When the personal becomes commercial

It’s been affecting to watch the explosion of the digital media industry, especially in the form of blogs and Twitter, for someone who has been online in some form or other since the early 90s. Having been around to see it grow out of its infancy into something approaching young adulthood, you start to feel protective. It’s hard to watch the changes that transform a thing you once loved into a perhaps less appealing or recognizable form, like a surly teen replacing an adorable toddler. As has happened so many times before, what was once purely a pastime has shifted from love to money. Case in point: lately I’ve been an avid watcher of rugby, and researching its roots, I discovered its origins in village festivals (“mob football”) and then its rise and systematization in the British public school system. To see how its cousins, NFL football and soccer (a shortening of “association football”) , have developed into multi-billion dollar revenue generators and intricate fan cultures, so different from the original, amateur form, reminds me a lot of how so much has changed with the online landscape in the past two decades.

When I first got online around 1991, the only way to do so for the average person was to buy a modem and find a list of bulletin board systems to call up; my first list of phone numbers was taken from a free computer newspaper. These were mostly run by hobbyist geeks who enjoyed the new-found method of socialization via computer, wanted the latest pirated software or who just revelled in the novelty of digital communication. At heart, it wasn’t that much different than today. Watching people get excited now about “social media” and being able to connect in new, new ways using some new, new thing betrays a naive understanding of what came before — the medium isn’t any more social than it ever was, but the speed of communications has drastically increased and the audience has grown much larger. Now, talking online is less a leisurely conversation and more like trying to talk to a horde sprinkled with hecklers.

No, it’s not somehow more inherently social than it was before, not by me. The key thing in my mind that has changed about online communication is the emphasis on money, on making websites profitable, on goosing the Internet’s ability to connect us faster and more easily with a more diverse group of people than ever before, so that we can be bucketed into consumer demographics and have our likes and dislikes catalogued for better targeting by people who specialize in selling us stuff. The machine of capitalism, with its ad impressions and cost-per-clicks, has ground its way convincingly through the tender field that existed before; what was once a bunch of small family farms has been replaced by a big factory farm that has maximized output. In the infancy of online advertising, when some early personal site owners dabbled with it, placing banner ads on their websites, it was considered appalling and often caused readers to stop visiting. Imagine that now? Site-trackers and website analytics weren’t used to gather data for selling advertising to media buyers, but rather to inflate the egos of people with the most popular websites. How many pageviews a day did you get? Where were all your readers coming from? The online diary was an avatar, a digital representative of a person, and much like Facebook discovered, the personal and mercantile make a controversial mix. Even the terminology gave it away: these were online journals and diaries, and who would be so crass as to put advertising on something like that?

Online journals were essentially the first regularly updated personal websites; updated up to multiple times per day, they allowed people to publish their thoughts and observations at will, and because of the consistency of the best ones, they developed a readership of people interested in this ad-hoc mode of communication, which brought a level of intimacy between reader and writer that hadn’t really existed prior. Although more like traditional paper journals in that they detailed the quotidian happenings and random thoughts of the journal writer, occasionally they’d stray into deeper, more fleshed-out commentary. At the time, I described many online diarists, including myself, as people who aspired to be mediocre op-ed columnists and weren’t solely writing as an expression of some inner demon; seeing professional pundits writing blogs now makes me feel somewhat prescient, although it probably wasn’t that hard to envision. Even back then, there was a segment of diarists who felt that there needed to be some element of professionalism and level of quality in the writing, which seems laughable now — it’s a diary, it’s your own private scratchpad, you write what you feel! Except the dichotomy was that these online diaries weren’t exactly intended to be left unread, but to attract an audience, and the better you wrote, the more readers you would draw in. Further, there was always a divide between journal writers comfortable sharing the angst, mundanity and heartbreak of their existence with an anonymous reader and those, like myself, who preferred to swim in the waters of commentary and analysis, peppered with personal anecdotes. The online journal fell apart under that strange tension of trying to be both oriented inward and outward. Both facets still exist, but the latter has definitely won out, gradually giving rise to what we now call a blog (as Peter Merholz neologized). And in a case of the child outgrowing its parent, the old term “online diary” has all but disappeared — new bloggers who write in a diaristic format are just “personal bloggers” now.

(The same trend continues with the recently coined “social media”, as if the websites and message forums and email that preceded it was inherently unsocial. The power of names is never as evident as it is online, when a new name and a tinkered version of prior formats can produce whole new industries and careers. Thus, the “social media consultant”, who often is just someone who knows how to use Facebook and Twitter effectively to market your product.)

But back to the matter of what’s changed since I first got into this game — the money. With the rise of blogs, and the co-optation of them by business and professional media, advertising was bound to follow, and those that got into the online media industry late often had a better chance of capitalizing on it all because they hadn’t grown up around the culture that considered the ad antithetical to the concept of writing online. The old way centered around the DIY aesthetic of self-publishing; the new way brought in the advertising apparatus of print culture, relegating the sites centered around the old way of doing things to a more marginal, ‘zine-like status. Justin Hall, Glassdog, Maggy Donea and Karawynn Long — who among the millions now online remembers how popular and important these people seemed for a time? Trust me, these were big names back then! The people who were considered well-known and minor celebrities in the late 90s online have for the most part faded away or taken a backseat to newcomers who arrived after the conflicted feelings about incorporating advertising had largely abated and who were at ease with the marriage of marketing and online media. When the online population was mostly those nerdy enough to design and build their own website (which was a rarity in a time when many people didn’t even know what a website was), its pantheon was essentially other geeks and misfits and wonky personalities. Those kinds of people still exist, but they are neither well-known nor have the kind of voice that makes itself easily heard in the current environment. I feel a certain poignancy there, perhaps a tiny resonance with the way the radio star might be killed by television.

Like in other areas, those who adapt are best able to thrive when these shifts occur. People like Heather Armstrong of Dooce, Jason Kottke (and his experiment with microdonation-based sponsorship, which old-schooler Lance Arthur of Glassdog himself lambasted at the time, much like other people who had kept sites prior to the advent of profit in personal publishing.), and Matt Haughey — all of whom I remember as much less well-known versions of themselves, and who existed online prior to the rise of blog advertising — have embraced advertising and turned what was once a geeky hobby into a means of self-employment. And if they continue the way they have, even then I feel they will eventually be crowded out by newer arrivals, where individual personalities are no longer the focus and are more like traditional magazines and newspapers in their emphasis. (Would mid-90′s professional media websites like Suck.com and Feed Magazine still be around if they had started now, in an era when online advertising is seen by many companies as a huge part of their strategy and neither would likely have had to struggle as hard to fund themselves? Clearly they were ahead of their time.) The best bloggers may eventually begin to prefer the stability or cachet of working in a larger organization, much like an amateur rugby player turning pro, and being a solitary blogger will be much like other indies in film and music. The line between old-school journalist and modern blog editor becomes very thin; how many truly independent journalists exist?

Indeed, it’s quite difficult now to find a niche that hasn’t been well-mined by some savvy media company, ready to pay a blogger a barely livable wage. Yes, new blogs are born every day, and many excellent ones are independent and will remain independent, but as the gap between professional and amateur writers widens, it’s only those who have specialized experience in a particular, unexplored subject area and incredible consistency that seem to be able to capture people’s interest, given the plethora of blogs in existence. This, in turn, cause further specialization within the blog landscape, and intense copycatting. Economics blogs, sports blogs, mommy blogs, celebrity photo blogs, personal finance blogs, gadget blogs — there’s a blog for every niche, and the competition is fierce, as there is little barrier to entry. Blogging is all business these days, and marketing has become the name of the game, and with marketing comes its evil twin hucksterism. Many people have no qualms about creating blogs for the sole purpose of gaming Google’s search engine and increasing their revenue through tricks and tactics rather than interesting content, and flogging e-books and newsletters whose content is often parlous or questionable. All this seems pretty distant from the ideals of the web circa 1995, and thinking back on it now it feels like it was a quainter time, like seeing pictures of the fishing village before it turned into a metropolis. There are still fishermen out there, but a lot of them have had to find other work.

Many people now online have no idea what the environment was like before, but those who continue to thrive have been able to make the mental leap and accept the intrusion of advertising in an arena that used to be intensely personal. I hadn’t explicitly done it, until I started to think more deeply about why I had attached such a stigma to having advertising in blogs, which is what led me to write this. Perhaps I’m late in accepting it; others have happily done so, to their benefit. In fact, I enjoy what’s online much more these days — there’s much more of interest to me to read, and the commentary and analysis only gets better and deeper as people have become more able to work and write solely online. Money attracts professionalism, and professionalism is what I appreciate about the web now. As I’ve grown, so has the web, and both of us realize that money isn’t necessarily corrupting, especially if it gives rise to some of the excellent online sources we have now. It was bound to happen — free content can’t last forever, and eventually it’s got to be paid for by someone. You can still knock the ball around with your friends on a muddy field, but if you want to see some top-class rugby, you might have to buy a ticket to the test match. So, perhaps a little regretfully but with more clarity, I’ve accepted that online advertising is here to stay; the reality is that once money enters into the equation, it finds it hard to leave.