So I have a gig on Friday, at the Coffee Loft in Marlborough. And I’d love to see you there. Because I long for ears, and eyeballs. Such is the life of a musician.
We’re all craving that attention, we are. But the rules are changing. Somebody like Linda Chorney understands this. Nobody’s really heard of her, but she was nominated for a Grammy, because she personally asked half of the 12,000 Grammy voters on the Grammy organization’s own social networking site to vote for her. By the time she was done, more people had heard of her than have ever heard of me – and they were people that count.
This is why people think Facebook is worth 100 billion dollars.
I’ve got a MySpace page. And a Facebook page. And a YouTube channel. Sure, the MySpace page basically says “This is stupid and ugly, go visit my actual Web site” – which, in aggregate, is likely the cause of Rupert Murdoch taking an absolute bath on MySpace – but it’s there. Just me, chasing the tail of whatever gets the ears, and eyeballs.
It used to be that the connection cost us musicians actual dollars out of our actual pockets. Repro costs for CDs, postage for gig mailings. Now, there are dozens of services – like Facebook and YouTube and Tweeter and Burper and all the vastness of digital distribution – that no longer ask for dollars out of our pockets. But connecting is never free. And while MySpace and Facebook and YouTube have no membership costs, it’s worth noting that Google and Facebook are making money, and that money ain’t coming from my gig announcements. And MySpace was sold to an advertising company.
See, it’s not just me chasing your eyeballs. The entire Web runs on eyeballs – for advertising. Watch a free video, watch an ad first. Visit a Facebook fan page, get an ad (well, not my page – I’m apparently not popular enough to bother with). It’s like TV, or newspapers, but, oh, so much better, the sites tell the advertisers – more targeted, more precise, more, well, profitable. In other words, follow the money: if you’re not the customer – if you’re not the source of the dollars – you’re the product.
It’s just another way of paying. I kinda hate it more than the previous way of paying – but I’ll admit, it’s more accessible to more people. We don’t actually place a value on our time, our eyeballs, our personal information, our faces (in responding to a recent lawsuit, Facebook is claiming that it can use your likeness in its Web advertising because you’re a “public figure” as far as your friends are concerned). We don’t all have dollars – but we do have time and eyeballs and personal information, and most of these sites are exploiting the fact that few people place a value on those things (well, we do, but it’s astoundingly cheap – Google is offering people $25 in Amazon credits to install a browser plugin that will allow Google to study their Web traffic for a year).
So YouTube, and Facebook, and Tweeter and Burper and Friendster (boy, that one just died) and LinkedIn and the whole mess of them. They’re all relying on the network effect – they can sell advertising because everybody goes there, and everybody goes there because everybody else goes there. It’s hard to break into this market once a leader is established – Google+, anybody? – which is, again, why Facebook is supposed to be worth 100 billion dollars.
But there’s a cautionary tale here. It’s possible, certainly, that Facebook will remain the AT&T of social networking. But let’s not forget that MySpace was worth $580 million to Rupert Murdoch in 2005 – and $35 million 6 years later. I don’t care about Facebook, or YouTube – its value is exclusively in my ability to connect. And the next thing that comes along that makes that possible is just as much of an option for me as what there is now. I’m not paying for Facebook, not in dollars, anyway – and that’s just one less element of stickiness that keeps me there. My dream is that, eventually, these sites will pay for our being their product rather than their customers – it won’t claw back Mark Zuckerberg’s payday, but it will, ultimately, I hope, reinforce the fact that what’s important is the connection, not the channel.
So go visit me on YouTube. I’m putting up more videos. But those videos will go wherever they have to in order to reach you. And come see me at the Coffee Loft – because the whole point of all this social networking nonsense is so we can actually see each other, in the same room, enjoying one of the last things that’s still beyond the reach of the social Web advertising vampires.