#it’s a way for tumblr to profit at the expense of its users | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

britcision · 9 months

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I’m pretty sure the people bitching about not giving money to tumblr are the same ones who complain when AO3 or wikipedia ask for donations, so I’m just gonna clarify something

Running a website is not free

Even if they made no changes and did only maintenance, they still need to pay for server costs, expert programmers for when something goes wrong, storage (although frankly storage is cheap as chips these days which is nice)

They need to keep up with the capabilities of new tech like improvements to web browsers, never mind their own apps keeping pace with old and new tech developments

Backwards compatibility (being able to run the updated app on old tech) is a massive problem for apps on a regular basis, because there are people out here using an iPod and refusing to update software

There’s a reason every few years apps like Animal Crossing will issue an update that breaks backwards compatibility and you can only play if your phone is running more recent software

This shit costs money even before you look into the costs of human moderation, which I’m not exactly convinced is a big part of their current budget but fucking should be if we want an actual fix for their issues with unscreened ads and reporting bigots

Ignoring that it’s apparently illegal for companies not to actively chase profits, running Tumblr is expensive

And advertisers know we fucking hate them here

They’re still running ads, which we know because they’re all over the damn place, but half the ads are for Tumblr and its store

Other ad companies know we are not a good market, so they’re not willing to put the money in

Tumblr runs at a $30 million deficit, every year, because hosting a site is expensive

They are trying to take money making ideas from other social medias because they’re not a charity; they need to make enough money to keep the site going

If you want tumblr to keep existing, never mind fixing its many issues that require human people to be paid to do jobs like moderation, they will need money

Crabs cost $3

One crab day a year can fix the deficit and hammer home for Tumblr that:

A) we do want to be here and want the site to keep going

And B) they do not need to do the normal social media money making strategies we all hate

They need a way to make money if you want the hellsite to exist, because we live in a capitalist hellscape and cannot all be AO3

If they think they can make enough to keep running without pulling all the tricks we hate, they have no reason to pull said tricks

But they need money

And a way to make money

And if we can show them we can do that, there is a significantly higher chance they will listen to us, the user base they need money from, than if we don’t

Tumblr isn’t perfect, or anywhere close. They need someone to actually screen the paid ads they put through, they need to take the transphobia, antisemitism, and bigotry seriously

These Are Jobs That Will Cost Money

People Need To Be Fucking Paid For Their Work

Tumblr Is Not Run By Volunteers For Free And Nor Should It Be

Paying People Is Good Actually

So if you wanna get all high and mighty over $3/year, by all means, go spend that hard earned cash elsewhere

Good luck finding a perfect and morally pure business to give it to though

Being a whiny negative asshole isn’t more appealing just because you’ve put yourself on a moral soapbox, it just means the asshole is a little higher up

For all the whining about “all the new updates are terrible this site is unusable”…. It’s one fuck of a lot more usable than it was in 2017, 2018, 2020

And yeah, it’s going back down and most of the newer ones have been fucking annoying and I would also like them to stop

But it got up somehow and that means it could do that again

Hope is more fun than edgy nihilism

August 1st is a good and exciting day to summon a crab army

#tumblr #crab day #fuck if i know what a profitable plan for tumblr as is will look like #since half the user base are entitled assholes who think they shouldn’t pay for less than perfection #and tumblr themselves are entitled assholes who think $5/month is a good base proce #motherfuckers would have so many more people if it was $2-3 #totally not paying $5/month for this shit #but $3/year? yeah that’s okay

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possumcollege · 2 years

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I don't like tumblr's new marketing voice. It's that vaguely antagonistic internet strategy of "this'll be just cringe enough that people hating on it are going to drive engagement through the roof!"

Pikachu guy is a calculated choice. They know their users well enough to know most folks on here are either going to hate on it in posts, or throw a few bucks their way to be rid of him.

Their ads for premium are condescending and openly acknowledge that the choice they made was to profit at the expense of user experience. It's a disingenuous "Hey buddy! UGH, this sucks but you know how it is and it's not like any of us have a choice so just give us money or make friends with this firehose of ads!" This is in no way surprising, since every major change the leadership makes has been a demonstrable flop to protect our enrich themselves. Nuking the sites of very talented and creative people, or TOS censoring them into oblivion on moral grounds, punishes very active and progressive users while doing nothing to combat hate speech, misogyny, transphobia, radicalization, or threatening content.

Every thing I like about tumblr is a fingerprint of the people using the site, in spite of its flawed management. The communities I've seen growing here, the voluntary adoption of tags and warnings to support and validate vulnerable or marginalized people have made this place much more functional for me than other socials. The ability to curate the user experience that the algorithm provides does help expand one's horizons, but most of the new material I've found here was through users reposting or sharing things they love.

I know this can happen through other socials as well but sites like FB are so dry-rotten from lack of accountability and data-mining saturation that trying to filter out the ads uses more mental energy that actually socializing. The Twit's feed format is HELL for my adhd. Its popularity and accessibility paired with its dogshit moderation attracts so many predatory bad actors that climbing over trolls turns it into a crab bucket of voices, where some of the most energetic users are just there to grief and own strangers in a public forum.

This is all just what the internet is becoming. I'm totally just shouting into the void here, and it reinforces my drive to make more meaningful creative connections offline. Sites like this are really important for people without the resources to advertise, they help make connections with other creators, and help us find new audiences, but the crass and obtrusive ways they interact with their user base are dead frustrating. When they shelter the trolls and cultivate shitposting above enabling creators they're just melting into the toxic mass of sites whose mask of community building barely hides a ravenous drive to convert our desire to socialize into advertizing and data-mining revenue.

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astraltrickster · 11 months

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Honestly Discourse about whether tumblr is a Good Platform or a Bad Platform drives me up a wall because...

Imo on the modern internet there IS no such thing as a Good Platform(TM), especially not at tumblr's scale or higher, BUT tumblr is the closest we have at this scale.

See, all these things can be simultaneously true:

1) Social media moderation has an ingrained right-wing bias, and this is likely to remain true even if the staff is somehow vetted to all be Educated Leftists, because of how it is structured and the ways right-wingers are wont to abuse that structure - they tend to stalk and report-spam people they dislike until either an automated system flags their target or their report lands on the desk of someone who's either sympathetic to their "cause", assuming that if something totally innocuous got reported there MUST be context that makes it Bad, just mindlessly clicking through their queue because whatever they get paid either way, or just having a moment where they might make a mistake; they spam their dogwhistles and propaganda posts with the same goal because even when they're manually moderated no one can catch them ALL (hence why you may see really egregiously awful Blazed posts - what you don't see is that someone likely tried 10+ times to get it to slip through the cracks), and they love to play the digital "I'm not touching you~ I'm not touching you~" game and harass people in ways that follow all the site rules to the letter but not the spirit and will fly under most moderators' radars until someone snaps back and...turns out that "how many times do I have to block you?? Go drink bleach and fuck a blender and get the fuck out of my inbox" is more obviously actionable than any of their posts. This is far from being exclusive to tumblr.

2) Tumblr operates on a skeleton crew and cannot afford to get bigger. Yes, they make about $60 million in REVENUE annually. Yes, all of that and more is consumed by their operating costs. Social media platforms are expensive as shit to run and the difference between revenue and profit is an important one!

3) A website that prides itself on having more queer users than any other general platform at its scale has a responsibility to try harder than those others to reduce queerphobic bias in moderation and the fact that they have a history of failing at that is legally documented...

4) ...and yet they're kind of in a catch-22 situation with that because of all the internet censorship bills and payment processor bans being proposed and even passed, such that the standard that declares depictions of queerness to be "sexually explicit" and "obscene" at the slightest hint of anything "spicier" than hand-holding is slowly becoming enshrined into actual literal law and de facto law enforced by payment processor near-monopolies; internet porn is becoming de facto illegal and all depictions of queerness are getting rolled into that because the US government hates sex workers and queer people and that is far bigger than tumblr and it should HORRIFY you...

5) ...and because of the budget issues they're limited in their ability to address the bias inherent to auto-mod software trained by queerphobic standards

6) Those previous two points do not make it okay to just do NOTHING and it would be really nice to have more transparency into what, if anything, they ARE doing to address this within the limitations they have

7) Stopping the bots is harder than you probably think because nearly every method that would reliably work would catch even more innocent real users than the ones they employ already do (and they already catch a lot) (it's starting to feel like getting mistakenly caught in a bot filter is becoming a tumblr rite of passage or some shit)

8) In light of the parenthetical above, whoever is in charge of wrongful account termination tickets needs to stop playing Candy Crush or whatever the fuck they're doing that makes those tickets only get addressed when someone complains on Twitter or Reddit (in all seriousness I suspect this is a problem with the support ticket software that needs to be addressed more than it is with who's running it but it's cathartic to say it that way)

9) Some of their "user-friendliness" updates are....extremely stupid and anything but user-friendly in practice (looking at the removal of the ability to visit a previous reblog JUST when we as a community more or less settled into a system for where "prev tags" does and does not fit in this ecosystem)...

10) ...but sometimes they actually are an improvement once you get used to them and immediate rage because They Changed It Now It Sucks actually makes it significantly harder to tell which ones are bad (remember how much we hated the update that put interaction controls at the bottom of a post when that first rolled out despite it being objectively better just because it fucked with our muscle memory?)

Tl;dr: Tumblr is...a website. It's honestly one of the best we've got, despite the...GLARING flaws. The bar is on the ground. They occasionally trip over it while gingerly stepping over it. How fucked up is the state of the internet in general for that to be true? Extremely.

#tumblr wank #serious tag #kinda

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fischyplier · 3 years

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FUCK POST+

ALL MY HOMIES HATE POST+

#tumblr #post +#post+#post plus #tumblr post plus #post+ sucks #tumblr+#fuck tumblr #tumblr plus #tumblr bullshit #post+ discourse #anti post +#anti post plus #it’s a way for tumblr to profit at the expense of its users #a million reasons on why post plus sucks #fuck em #textpost #like and/or reblog!

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cs-discourse · 3 years

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just a thought

(Sorry if this submitted twice tumblr is fucking stupid)

but has kalons become far too complex to anyone else? this whole thought was just kinda sparked with these new items that are only money grabs (the fact that you have to now buy an even more expensive item if you want to change up a mertail is bullshit)

i just feel like if you weren't here from simpler days, this species is so complex in terms of rules, items, forms, etc. I get the user ID # as it makes life easier for the archivist(s) but what was the point of the extra breeding slot item other then to make money?? just give us the fourth slot free as a trait as kalons as a whole?? its just stupid to make people pay that much - people already pay out the ass for kit selects and auto passes.... the first three slots are already free without items, so ?? it just feels wrong to have to pay for that 4th... it's not fair on people who can't afford breeding items either and just have to hope for good rolls.

i think it's more the fact that the way kalons are being run now only look like a bullshit money grab bc wicc is stupid greedy and can't let people enjoy things. those new items just prove they only want to make money.

another complex thing is something that's always bugged me is the sheer length of the fucking nursery forms; i get that providing edits and hex codes helps the artist but also, its not hard for the artist to figure that out themselves. I genuinely don't understand why we have to provide from where the kalon was obtained. (if someone wants to explain please go for it) might as well give my social security and credit card # while im at it. its genuinely no wonder why some people have trouble getting slots - i never made the forms for nursery bc of how overwhelming it was to find all this bs

on talk of forms - even gifting forms are complex now - im so used to other species like "here is the link to the adopt being gifted, the proof and new owner and thats it". everything in forms feels so micromanag-ish like?? other species are just fine with easier systems and are just as big as kalons- even say, dA species aren't this complex. I get specifying which kit in a nb, but its not that difficult to figure out which kit is being gifted when they have a growth?? maybe this is just me being peeved lmao but im just over the over complicated bs that kalons has become.

and another thing - the item to edit an existing legendary trait is bullshit! especially when it comes to mertails - it's not fair to say "oh you have a tail edit item? sorry but you can't use it on your kalon with merTAIL" - its still a tail for chist's sake - but no wait sorry this species now only exists for profit - whats next? artists get to sell adopts but have to give a percentage to wicc?

this species as a whole has gone from a great place to just some big fucking money grab and i feel like i've only become part of some bigger MLM Scheme but in the form of sparkledogs

so to anyone new to kalons thinking of wanting one - d o n ' t . it's clear now with these new items that it's become a money grab and nothing more.

i miss karmel, back when kalons wasn't a money grab

tldr; fuck kalons, its not worth it anymore and has become far too complex to even bother with anymore.

#cs discourse #submission

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jmtorres · 5 years

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hey so the latest thing that's making me headdesk on the "tumblr users don't understand why tumblr is going to die as a platform" is i've seen a couple of posts that are like "$3million? Anyone could buy it! let's start a gofundme and buy tumblr ourselves!"

my dearhearts, $3 million may be the value of tumblr's assets less its liabilities, or it may be a totally made up figure between two companies like your dad selling you his old car for $1, but it doesn't remotely touch what it costs to RUN Tumblr. as far as I can tell, tumblr is a money pit, which is probably why verizon was willing to sell it at a huge loss--it was already losing them money.

accounting super basics: Revenues - Expenses = Profit. If it's positve it's profit. If it's negative it's loss.

Revenues are any income. If you are a retail store, when customers buy groceries or whatever from you, the money they pay you is revenue. If you're a cable company, the fees customers pay for your services are revenue. If you're Tumblr, your revenue comes from ads. Best estimate I could find on the internet, Tumblr makes about $12-13million a year in ad revenue, and possible some relatively negligible amount from those premium blog layouts hardly any users are willing to pay for.

$13 million, you think, okay! So a year after buying Tumblr we'll be sitting pretty!

If you didn't have to pay anything to maintain it, maybe. But there are expenses.

Expenses are anything a business has to pay to stay in business. You have paid employees? Their wages are expenses. If you're a retail business, all those products on your shelves, you bought them from manufacturers or wholesalers, and what you paid for them are expenses. You rent office space? Expense. You pay utilities? Expense. You advertise? Expense. If you're Tumblr, your expenses are lots of server and data things. A lot of us don't really have a good handle on how much that costs, and went I went poking the internet I had a pretty hard time come up with anything, because Tumblr never had to file public financial statements and it was not a big enough segment of either Yahoo or Verizon for their financial statements to itemize its operations from their other segments. So I don't have a good estimate for their total expenses, but I found one article from like 7 years ago when they switched from hosted servers to running their own data center and were bragging about how much money it saved them. They went from $4-5million a month a server costs to $2million a month on server costs. So that's ONE expense. I poked my partner, who works in webhosting, and their reaction was "Huh, I'm surprised they saved that much, but also they're probably still paying a shitton for [other technical things that went over my head]."

So we have ONE expense for Tumblr estimatd at $2million a month, that is to say $24million a year. They have other expenses which are probably comparable if not more, I just have no way of estimating them. But that revenue figure of $12-13 million per year? Doesn't remotely cover that one expense, let alone all the other untold expenses.

When I say Tumblr's going to get shut down if no one can figure out how to monetize it, this is what I'm talking about. It's operating at a loss. It's been operating at a loss for years. It does not make enough money to cover its expenses, and frankly the amount of money going down the drain on it annually makes its $3million price tag sound like nothing. Automattic wants to try more freemium--I don't know if that will work, I don't know if anything will work, but they HAVE to try to do something to get money out of Tumblr because we're not talking about trying to turn a profit here, not really, we're talking about trying to get it to stop hemorrhaging money. Tumblr could float along if it could BREAK EVEN. If they can't get Tumblr to the break even point, they'll cut their losses and sell it on, or shut it down. That's all there is.

so like, maybe you could raise enough money to buy it--but what the hell would you do with it? Pour more money down its gaping maw? If that's an investment you want to make, you need to either be so ludicrously wealthy you can spend millions every year on tumblr without return, or you need to come up with a plan for it to actually generate enough money to sustain itself.

#tumblr #$1b flop #accounting

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intersex-ionality · 5 years

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The Nature of Advertising on Tumblr

There are ways that corporate owners could monetize tumblr, of course. A great many ways, in fact!

They could implement a combination of things, and probably make far more than they do on their ads.

A well monetized tumblr would, probably, take notes from Dreamwidth by allowing free users access to all features, with a limited number of sideblogs (maybe 12, maybe 25, something that would cover most but not all users needs). Paid users would unlock more sideblogs, or, additional sideblogs could be purchased for a small fee.

It would probably take notes from DeviantArt, by allowed creators to take commissions directly through tumblr, with a small service change going to tumblr.

It would probably have a robust donation system, similar to ko-fi, where people could leave tips for other users whose posts they liked, with a small service change.

It would probably have really robust support for off-site linking, to stores, to image hosts, to other blogging platforms, to video services like youtube and tiktok, allowing them to reduce the size limits on most file types. People might be able to pay a flat or subscription fee to increase the file size limits on their account, if they don’t want to host offsite.

It might even be federated, allowing even more off-site storage and increased potential for service charges as a wider audience means a wider pool of possible donators to tumblr’s users.

It would be correctly age bracketed for the legal services it provides, such as access to NSFW content--not necessarily explicit. That is to say, it would be advertised and operated as 16+ in most districts, 18+ in the US.

They don’t even have to undo the porn ban to achieve decent revenue streams. More robust blacklisting and filtering that doesn’t rely on poorly implemented algorithms would also help improve the situation. Younger users could have filtering turned on permanently and automatically, based on their age at signup.

But, given twitter’s range of served ages, we know that a full porn ban isn’t necessary on all ages sites. Lifting the porn ban would likely be feasible, and would provide an immediate boost to the site’s activity.

Combined with these other systems as describe, this activity boost would help to create a stable revenue stream compared to tumblr’s astonishingly low-click-rate ads. People would rejoin “just to see,” and recognize the utility of systems such as commission-through-tumblr, which encourages them to stay. It makes the platform appealing to people who create content: art, writing, news, analysis, theory. Because it combines a payment system with a viral spread system.

All of these ideas do not impact most tumblr users, benefit many, and negatively impact relatively few.

HOWEVER.

We will never see such a thing happen.

Not because it’s impossible: all of these systems are already implemented elsewhere on the web, and though they are relatively complex to set up initially, they are not overly difficult to maintain nor are they prohibitively expensive to create.

But, because the nazis we imported to tumblr after 8chan exploded are much easier to market to.

Nazis often have money, and are often willing to throw it around, especially as compared to queer artists and academics of color.

Nazis don’t require the implementation of new systems.

Plain old banner advertising works great on them.

Nazis are already a relatively homogenous group, making them easily targetted by traditional advertising.

Nazis are astonishingly reactive to advertising, because of the extreme pressure to conform to whatever the group thinks is especially fashionable that week.

Nazis even love the porn ban, because it bans what they perceive as degeneracy.

That is why we will never see the actual enforcement of nazi bans, and that is why we will never see tumblr profiting in tandem with its user base, rather than trying--and failing--to exploit their user base.

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, July 19 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late June report, although some may be older than that.

I‘m still working on Etsy search testing and a few new blog posts and pages for my website, so it is still difficult for me to get this summary out more than 1-2 times a month. All suggestions on solutions to my time crunch are welcome.

If you have an questions, comments or suggestions about my Tumblr or my blog, please contact me here or on my website. I’d love to know what you think!

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Latest change from Google: the free Google Shopping listings will now show up in US organic search as part of product knowledge panels. Unfortunately, since they are only doing this for product knowledge panels to begin with, it likely won't help handmade sellers, but could be useful to sellers of vintage & supply items that are known products that will have a knowledge panel. It may be a sign that they are planning on moving free ads to more Google "surfaces" over time, however. Note that it appears that all product knowledge panel ads will be free starting this summer (US only), so that means that any Etsy paid ads for these types of items will become free ads that you won't have to pay EOA fees on if you get a sale. Google claims the free ads are bringing more searcher engagement to Shopping.

Amazon announced they will begin to show US sellers’ business name and address on the Seller Profile page as of September 1. The same requirement already exists in Europe, Japan and Mexico.

The USPS will no longer be delivering mail as promptly every day, to cut costs. This potentially affects anyone shipping to a destination in the United States.

How 7 different companies grew profits during the last recession - there will still be business opportunities during the upcoming recession, but you have to be positioned to take them.

ETSY NEWS

Etsy Labels no longer offer USPS international shipping options for all packages under 4.4 pounds other than Canadian orders, replacing them with the Global Postal Shipping Program (GPSP). Many US sellers dislike the GPSP, and have moved on to outside providers that integrate with an Etsy shop and other services, such as Pirate Ship, Shippo, Stamps, and Shipstation.

The quarterly category & attributes updates are limited to face mask & hand sanitizer attributes for July. Etsy also made some other minor updates recently, including allowing us to set a message auto reply for up to 5 days.

You may have noticed that Etsy is really pushing Etsy Ads on sellers right now, despite the numerous complaints about the average cost per click becoming far too high last year. I’ve turned mine off permanently, but if you are interested in trying them or fine-tuning them, Etsy released an article and a related podcast with a transcript.

Louisiana and Mississippi have been added to the list of states that Etsy collects sales tax from.

Etsy raised fees on Reverb to 5%, “to make further investments on behalf of our sellers.”

Etsy will release the second quarter results on August 5. We already know that April and May were record-setting, and June was also probably pretty good.

The site has continued to receive decent media coverage for the mask initiative; Etsy is mentioned in several articles/broadcasts a day as a place to get masks, including stylish ones. This article briefly interviews a seller and looks at what Etsy will do next, as the mask demand peak might be over.

Now that people think of Etsy for things like face masks, Etsy is continuing to market itself as a place to buy everyday items, something it shied away from for a few years. (Remember when Etsy was all about “owning special”?) They’ve added “Everyday Finds” links & Editors Picks pages, and have published tips on what pandemic shoppers are looking for. (Note that the year over year values compare this April to last April, and so were during peak lockdown for the US.) “Keeping surfaces clean is top of mind these days, and shoppers are searching on Etsy for many types of cleaners, from all-purpose scrubs to washable sponges...134% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “ceramic sponge holder.”...”74% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “mug”...”352% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “diy”.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this page on the search and ads algorithms appears to be relatively new.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

The sea change in online buyer behaviour during the pandemic may mean that you need to update your keyword research. Keyword volumes have changed, some very dramatically. For example “‘adult bikes’ shows a massive upturn.This represents over ten times as many searches for this term compared to just under a year ago. If you projected this back in 2019 you’d probably be laughed at.”

Speaking of keyword research, if you need a refresher on why you should do it and how to approach it, here is a recent article.

There are many different ways to get backlinks; here are a few that are pretty easy [video & text].

Are longer blog posts better for SEO? Not necessarily, as long as you cover the topic well. The exception is that blog posts under 300 words are usually not worth writing.

Most SEOs think there was an unannounced Google update around the third week of June. Some are reporting that sites that specialize made gains, as opposed to those who have more general material. That same study reports Etsy had one of the largest traffic increases, but not as much as Pinterest (I’ve been seeing a lot more pins when Googling lately, so this seems likely.) Government websites also seem to have received better visibility. “As Google has described in their document on how they fight disinformation, they describe that their systems are designed to prefer authority over other factors “in times of crisis”. If this truly is related to what we saw happen in June, these changes could possibly be reversed once the worldwide pandemic situation improves.”

Bing released a few basic tips on how to use its keyword planner.

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

TikTok has moved out of Hong Kong, while the US government may be looking at banning them, following India’s move on July 6. With TikTok in peril, many people are now downloading its competitor Byte.

If you use Facebook for your business, please read up on the changes required to comply with California’s new privacy law.

Instagram is now testing an Instagram Shop tab, which allows users to filter by category.

Twitter is planning on starting a subscription service, but deleted some of the details from the job listing just hours later.

One of the results of the big Twitter hack on July 15th was Google removing the Twitter carousel from its search results.

Pinterest searches involving Christmas started way earlier this year, with a 77% increase YOY in April. “That includes a 3x increase in searches for “Christmas gift ideas”, while other queries like “holiday recipes” and “Christmas” were up more than 90% and 80% respectively.” These are good stats for marketers to have, helping us decide when to release and promote new products.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Spending too much on Facebook ads? Here are some common mistakes and some suggestions on fixing them.

If you already know that ROAS stands for “return on ad spend” then some of this article may be old news to you.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

If you are using Google Shopping with your website, be aware that the Google bots may be inflating your abandoned cart rate.

Google Analytics can help you track the effects of changes to your website, or other business conditions. You can also get alerts when certain types of events happen, or when traffic is abnormal.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Walmart is expected to launch Walmart+, similar to Amazon Prime, this month. But note that while many brick & mortar businesses are now doing a lot more business online, it is more expensive for them.

For those of you who use Stitch Labs, they have been purchased by Square, and the existing services will likely be cut in 2021.

Deja vu for Etsy sellers - eBay was apparently offering incentive payments for signing up for their new Managed Payments system by mid-July. (Etsy did the same with its Etsy Payments system, but only for Americans.)

Is Amazon Handmade as good for small makers as it claims? Maybe not. If you sell on Amazon, consider these strategies to protect your core business from being swamped by the big A.

Wix has introduced an ecommerce version with a lot more options and integrations.

Shopify’s new “Shop” app has some good features but also some issues. [podcast & edited transcript]

BigCommerce filed to go public, and added Ayden as a payment option. More details on the Ayden move here.

Did you know there are sites you can use to sell your ecommerce business? Here are 10 of them.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

US ecommerce sales are now expected to grow 18% this year, while overall retail is predicted to be down 10.5%. “In a pandemic economy, consumers have gravitated toward trusted and reliable retailers. As a result, we can expect the top 10 ecommerce retail businesses to grow at above average rates (21.8%). Amazon will gain US ecommerce market share this year, while Walmart's accelerating ecommerce growth will take it to the No. 2 position for the first time.”

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a factor you can use to drive sales; here are 6 tips.

Generation Z is acutely attached to internet use, and is more likely to be planning on starting their own business than any other generation.

MISCELLANEOUS

It’s possible that the increase in people working from home will lead to more work hours and therefore more burnout.

#search engine optimization #etsynews #content marketing #smallbiz #ecommerce

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kashishipr · 4 years

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Are you facing issues in protecting, managing, or monetizing your Intellectual Property (IP)? Don’t worry, as you can now implement blockchain technology, which works as an advanced tool to help you protect, manage, and monetize your IP.

Intellectual property, which refers to outcomes of the human mind, includes many different things. From inventions to artistic works and unique products, almost every uncommon and useful thing can rest under its umbrella. Whether you create a symbol, write a book, design a game, or come up with any other intangible media, you (as an author) can access and enjoy Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over the same. Nevertheless, the present system appears a bit weak to bring this phenomenon in practice. You are possibly aware of how easy it is for others to steal your content nowadays when the internet facilitates your data to flow freely across the globe.

Blockchain technology provides an incorruptible digital ledger that aids you in tracking assets and recording transactions in a business network. Assets can be tangible such as cash, cars, and houses or intangible like IP. Working as a tool to store and manage assets on a decentralized ledger and track transactions associated with digital content, including anything – music to pieces of art, etc., blockchain ensures reliability, accountability, and transparency. In this way, it allows an immediate revenue stream for creators by enabling a direct relationship between them and consumers.

IP Protection with Blockchain

As a creator of content, image, or anything else, you can understand how frustrating it is to put in efforts and time on something that people can access freely without your consent and any compensation. Moreover, you also comprehend the importance of retaining ownership rights as it is the easiest method to avoid such frustrating acts. Nevertheless, with the current model of the IP industry where getting your asset registered is a time taking process and the internet that has made copying content quite easy, doing so appears a bit hard. Worst, proving infringement of your content in court without proof of ownership becomes difficult. Here, blockchain digital ledgers that emphasize working with time-stamped and unalterable records come up as the perfect place to store evidence of your ownership rights. They provide a solution for authenticating and proving the time of creation and the identity of the original creator, thus eliminating all sorts of doubts and making it easier for creators to enforce their rights when Copyright Infringement of their content occurs.

IP Management with Blockchain

In the present era, once creators upload their work online, it becomes arduous for them to maintain control of the same. Moreover, not only the creators find it problematic to know who is using or making profits from their content, but even third-parties who wish to seek a license to use someone’s IP face difficulty in determining the relevant owner. All these facts result in increasing infringement issues and preventing authors from properly monetizing their works. The blockchain technology, which maintains a fair digital record enough to prove the creator’s authenticity, can prevent the occurrence of such issues. Besides, by maintaining transparency, it helps third parties to identify the original owner and get his/her permission to use the content. And this, ultimately, benefits the creators with the option to obtain expected compensation in exchange for licensing their IP.

IP Monetization with Blockchain

Blockchain technology-based smart contracts play an active role in helping creators monetize their IP. These contracts empower creators to not only dictate the fee and terms of their licensing agreements and ensure that the licensee is using it as expected but also license content directly to end-users. They can also serve you with benefits like automatic payment triggering whenever people access your content, appropriate scaling of compensations, etc. Blockchain, in this manner, aids you to save your money and monetize IP effectively as with smart contracts, you needn’t have middlemen.

Conclusion

Almost every one of us knows that blockchain technology, if used correctly, can help creators in improving efficiency, cutting expenses, and increasing revenue by creating new products. Still, many individuals and enterprises often ignore stepping ahead with it. Well, whether to use blockchain for protection, management, and monetization of your IP or not is your choice. Nonetheless, if you want to experience noteworthy protection of your IP and suitable compensation for your creative works, it is advisable to go for this advanced technology. ✅ For view-source: https://bit.ly/32nrwvG

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meeedeee · 5 years

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Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

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