Gunther Sonnenfeld

Have you ever wondered why everything in the world is so damn ironic these days? Psy, Bieber, geo politics, consumerism. Everything today either comes with a self-referential set of ironic functions or starts off with the qualifying statements like “I am not an expert” or “I don’t really know first hand but.” It’s as if if it is not equipped with an ironic escape hatch or an intellectual qualifier no one is comfortable in creating, sharing or believing in anything. Belieber jokes aside there’s an interesting phenomenon happening in our society today that could quite possibly be one of the most devastating attacks on humanity we’ve ever seen. That phenomenon is the pathological attack on the psychology of what it means to believe. What we see, read, hear and experience have all been systematically striped of all faith-based belief, leaving us with emotional gap in what that belief is supposed to uphold. In fact, this non-belief we’re seeing emerge out of this shared cultural attack is so extreme that one could quite easily diagnose it with a clinical diagnosis of what it means to be experiencing psychosis. The internet, of all places, is where this issue starts and ends.

The internet, through its massive surplus of information and dogmatic pursuit of transparency, has unleashed our collective rationality on almost every domain of information there is. Whether its the fictions of advertising, the hypocrisy of charitable giving, the falsities of organized religion or the failings of science and economics there is hardly a place left that hasn’t been trashed by the overly-rational pursuit of truth. Like rationality locusts we swarm in, shred beliefs from every angle and fly away to the next unsuspecting domain. We are, as it turns out, in the midst of an exposé of dialectic paralysis where no fact is left unchallenged and no belief unbeaten. But the paradoxical truth, which is ironically ironic, is that we demand more meaning from our choices than we ever have before. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear each choice has a depth of belief requirements that force you to be able to defend each choice as if it were your last. It’s as if we embody the truth of our choices in everything we do. It is our burden of having everything from all perspectives at once instantly.

Navigating this shit storm of rationality is challenging. It seems that we, believers, are left with three choices once the locusts have come and gone. One, pick up the pieces of our beliefs and try and make choices that are stripped of any existential value (I.E. purely rational choices based on utility). Two, become even more dogmatic about our beliefs and find shelter in an extremist view that rebels against the attack on those said beliefs (I.E. The radicalization of belief). Or three, accept the falsity of a belief and incorporate it as an irrational factor and just do whatever you want as if you believed it (I.E. I know very well but … ). Each of these three options just doesn’t seem ideal given the natural externalities we can imagine from each. Can you imagine a world filled with rational choices of sex, entertainment and creative exploration? Radicalization needs no more advocates. And accepting false beliefs as if they were true is precisely the unholy compromise that has casualties like global warming, indentured work and massive unemployment. The voraciousness of dismantling what it means to believe has real consequences and there are few that would see those outcomes today as anything really positive.

There are surely rationalists out there that see the honest representation of the material world has its virtues. I’m also sure that there are those that see belief existing beyond the subjective-objective domain, not accessible by the human spirit, as a faith worth believing in. But to both of those extremes I would point to the gap that remains in the day-to-day? Without belief in our everyday we would cease to progress, explore, take leaps and care for a world that needs a future. We need heroes, fictions, stories and faith to sooth our minds to the harsh rationalities of our world. I just wish that the internets would change their locust-like behaviour into one that builds beliefs rather than consume them.

Image from: http://www.timesofisrael.com/large-locust-swarm-enters-israel-from-egypt/

The most valuable part of having a large social network (for me at least) isn’t visibility, it’s about reducing middlemen.

The internet has destroyed many middlemen, and created countless new ones. I barely use the former, and when I don’t have to I avoid the latter.

Examples

• Classifieds –> Craigslist and eBay
• Travel Agents –> Kayak and Hotel Tonight
• Tower records and Sam Goody –> iTunes, Spotify, and TurnTable

Let me share three short anecdotes

Story #1: I had an extra Apple TV I wanted to sell. I could have gone on eBay and found the highest bidder, but there are two critical downsides to that route. A) I have to pay eBay a fee for the transaction. B) I’m competing against hundreds of other people selling the same product as me. I ended up posting my wares on Facebook and sold the device to a trusted friend within 20 minutes. PayPal and UPS take care of the rest. I also help get the product in the hands of someone I know.

Story #2: Because I’m bootstrapping my startup CentUp, I decided it would make sense to lend out my time on the side to earn some extra income. My first thought was to join a network like Clarity which lets you create a turn-key destination for people to hire you. But much like the eBay example above, I decided I didn’t want to pay someone a fee to provide me with something I could accomplish on my own. So in about 30 minutes with the help of a Stripe-powered Squarespace site I built my own website where people can buy my expertise an hour at a time. Instead of paying 15% for every call I get through a marketplace, I pay a small monthly fee to my site provider. Heck, it got so popular, I added two more people to supplement my efforts.

Story #3: Before I met my lovely fiance, I wasted plenty of time and money on paid dating sites. It never led to more than two dates, which again led to more wasted time and money since my end-goal was finding a long-term partner. Having a large twitter network however has led to me having a large circle of friends in Chicago. Literally some of my best friends I originally met through a conversation that started on Twitter. Through that circle of friends, I met Katie. Katie and I are getting married this year. My network trumped any middleman’s technology or marketplace.

On the internet, you can be your own middleman.

In the “old days” middlemen thrived on scarcity and existed because it was too difficult for consumers to get access to each other or certain things.

Today middlemen thrive on laziness, lack of time, or technological ignorance. So many are a luxury versus a necessity. And that’s ok. It’s just important to realize that the barrier of entry for companies to become middlemen have become lower for the very same reason it’s easier for you to get by without them.

And because of the above, I think that the massive success of many new kinds of middlemen, will also lead to their ultimate demise if they don’t rapidly change their service offering every few years. Today middlemen are springing up to eliminate waste and lower market prices, but they’re also changing consumer behavior and in many ways teaching consumers how to get the same products on their own.

Economies of scale will always make middlemen a necessity. Technology will simply continue to make their lifespans shorter and shorter every year.

Photo Credit

Given that I work in media, marketing and advertising I am usually reluctant to critique my own domain, mostly for the reason that it exposes my own self loathing nature. This week however my social feeds have been littered with friends sharing the latest Dove campaign. This version of “The Quest of Real Beauty” has a forensic artist who, based on verbal descriptions of facial characteristics, illustrates people. The first exercise is a self-described illustration, the second a third-party’s version. The distance between the two illustrations is aimed to showcase the psychological effects of decades of beauty advertising. The solution, Dove somehow.

Here it is:

Dove Real Beauty

Apart from the obvious facts that Dove, a beauty brand, has been a huge contributor to this psychological effect, and its product is meant to “solve” this mental dissonance (I.e. You think you look like shit and my product will help you feel like you’re at least doing something about it with our creams), this campaign takes advertising to a new place that we only really ever saw with charitable commerce previously. To get there however we need to have an understanding of what advertising’s purpose is and was.

If one were to believe that products / services emerge out of unmet needs / wants then one could quickly look at advertising as the dramatization of the space in between. Ironically, this is why we have quotes like “it was the ads that killed it,” or “the fastest way to kill a crappy product is to do great advertising.” If these two domains aren’t aligned in their delivery then the whole system goes to hell. The connection of needs / wants with products / services is unity in consumerism which moves the whole system forward.

Ok great, so what. Well, this puts advertising in a space where we can tell a lot about who we are as people and what we need from products, services and companies. An advertising agency’s aim is to find those reasons within us and unite them with the right consumptive answer. This holy unity has always been true but today it operates in a funny sort of way. A way that technology and the internet has had its hand in creating.

If you were to take Dove’s campaign honestly what they are effectively telling us is that real beauty is an honest representation and belief in your inner self. All these dysmorphic beliefs are unwarranted because the world sees you as beautiful for who you are. If we were to take this campaign right to the end we could expect to force Dove to TRULY walk their talk and close up shop because they recognize that real beauty doesn’t need beauty products. But this is clearly not the case and never going to happen. The truth is that this campaign is actually illustrating is the way that beliefs function in our internet powered society today.

You needn’t spend more than 20 minutes to find a critique of anything online. In fact, it’s hard for anything to exist without someone dismantling its appearances trying to get to the authentic core of what it actually is. We rip apart news stories, brands, content and advertising in order to connect to what we believe to be the authenticity of its existence. This authenticity has become especially important in this massively critical time in history. The interesting thing is that our behaviours, in spite of knowing that something may be based on a lie, still operate as if we believed that lie was true. The easiest example to wrap your head around is Santa Claus and Christmas. We all know that Christmas is total fiction but it still operates as a multi-billion dollar industry. Even when kids know that Santa doesn’t exist it’s as if they enter into a silent agreement with their parents to acknowledge that each know that he doesn’t exist but we still want presents, lights, cookies and a celebration.

In the case of Dove our shared lie is slightly more cynical. We need them to pretend like they give a shit about “Real Beauty” just so that we don’t feel like monsters when we buy beauty products to solve for our dysmorphia. We collectively share in this lie with Dove because we, as people, like companies, are subjected to this endless critique towards “the truth” while still inherently having the same needs we always have had. In short, “I want to buy beauty products to make myself feel better about the fact that I think look like shit but I don’t want everyone to think that I am someone that believes that I need beauty products to do so.” Dove, like McDonald’s in their recent “truth” campaign, addresses the realization that there is a falsity in the gap between what one needs / wants and what products / services can do by acknowledging it head on and giving us an excuse to say yes, I know its bullshit but I still want it!

One of the more interesting things you’ll see out of the way that this functions, which is pure circumstantial genius ironically enough, is the more people rip it apart the better it works. It’s as if the more you point out how hypocritical Dove is the better the excuse there is to buy it. This is the emotional effect of the internet wielding its vicious, critical force on the world. We have gone past the zero point of anything ever being true that even the acknowledgement of the fact that it’s a lie makes it ok to act on.

We are in interesting times in our society where beliefs and behaviours are becoming less and less aligned. The old adage of “I know very well but …” is causing total havoc on the way everything operates. From consumerism to global warming the fact that we know shitty things are happening but we don’t actually behave any differently is cause for great concern. The non-alignment of our behaviours may actually be rationality pushing up too hard against what it means to believe. At least in the age of belief where religion, advertising and Santa Claus were all true we could change those up to move us into a better direction. Today it seems like the only thing that could be true is a lie.

Image from here: http://wikicubbuster.wikispaces.com/Media-Visual+Literacy+Assignment

How will the internet dramatically change our lives as we march towards old age?

It’s been just over a year since I lost my grandmother. She was virtually the only elderly person I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time with. One of the lasting memories I have from the final few months of her life was visiting her at a nursing home and observing her fellow tenants.

Some were watching TV, others playing cards, and some simply sat in chairs staring. I honestly don’t think many of them were sad or even bored, but I do believe that the majority of them were lonely.

Although I can’t speak from personal experience, I imagine that there’s a disconnection that happens when you get older. Your friends start thinning out, it becomes more difficult for you to go anywhere to find new social contacts, and sadly, family often feels uncomfortable visiting. It seems like a not-so-great existence.

For whatever reason, today I thought about my own future as an elderly individual and what that life might look like. The one stark difference in my imagined future compared to my grandmother’s experience was a computer. I know sixty- and seventy-year-olds who are fairly proficient with computers (my parents among them), and the number of people that live completely sans the internet is dwindling.

While many have argued that social media has destroyed (young) people’s ability to have intelligent conversations or experience deep levels of empathy, I hypothesize that the modern internet will be a gift for the elderly. Today’s elderly experience community through a small circle of neighbors, infrequent visits from either family or caretakers, and sadly through one-way mediums like television, radio, or books. And that last set is what will experience the greatest shift because the channels that seniors of the future will use to pass time will actually talk back.

Even today, there are quite a few folks in their seventies who are using the basic functions of Facebook. It seems highly likely that in ten or twenty years, there will be nothing unusual about an octogenarian commenting on a Reddit thread or submitting a comment on YouTube (or something similar to it depending on how the internet evolves). The internet has fundamentally changed our ability to share our voice. Today the elderly consume information and relay their reactions to a small feedback loop local to them and maybe over the phone to a small circle interesting in hearing them out. Tomorrow, the feedback loop becomes wider and and will last longer because their voice can echo across the planet. My grandmother would watch the news and tell me her thoughts about how the President is running the country. If it were 2022 instead of 2012, she may have been posting her thoughts in a Facebook group or commenting on a CNN article as well.

The unfortunate reality of old age is this: The older you get, and the sicker you get, the fewer people you’re going to have in your life. No one wants to think about it or admit it, but I honestly don’t believe many people will argue this point. But the internet is never going to turn us away or ignore us. (Well, it might ignore) It offers a community so large that it will be quite impossible to be alone. While countless other complex matters are going to arise from seniors becoming a large portion of internet users, I ultimately think it’s going to be a much better existence than exists today for the elderly.

So… enjoy life and experience the “real world” as much as possible now. When your legs, ears, and eyes don’t work as well in the future, you’ll have plenty of time to cruise the internet and interact with others.

Photo Credit

Happiness metrics have often been thought of as these things that are lofty or ridiculous or simply idealistic. Maybe they are to some extent.

Anything not directly tied to money or some economic growth standard doesn’t seem to merit the weight and attention of the general public. Sadly, psychologists contend that most people don’t think of themselves as deserving of happiness, in whatever form that may be.

A simple response to those notions would be that people need to discover their happiness in more creative ways, and that happy people make better products and provide better, more meaningful services, which can only do great things for an economy.

Gross Digital Happiness is a concept I’ve been playing with for a while now that merges GNH (Gross National Happiness) metrics, social network metrics and economic metrics (or more clinically defined as econometrics). It’s a behavioral precept for monitoring patterns that link us to “happy actions”, with the intent that these actions occur in physical spaces and are then reported or tracked in online spaces.

And here’s the catch: it shouldn’t feel only like an application. This isn’t just about collecting data, it’s about aligning emotional values.

I’ll give you a personal example.

Not a lot of people know this about me, but I’m an artist. Naturally, I feel different types of emotion when I draw or I paint. It would be great if I could express those feelings to other friends or acquaintances, and connect with people on deeper, more emotional levels, say, through social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Tumblr or G+. The way I can make those connections is both through what I create as well as expressing how I created it, or better yet, why I created it.

A few critical dynamics occur here:

First, I can realize that I am emotionally not alone, particularly at certain times of the day.

Second, I can relate to other people going through similar emotions or emotional states.

Third, if companies insist on using my data to keep slinging me stuff to buy, then they might as well understand what truly makes me, and my friends, happy.

Or, what makes us creative. Or sad. Or pissed off. Or whatever.

What’s nice is that commercial technologies are just scratching the surface in similar ways.

Facebook released a Gross National Happiness app back in 2010 that shows leaps in positivity and negativity.

Feliscope is a system that measures “prosperity, happiness and felicity” based on individual inputs.

A number of biometrics platforms have been developed, such as Auraware, that intend to show how certain activities and body functions contribute to our spiritual well-being.

Happathon is a crowdsource community that is devoted to building apps and platforms around metrics that promote “well-being versus wealth”.

Other platforms, such as Myo, are using gestural control to explore a wide range of physical and emotional functions, replete with acute data sets that can transform industries like health and medicine.

And again, it’s not just about data — it’s about the patterns that reveal new narratives about what happiness can mean for people in different contexts. Narratives such as:

- The various dimensions of love;

- What positive sacrifice means between life and work;

- The meaning of gifts;

- The joys of freedom;

- What creativity means to each of us;

- Living a healthier life;

- The science of making confident decisions…

… Etcetera, etcetera.

In a era when industrialism is arguably still making us “dumb and numb” in various ways, I would hope that this would contribute to the development of emotional intelligence, or emotional I.Q., both at the individual and collective levels. More importantly, I’d love for us, as a society, to establish happiness as a goal, not just an ideal.

It’s about time we started using various cognitive and wearable technologies to understand these deeper layers of ourselves. After all, isn’t that the point of technology… To actually help us make our lives better? To enable happiness?

I was wandering through the bookstore the other evening, parsing through what seems and endless trail of thoughts, ideas, formulations, reformulations and confusing categorizations of knowledge. As culture studies blend with science which blends with business which inevitably ruins everything one that struck me as odd was the nature of the titles that appeared throughout. No matter the subject matter, no matter the author, the majority of the books had an odd, contrarian title and subhead. Titles like, “Thinking – why not thinking is the only way to think!” Or, “Persuasion – How everything you knew about selling is wrong.” It’s as if we were born today from a legacy of idiots who didn’t have the first clue about how the world actually worked.

We all know the majority of these snazzy headlines are just dressed up gimmicks to create dissonance in your mind in the hopes that you buy these grab bags of ideas. In most cases they are re-formulations of age-old practices, packaged in a contrarian way.  Within this polemic positioning is an interesting commentary on the nature of our society today. Confusion itself is an embedded function in our society, especially into our economy.

There are two perspectives cast onto this economy with confusion as a fundamental feature. The first is an economy that is genuinely confused, looking for answers. This expert-led, problem-solving economy tends to have biases towards rational actors, logical operations, market disruptions with a resulting push for equilibrium. Classical economics teaches us about market perturbations and the resulting push for a return a balanced, equilibrium state. Principally this description tends to make a lot of sense but in practice is a walking disaster zone. In practice we end up with an economy that’s propped up by institutional powers with fictitious market levers and all kinds of weird indicators that try and purvey a steady state of growth. But as good skeptics a mere scratch at the surface demystifies this illusion and breeds all kinds of economic confusion with a subsequent fleet of “experts” that aim to resolve it. In essence, this is the confused economy that needs correcting.

The other side of the confusion is an economy of confusion – or more precisely an economy that is inherently confused. The simplest way of understanding this distinction is a quick look at how the stock markets operate. A simple truth inherent to the ways that markets work is the idea that volatility breeds price instability which breeds pricing spreads which breeds investor yields. Or put even more simply, the more prices move up or down the more money that can be made. At the heart of these movements is the principle of confusion. A confused market is a volatile market seeking a false equilibrium which, in turn, creates disequilibrium elsewhere. The greater the rate of confusion the greater the volatility and the greater the potential returns (and losses). Confusion, in this case, IS the economy. There actually is no equilibrium sought, only judgment levied on confusion. A mine explodes in South Africa the market yields put returns on dependent industries. There is no desire to understand the real consequences of that change, only a desire to capitalize from it. This, in the purest sense, is an economy of confusion.

The truth is that confusion, no matter whether it’s a confused economy or an economy of confusion breed’s human opportunism. In either case its totally predatory and the internet, by its very nature, only accelerates its effects. Because confusion is created by events that generate information, and the internet exponentially scales that information, the ability to breed confusion is almost endless. We are actually awash with confusing information including this post!

The solve isn’t easy, especially when comes to realize just how rich you can get from confusion. I guess the only recourse is to write a book about it. Not sure about you but I kind of like the following title:

“Confusion: Stop being confused and start confusing it yourself”

Fuck me my head hurts.

Image sourced from here:

http://wolf2y-studio.blogspot.ca/2011/01/confusing-pictures.html

Narcissism is often considered to be the driver of a digital network’s success. Omitting certain details (whether unflattering or boring) and highlighting successes has become the unsurprising norm. And this duality of our existence continues to grow the more that the internet pervades our lives. This fissure also begins to develop earlier and earlier as younger people are born into a world where the internet is simply a standard utility.

But aside from the obvious ego-driven elements of this growing divide, there are other (arguably less superficial) trends emerging:

Mental Health: Infrequently do people post of pending mental issues that are plaguing them. People are often reluctant to share emotional and mental problems with a doctor let alone their personal networks. Aaron Swartz is a recent sad example of turmoil that was brewing in a promising (though sometimes misguided) internet activist. What could he have accomplished if he hadn’t hidden the mental issues that led him down dangerous paths that ultimately led to him ending his life?

Professional skills: The peope who watch our careers progress from the outside (not colleagues) generally see two types of professional mile markers. 1) Promotions and new jobs. 2) Industry related insights and links that we share through our social streams. We appear smarter, more capable of handing a large variety of work, and in high demand. As resumes become less valuable and a “google search of your name” becomes a standard vetting tool, our societies methods of finding qualified candidates is changing. While some may think that having more information to judge by is a good thing, it also makes it far easier to misinterpret a professional’s true talents and strengths. People are making hiring decisions based on fewer in-person conversations and more based on online footprints. And this can prove detrimental to both employers and employees.

Romantic status: As someone who asked his future wife to marry him via internet meme, I’m highly attuned to this. I share my love for Katie very publicly, and am sensitive to anything I say online to avoid ever hurting her feelings. I am silly with her online, and offline. It took many years of being a heavy social media user and many relationships to finally reach a point where I knew how to handle this duality. I think this particular segment of the internet will continue to become difficult for people to manage, especially for those that are in new relationships.

So why do we need to deal with this duality? Because we exist in two different worlds, one being global and bite-sized, the other being local and physical, and it is impossible for those two circles to not overlap. When these fusions take place, it can lead to great things like new friends, opportunities, and fun. On the flip-side it can lead to situations that can massively affect livelihoods and relationships when the two individuals vary more than they should.

Ultimately, the not-so-easy solution to dealing with this division of our “selves?” A mindful and dedicated commitment to honesty that pushes our digital personas closer to our actual ones.

Photo Credit

I need to say this: We have a LONG way to go in terms of making business “social”, or making businesses social organizations from the inside out. Much of this is predicated on how society approaches the ways in which we work.

Case in point: wage issues that affect global workforces, and the ways these companies choose to address what are fundamentally, and massively, human problems. I’ve talked about this in other other posts, particularly in how we build or create value, and how businesses can operationalize that value. The sad part is that technology companies (like Amazon and Apple) can be the biggest culprits in the ongoing effort to increase profitability at the expense of human resources and personal development.

The good news is that we have the domains through which we can create seismic change. The key is understanding how internal and external culture drives emergent processes for building and scaling value.

In many respects, this flies in the face of (post)industrialism as we’ve come to know it… How can it not?

The larger reality is that we haven’t yet committed ourselves, holistically, to explore the contexts in which we’re operating so that we can ask better questions (short- and long-term), and create more tangible possibilities in order mitigate risk, engender trust, as well as leverage ecosystems of interpersonal and intercompany relationships.

And I’ve long maintained this: Doing good is way more profitable than succumbing to greed.

So what does building a future of ‘work’ specifically mean to you and/or your organization?

What differences can you make in your daily routines to redefine or reinvent ‘work’?

What outcomes would you like to see in the near future, or in the longer term?

A young entrepreneur asked me the other day what I thought the world looked like, in an economic sense.

The question threw me for a loop; typically, people will ask questions like “How much money can I raise for my venture?” (I shrug) or “How long will it take to grow my business?” (I shrug), or “Do you like my product?” (I shrug), or more pejoratively, “Who the hell are you?” (I cower).

But this question was a damn good one.

I paused, then sat on it for a few moments. I didn’t answer him. Instead, I asked about him and his business, and he shared lots of interesting ideas. The one that resonated with me was his conviction about changing the world in the way we see it. Indirectly, he was talking about context.

So I thought some more about what we discussed, and to his initial question, this is what I came back with.

So here’s the premise for the answer to his question (which is really just another open question): change happens whether we want it or not; (re)building the world is a whole other charge.

I shouldn’t have to explain everything in the graphic (at least I would hope), but suffice to say that it illustrates how we can build upon tensions between capitalistic norms and democratic norms. If you’re still confused on the differences between the two, I would suggest reading the likes of Chomsky, Fuller and Fukuyama, and study what’s happened in every election cycle since the 1930s, just for starters.

We tend to think of the world — the global brain, or the global machine, if you will — as this thing that exists through duopolies and false dichotomies. Basically, it’s a constant battle between good and evil, protein or carbs, money or happiness, democrats or republicans, civil reform or educational reform, fossil fuel or renewable energy, etc. etc.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard to know which way is up; the news is often depressing as hell, and history repeats itself ad nauseum.

But few people, relatively speaking, are talking about everything else. All the stuff that we don’t know, and all the stuff that we don’t know that we don’t know.

So, back to the initial question.

Words like disruption and innovation don’t mean much when change happens anyway. Change is evolutionary. I’m not suggesting that disruptive innovations (a famous Clay Christensen concept) like Google and Airbnb aren’t game changers — they most certainly are. But in a world that now requires us to build differently, we need to think about how our creations and inventions are contextually fit and contextually sustainable.

And in that sense, entrepreneurship is world-building. It really, really is.

To that end, technology is an accelerant, while culture is a central proxy for success.

As for the young entrepreneur, it seems he’s got plenty to think about in terms of building and growing a business. And in that process, he’ll be answering his own question in a way I never could.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s a statement that many of us have uttered at some point, and also whole-heartedly believed. But for some reason when it comes to web content, we’ve all been trained into believing the exact opposite.

The last decade or so has gone by and professional publishers haven’t stressed about monetizing web content. Their more traditional revenue streams had remained strong(ish) and the potential the web offered hand’t been fully realized.

During this time, the internet also felt like a new market opportunity for talented content creators looking to grow (or create) their fan base. It wasn’t a utility yet, but rather a blank canvas that people were willing to invest their time and talent despite a lack of immediate return.

Fast forward to today. The web is ubiquitous in North America. Paywalls are springing up every day. And the traditional forms of revenue publishers have relied on are disappearing. And this has led to many “undesirable” forms of “payment” springing up, the most popular being ads, and data. There are a few other which are far more appealing, but far less used: 1) pay-walls, which only superusers tend to find worthy and 2) praise, which is only an acceptable form of payment for content creators who produce things as a hobby, versus a way of life.

Don’t get me wrong. “Free” still exists. There are of course people who simply enjoy writing and are quite good at it. And whether they are praised or not, they will write. There are also scholars who receive compensation from other venues that share their thoughts publicly. But as web publishing has become easier, finding good quality content has become harder. “Clutter” as described above is a polite way of expressing the fact that you often have to sift through a lot of bullshit to get what you need.

Let’s recap:

In the macro sense, free isn’t just an unattractive incentive any more, it barely exists.

• You give up data. That’s not free.
• You waste time to find what you need. That’s not free.
• You get portions of information, but not everything unless you pay. Obviously, not free.
• You have to have your reading interrupted by distractions (ads). That’s not free.

Many of the forms of monetization mentioned above our clever indirect ways for publishers to receive compensation for their work. We need to move away from indirect, and make the transaction extremely direct. You want something, you offer money in exchange.

I believe that the future of quality content is through content-specific rewards to the publisher. In fact, I also believe that system will produce the highest quality of content.

And before I hear the big, BUT!!! let me explain my chart:

Ads on site: We already know that advertising as a primary revenue model for publishers is a broken system. Regardless of all the amazing ad tech companies emerging, I do not believe they are in any way improving the consumer’s experience and desires, which is getting the best possible content. (I’ll caveat that Buzzfeed is knocking it out of the park with their brand partnerships. But they’re definitely a rare breed)

Site paywalls: Some publishers can pull this off really well because they’ve earned an adoring fan base. Last week Andrew Sullivan moved himself and staff over to a private subscription site and generated a massive amount of interest and paying customers. Outside of these rare cases, paywalls are a product purchased by a relatively tiny base of customers and therefore isn’t pushing content producers (as a whole) towards higher quality work.

Content-specific paywalls: Publishers know that people won’t pay a few dollars for an individual article unless it’s tremendously useful or entertaining. That ensures high quality content. The problem from a business perspective is that people are reluctant to buy content based on a few sentence preview. Frankly, people will feel silly for spending $1.99 on something that proves to be of little value to them. Unless a customer gets a recommendation from someone else who already bought and read the article, they don’t have a lot of confidence making that investment. Then again, they’re friend probably already sent them the article for free anyways.

Content-specific rewards: Content creators deserve to make money from their work, but audiences today feel forced to pay, not necessarily motivated. Publishers need to reward their readers with exclusive content, tangible items, and better content. But they should do so after fans volunteer to offer them cash in exchange the amazing content they just consumed. Micropayments have struggled to gain traction before, but that’s because the current systems don’t work hard enough to benefit all parties involved. Reducing the increments of payments and increasing the frequency is where the industry needs to move because the opposite (more traditional paywalls) have clearly failed to lure mass adoption. Not only will smaller individual payments help increase the overall level of giving, it will absolutely improve the quality of all online content since only the most captivating articles, videos, etc will receive compensation. I’m personally working on a system that takes this model and fuses it with charity to strengthen the ecosystem even further. But you can learn more about that soon enough.

There are two benefits to a content-specific reward system.

1) Our digital consumption experience will become freer of massive distractions (ads) that interrupt our learning and analysis.

2) Content gets better because we’re rewarding specific work, not an entire publication. This means the best authors, topics, and processes earn the most income from readers.

Free is on its way out.

Face it. Free isn’t what it used to be. As traditional media forms cease to exist and all our content moves into the digital world, the noise that comes with current monetization systems (advertising or otherwise) are overcoming us. People are increasingly opting out of “free” to pay for what the media they want sans interruption. I hope that publishers and especially fellow bloggers continue to look at ways to motivate their fans to compensate them for great work.

By the way…this blog post isn’t free. So watch this video. Then go here.

CentUp.org from Len Kendall on Vimeo.