Oh boy, I get email.
I’m reaching out one last time about featuring your brand in influencer-generated gift guides for the upcoming holiday shopping season.
I have 20 fabulous influencers who are doing holiday gift guides and they have a combined reach of over 3 million consumers who are eager to hear about your brand.
I’m running a special where I will feature your brand in all 20 gift guides for $4,000. It’s a one-time fee and it covers the influencers’ fees.
Gift guides are the most impactful way to get the word out about your brand to consumers who are looking for gifting ideas. This is the 4th year that I’ve run this campaign because every year, my clients get fantastic results.
Spaces in these gift guides are filling up fast and I don’t want you to miss this great opportunity!
Please feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions and/or if you would like to be part of this campaign.
Look, you’ll never persuade me with a tease that features the words “brand” and “influencer”. That’s a great way to get me running in the opposite direction.
I notice also that I am expected to cough up $4,000 to be mentioned in these “gift guides” from 20 different “influencers” who have almost certainly never even heard of me, while the “influencers” are getting paid. Seems a little unfair? I think I’ll pass.
The problem is that marketers have finally figured out a way of making unfilterable spam: they get the content creator to embed it in the creation. Welcome to “the great enshitment” in which social media becomes spam and garbage and 100,000 new content creators and ‘influencers’ vie for attention in a dramatically expanding stream of crap. Also, as the marketers are gleefully aware, it’s going to be impossible to regulate. If some ‘influencer’ starts touting dangerous products or ideas, the marketers just shrug because it’s on them. The marketers make their money facilitating the mess, they don’t control it and it’s fractalized so that nobody can regulate it.
There was a brief time when some of us thought the internet was the new forum, the new Great Library of Alexandria – but it actually appears to have become a conduit for photoshopped wannabes selling their onlyfans (porn) or porn (porn) or conspiracy theories. Brave new world? No, it cowers behind anonymity and whines about free speech.
Re: Marcus Ranum @ #1…
All of that simply reinforces and validates my complete disinterest in “social media”. The only thing close to that that I pay any attention are fora that are tightly controlled to eliminate the spam you’re describing. Sites like this one and the Raspberry Pi Forums. I don’t do anything with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc., etc. and never have.
$4,000 for (maybe) 3 million exposures. That’s assuming everyone opens the gift guide. What’s the expected conversion rate? It would need to be one in 750 (if I’m doing the math right) with a $1 profit margin per sale to even break even. That’s an insane conversion rate for that kind of marketing.
I use the traditional hypnotism-through TV method to influence people, a tradition preferred by evil geniuses through time. “Obey the master”.
Kind of like those “who’s who in American’s schools” scams
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
“I don’t want you to miss this great opportunity!” is a dead giveaway.
My eyes see the words as written, but my brain insists on reading it as ‘grift guide’.
It might have been more convincing if the email included just a single mention of what they think your “brand” actually is. Everything about this screams “generic mass-mail.”
re: #1. the idea that the host of the show plugs the product as if it was part of the show is hardly a new phenom. Granted, it has come into the attention of the mainstream audience more rapidly through youtube / tiktok vids and “influencers”.
But the practice was very common in the 50s through early 70s on TV shows (I have (bad) memories of reruns of Lawrence Welk, and certainly the Jimmy Dean show had a few that still exist, esp if Jim Henson’s Rowlf made a mess of the time with his improvisations). TV Game Shows (Price is Right) have been that way non-stop.
It certainly is more common on radio still, and not just Alex Jones-like right-wing radio.
So it is what it is, and hardly a new phenom at all. Just not something ad-blocker software can handle. yet.
As far as I can tell, “influencer” is just the latest form of “famous for being famous”. All you need to get in is a gift for bullshitting. It’s “content creation” without any actual, well, content.
This just justifies my decision to work on a culture of in-group criticism even more. Hopefully the part involved in being severe and strict with non-literal language helps with advertisers.
acroyear@#10:
I didn’t say it was historically new, just new to social media. But, whatever. “This is nothing new” doesn’t mean it’s good, so what’s your point?
Another thing – it appears youtube is tending to de-monetize creators who embed their own ads in the content because it amounts to competing with the platform, which is monetizing the “algorithm” – we always knew that would happen, because the platforms’ interest opposes the content creators’ but the content creators are just starting to figure that out. Which will (already is) trigger a race to the bottom: on FranLab the other day (for one example) she was saying that she has to make a new video every day or the algorithm deprioritizes her channel, which means she has to be making content 8hr/day for what comes to a few bucks an hour. People who have a historical framework for US corporate labor practices should not be surprised by this, nor the race for the bottom it is triggering. The end result is the great enshitment in which everything turns to clickbait and verbal spam as the content creators chase a dwindling audience. Content creators that used to try to do good, thoughtful work are getting drowned by the stream of clickbait. It’s e-mail spam all over again. Some of us remember when email was a good form of communication.
Basically, marketers are going to zergrush every new channel for communication or art – it’s war to the death. And yes “it is nothing new” but so what? It sucks and it always sucked because corporate capitalists and marketers suck and have always sucked. They will always suck, but that doesn’t excuse it.
Marcus Ranum @ 13
Apart from using Patreon, what other ways are there to fight back?
Correct. I have to turn on ads in my videos, not to enhance the trickle of revenue I get from them (I think I make maybe $20/month, tops), but because if I don’t, the YouTube algorithm will route everyone around them, and they won’t be seen.
The best I have to oppose the corporate/shareholder motivations and youtube is never responding to questions. The best they get is sometimes I don’t click through an add.
Youtube can pay me to answer questions.
Influence me!
No, really.
I need gift ideas.
I, too, am very happy living a life without any of the latest “social media” except for FtB and a handful of other blogs like Mike the Mad Biologist. I’m also on four e-mail lists: two about standardization of programming languages (C and C++), one about the tz database, and one about passenger trains (mostly Amtrak).
I have no interest in the kind of trash that one currently finds on Facebook and others.
Sometimes you can click an ad, it will open new tab, close the tab and the ad is on hold until you leave the page.
Sometimes I play whack-a-mole with the ads.
WTF is “your brand” that this guy thinks you’d want to “feature in influencer-generated gift guides?” All I know of “your brand” is this blog. Is he offering to cite or suggest your blog in a gift guide?
Apart from using Patreon, what other ways are there to fight back?
Unfortunately, we don’t have to. After they have made vlogging and podcasting (and maybe blogging) an uninteresting shambles, it’ll collapse in on itself because when the content producers think it’s not worth it anymore, the content will dry up. I believe that is already happening. But for that to happen we have to accept that it’s going to be scorched earth.
AI and robots are the X-factor that may trigger a collapse in the online market for attention as a commodity. For all that I loathe Elon Musk he is trying to threaten Twitter by getting them to say how many humans actually engage with the garbage. There are vast armies of clickbot sockpuppets trying to game the “algorithm” by posting “your comment is so insightful and subtly brilliant that I am in awe.” There are already clickbots using AI to generate comments. And there are ads for packages for “influencers” for AIs that will write postings. I was going to do a posting about that topic but I fell into a recursive stack when I thought about having a textbot write the posting, as an experiment. Anyhow, one possible outcome is a vast social media landscape of chatbots squabbling with eachother, simulating the witty repartee of 100mn copies of John Morales. At that point, the whole mess collapses because nobody is actually spending any money on any of the crap being touted.
Oddly, the one media company that is almost sure to continue to do well is google, in spite of their many corporate blunders. Why? Because if someone is looking for a cheap hard drive, they may google “cheap 16tb hdd” and google’s adwords actually increase the targeted sales for the vendor – which of course they notice and drive $ to google instead of facebook, or whatever. Meanwhile conventional advertisers throw money at ads for cars, insurance, and other stuff that pretty much nobody buys through an ad on youtube or whatever. So the ad “spend” is going to move around desperately, while google and amazon are able to monetize manipulating their search algorithms for the marketers.
It may all collapse when someone realizes that none of the chatbots are running out and buying new cars based on web ads. Advertising for tacos and chicken burgers probably still works.
I have a theory that marketing dollars are shifted around rapidly so that none of the companies using the marketing channels can realize that none of it translates to sales. If they figure that out the online marketing bubble bursts, leaving google and amazon as the survivors.
I really feel badly for the people who are chasing the brass ring to get “followers” and “interactions” because that’s how content providers used to make lots of $ on platforms, but now that the platforms are cutting back on what they pay, the whole edifice of content providers may collapse.
Fran, from FranLab posted some charts explaining that everything is drying up at once – the adwords are paying 1/2 what they used to, half the patreon base has evaporated, and the companies are not paying influencers except in merch. Wanna say nice things about some rollerskates in return for some rollerskates? You can’t eat rollerskates… My prediction is that patreon will continue to dwindle and, when the market for “show your boobs to incels on the internet” (onlyfans) goes into a race for the bottom, all these “gigs” will implode as the owners of the data-funnels take bigger and bigger slices of the action.
The future of media is shitty, but it always has been, which is why they keep chasing the new thing, before the marketers shit it up and chase away the audience. Repeat and repeat.
All I know of “your brand” is this blog. Is he offering to cite or suggest your blog in a gift guide?
PZ’s going after the spider fan market, which is pretty niche.
Ironically (as someone pointed out) that marketer showing interest in PZ’s “brand” is actually a shitbot spamming that deep assurance that it’s really very interested to everyone who owns a blog.
I used to get offers like “I’ll pay $1000 if you host an article we provide, on your blog.” Now that there are so many people chasing sponsorship it’s pretty much “we’ll give you a lollipop in the shape of our logo if you embed promotions in 6 of your blog postings.” Of course if some blogger like PZ or myself tried to take that arrangement, the lollipops would stop after the first postings because the audience would leave.
All I know of “your brand” is this blog. Is he offering to cite or suggest your blog in a gift guide?
PZ’s going after the spider fan market, which is pretty niche.
Ironically (as someone pointed out) that marketer showing interest in PZ’s “brand” is actually a shitbot spamming that deep assurance that it’s really very interested to everyone who owns a blog.
I used to get offers like “I’ll pay $1000 if you host an article we provide, on your blog.” Now that there are so many people chasing sponsorship it’s pretty much “we’ll give you a lollipop in the shape of our logo if you embed promotions in 6 of your blog postings.” Of course if some blogger like PZ or myself tried to take that arrangement, the lollipops would stop after the first postings because the audience would leave.
“Impactful?”
Let’s not be too ambitious; perhaps 100M copies of Marcus Ranum.
(Start with the easy stuff)
Oh, you’re unaware of all the killer PZ merch? Hoodies, keychains, oven gloves, everything you need! And that’s not to mention the new album “PZ Sings” available on vinyl, CD, and limited edition glow-in-the-dark 8-track.
Onlyfans (porn) and porn (porn) are actually some of the most positive things online today and throughout internet history. In fact if it weren’t for things like FOSTA:SESTA, puritanical payment processors and social networks (many of which were initially built and grown by sex workers, only to be ditched by corporate in efforts to “clean up shop” for big bucks investors), we’d be in a much more egalitarian place regarding sex work and erotic content.