What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [27]
The Lilliputians have triumphed. The economies of scale must now compete with the economies of small. What changed is the definition of “big enough”—big enough to make money, big enough to survive and succeed. The tipping point of critical mass in business has fallen from the sky to eye level. Once upon a time in retail, you had to have a store, which needed location, location, location; capital to fill it with inventory; and cash flow to hire staff and buy ads to bring in customers. Then you had to have a chain of stores to gather muscle with suppliers and create marketing efficiencies. Now, you can find customers via eBay, Amazon (which is as much a platform for retailers as it is a retailer itself), Google (where you can buy inexpensive and targeted ads), and new online marketplaces of neat and unique stuff such as Etsy.com (which sells handmade clothes and crafts). Profits accrue sooner because you don’t own bricks or necessarily stock inventory or spend a fortune on marketing.
Once upon a time, you couldn’t write for a living unless you were paid by a big publisher, the guy who could afford to own printing presses because he was the guy who had the big audience (a virtuous circle of its time). Now many writers make money blogging. Enough money? Well, that’s up to you. It could be enough to pay for your internet hosting or maybe a lunch or two—or a decent living. Here’s an accounting of the value of my blog: In 2007, I made $13,855 in ad revenue ($4,450 of that from Google) on Buzzmachine. I shouldn’t have quit my day job, you say. But Buzzmachine is what got me appointed as a journalism professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism (worth not quite six figures a year) and consulting and speaking gigs (worth a few times that in good times) and the contract for this book (worth about double those gigs). So over a few years, my weblog is easily worth seven figures. My cost: $327 a year for deluxe internet hosting. There are bloggers who make—and whose blogs are worth—much more. But Buzzmachine is big enough.
Calculate in the falling cost of work if you want to go it alone online—no office, no commuting, no suits—and our definitions of profitability, critical mass, and success all shrink. The cost of independence has dropped. In an age when so many people are sick of their jobs—you know who you are—this self-reliance is empowering. Loyalty from employer to employees died in my lifetime. Now, given the chance to earn FU money and leave office politics behind, there is less loyalty from employees to employers as well. We’ll see more people trying to make it on their own because they want to and they can—or because they have no choice when shrinking companies lay them off.
What should their former employers’ relationships be to these newly independent agents? Companies should encourage and support some one-man spin-offs. After U.K. football writer Rick Waghorn was laid off from his paper in Norwich, he started his own football blog and community with a former business colleague. Their old paper viewed them as competition. Foolish. It was the paper that had built Waghorn’s brand and audience. When it fired him, it lost that investment along with his content. It didn’t have to. Instead, the paper should have sold Waghorn’s ads and promoted his site. It could have taken advantage of his expertise, work, reputation, and audience without having to pay his salary. Meanwhile, Waghorn would have been able to build a company. Everybody won. If I were to run the paper, I’d invest in Waghorn. I’d build a network of Waghorns.
But it’s not easy