’t just about common professional courtesy. Just because a candidate isn’t a good fit for a particular position doesn’t mean she won’t be interested in future jobs for which you’re recruiting. So if you send a person an email and show not even a modicum of professionalism, how likely is it that that candidate will respond to your future inquiries? Not likely at all.

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