The average YouTube video gets five new views every day.
Let’s parse that for a second.
5 billion YouTube plays a day, spread over about a billion videos means that while some videos live in the short head and get millions of views, there are a huge number of videos that get fewer than a single view each day.
At some point, the long tail is so long it ceases to exist.
This makes it hard indeed to rely on persistence alone to find your audience. The buffet line is far too long and the plates aren’t getting any bigger.
PS! Chip Conley and I are doing a live online event today (8/15) at 4 pm NY time. (here it is)…
Chip is a bestselling author, a wise soul and a good friend. We were also co-authors of our very first book… in 1986.
37 years is a very long run in the world of book publishing, one that would be hard to imagine beginning today in the era of such a long tail. The number of books published each year has increased 50x, and when we add in social media, blogs and podcasts, the amount of content clamoring for our attention is perhaps up by a factor of a thousand. No wonder it feels noisy.
One approach is to make something worth talking about. Another is to connect and lead a community. Chip does both, with generosity.
We’re testing a brand new way to host a charity auction, and I’m hoping you can check it out and even bid to support BuildOn.
In this post, I want to take a moment to explain the attraction and risk of unstable equilibrium, and there’s also a fun contest at the end…
If you drop a marble into a metal bowl, it will roll to the bottom and stay there. Every time. This is reliable, predictable and stable. We know what to expect from systems that find one spot of equilibrium.
But sometimes, there isn’t just one state. A situation could go this way or that. A brilliant jazz quartet, a well-matched game of soccer and a canoe in a river are all examples of an unstable equilibrium. There’s tension. We’re fascinated and are drawn to how it unfolds.
Goodbids.org is a project I’ve worked on for a few months with some friends. And we simply can’t predict how it’s going to turn out, so it’s time to test it in the real world.
Our goal is to re-imagine the charity auction. Most of the time, bidders in these auctions are looking for a bargain, which is out of sync with what the charity wants. The end result is often lackluster.
In Goodbids, every bid is also a donation. That means that the winner takes home a great prize, and all the other bidders get the satisfaction of knowing they made a useful and non-refundable donation directly to a charity that’s doing good work.
The unstable part? The nature of the auction means that the items being auctioned off will almost always go for a price much lower than they’re worth. The charity gets more, the winner pays less.
And here’s the contest: Until 4 pm NY time today, August 14, we’re inviting you to guess how much the final bidding will reach on the two items that are up for bid in our test run. The person with the best guess will get a collectible significance bee mug and some other loot.
Contrary to expectations, written contracts don’t have to be adversarial. In fact, the effective ones rarely are.
When you hand someone a release, a royalty agreement or even a partnership document, it pays to point out the gnarly parts, the controversial bits and the ones that are worth paying attention to.
After all, the very best time to understand an agreement is when you sign it, not later.
PS tomorrow’s post is about a new project, and it will arrive about four hours later than usual to help coordinate time zones. Thanks.
When we show up to bring humanity to work, we’re making a choice.
It involves risk and effort and emotional labor. We’re here to make a change happen, and we’re giving something to make that happen.
So it’s a vote.
A vote for the customer we seek to serve.
A vote for the boss and the owners of the institution where we do our work.
A vote for our co-workers.
If they haven’t earned it, if we can’t trust them, support them and root for them, we should do it somewhere else. Don’t volunteer to work for a partner who won’t work for you.
Our best work is scarce. We shouldn’t waste it on jerks, selfish hustlers or those that don’t appreciate it.
The candidate running for re-election offers truth. This is what I did, I would like to do it again. The candidate coming out of nowhere offers hope. We can’t know but we can imagine.
Kickstarter offers hope. No reviews, no tests, simply a promise of what might be.
Book publishers buy hope, so do venture capitalists. On the other hand, the typical commercial investor simply wants a repeat of what already was.
Some pharmaceuticals offer specific outcomes with known statistics…
Simple example: Early in my career as a producer and creator of non-fiction books, my proposals included finished layouts. It turned out that whatever I could have offered at this stage could never be as good as the publisher imagined could be created once I had their input… better to offer a blank page than the page we would actually produce. On the other hand, I couldn’t simply assert that the contents would be worth publishing–we had to offer examples and a track record.
The thing is, there’s never just truth, because we’re talking about the future. So we base our hope on what has come before.
And there’s never just hope. The hope is based on something that came before, some clue or hint or track record that makes us believe.
The hard work for the marketer is in choosing when we’ve established enough of a track record–but not too much.
And for the voter/consumer/investor, we get to choose what we seek, and what we offer. Confusing truth and hope doesn’t make it more likely we’ll succeed.
If the ferry is leaving in fifteen minutes, do you drive faster than normal to get to the dock on time?
If someone is driving close behind you and pressuring you to turn when you don’t feel safe, are you more likely to go for it?
We can do our work as fast as makes sense, but no faster.
Regardless of external pressure.
Sometimes, we establish false limits so we can leave room for when we need to hurry up. But hurry has a limit, and lowering our standards doesn’t stand the test of time. They are standards for a reason.
It’s tempting and fun to argue about the logo. About the way the toilet paper is hung. About how to load the trunk of the car.
These sorts of arguments work precisely because they don’t matter. At all.
And they distract us from the incredibly difficult work of discussing the things that actually do matter. That we can take action on. That are easier to ignore.
Magicians know where the trapdoors are, what’s up their sleeves and how to hide the ball.
And yet, mechanical skill is just the first step in being actually good at magic.
The real skill is in finding the empathy to imagine that someone else might believe. To do the trick for them, not to them.
August 6, 2023
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