Maybe, just maybe, we knew what we were doing by setting up Unauthorized the way we did:
At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?
Here’s the sticky-fingered culprit. Facebook has decided to sweep the leg on the entire industry, it’s actually happening now. But why now? The reason why is shockingly simple.
Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf} of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:
“What if we took it all?”
And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.
The endgame is underway. Last Thursday, Rooster Teeth, a company I admire and have tremendous respect for laid off 50 people. To avoid the same fate publishers have absolutely littered their website with ads; Pop-ups, Auto-sound ads, the kitchen sink, to stay afloat. We haven’t followed suit. Frankly I’d rather die.
Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?
By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.
theCHIVE doesn’t have that option nor would we want it. Logically, if the ad-supported model is dying, we must diversify our business model. We must control our own destiny and diversify away from ad-supported to subscription model.
If you’ve noticed, we don’t advertise any of our projects anywhere. Arkhaven, Castalia, Infogalactic, VFM and Unauthorized all refuse to pay-to-play on Amazon, Facebook, Google, or anywhere else. We would rather rely upon our core supporters, focus upon serving them, and gradually grow that strong foundation than try to catch a big wave on Amazon or wherever.
Why? Because the wave belongs to the wave maker and is entirely under its control! We’ve seen, repeatedly, that even million-selling Amazon authors have ZERO support outside of Amazon. Their success is entirely in the hands of potentially hostile parties, which is why we’d rather have a small, but very reliable set of supporters than a large, but entirely unreliable one.
Build your own platform. Build your own market. TheCHIVE has belatedly realized what we knew all along: if people aren’t willing to pay for it directly, it isn’t worth doing in the first place. And if you haven’t subscribed to Unauthorized yet, you can do so here. And speaking of UATV, there is a new Chuck Dixon video on the upcoming Birds of Prey movie up now. Yes, believe it or not, he wrote that comic too….