In which someone defends my honor
You read the post about me being called a troll, now read the back-story/follow up from Corey Tamas. Personally I think he frames it pretty well, but obviously I’m biased, since it was my honor.
You read the post about me being called a troll, now read the back-story/follow up from Corey Tamas. Personally I think he frames it pretty well, but obviously I’m biased, since it was my honor.
I’m pretty big on not link baiting, or so I thought. As it turns out, some of the Macgasm readers, and one in particular, seem to think just a little bit differently. According to a message on Twitter (the sender shall remain anonymous), paraphrased of course, Macgasm is pretty much turning into link bait trolling.
Hours, upon hours are spent by me, as well as a handful of others, writing daily about what we love — technology. Our opinions vary, out tones differ, but all in all I would have to say that all of the contributors sincerely try to avoid link baiting readers for page views. On occasion a misleading title pops out here, or there, but for the most part we try to avoid the leading post titles and stick to the facts, then provide our opinions.
But, apparently the definition of link-bait-trolling has changed without notice, and link-baiting is now synonymous with opinion. Expressing opinions, that also happen to be unpopular with your audience, is now officially defined as link-bait trolling, at least according to my latest Macgasm fan.
I dislike how Apple handled the Lion release. I don’t think it was ready for primetime, and I certainly don’t think that Apple took a great first-step by releasing it when they did. So I wrote about it, on my Apple blog. Sure, I was sarcastic, and a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but meant every word of it.
My Web site. My Blog. My Article. My Opinion. My right to write it.
What followed was a series of complaints, from one person in particular, that ranged from pretty much equating us to Gizmodo all the way to claiming that we were actively trying to manipulate Apple stock prices to make a quick buck, and sadly it was all from someone who knew better.
Those of you who know me, know I just returned from vacation. A vacation I didn’t plan on taking until I found myself unable to sanely write about technology without feeling stabby. So, instead of continuing my ornery ways, I decided to take a break. Minimum Internet. No writing. Real-life stuff. Time went by and more and more I craved, and missed, writing about technology on a daily basis. By the time my week was up, I was glad to be settling back into the saddle. One full day into my return, I’m questioning my sanity — why do I continue to write, for free, for a community that rarely speaks positively about things, and rarely provides fair and honest insights in comment systems?
For an industry that seems to pride itself on swinging the biggest dick around the room, why do we continue to try and out-swing our neighbours? I’m really starting to wonder about it.
Are comment systems and social networks really adding to, or building, community, or is it just arming the enemy with tools they need to carry on with their pointless crusade to be the biggest douche on the Internet? Why do I, do we all really, write in an industry comprised of people willing to race to the bottom, and thump their chest the whole way into the toilet?
Why?
I’m as guilty as some I guess, getting caught up in the daily grind, taking my annoyances out on others (sorry other Apple blogs) in a negative way. But to be honest, it’s not me, it’s never really been me, and after today, I’m starting to wonder when it became me? I’m starting to realize it was the moment that I published my first post on the Internet.
Some say it’s being overtaken by passion, others say it’s grand-standing, and some have taken to labelling it trolling, but all in all it could be summed up in one word: futile. Yet, I find myself getting sucked into it again, and again, and again.
Here’s why: I spend countless hours trying to help others online by writing posts, news posts, tips, and reviews, and yet we’re mostly met with drive-by trolls. Someone once said Garbage In, Garbage Out, but on the Internet too often it’s Good In, Garbage Out. That needs to change.
I’m worried that this may come off sounding like whining, or even complaining, but I really want you to stop and think for a moment about what you give back to the Internet, what you give back to the sites and communities you frequent? Are you really engaging them? Are you doing all you can to let your favourite authors know that you appreciate their hard work?
I’m not, and I really should. I know full well that negative comments often overshadow and outnumber positive ones by quite a large number, and still, I say nothing, and I sit in the shadows, letting the trolls run rampant.
The positive fans remain silent, and the negative complainers bombard message systems. Why is that?
Writers, hundreds, thousands, and possibly even millions head to the Internet to educate and entertain, and more times than not they’re doing it for free, for the love of it. They don’t ask for a cent, and yet, on the whole the only thing we give them is silence or smartass comments.
I’m vowing to be more positive and more supportive of the Web sites that I love and frequent, I hope you do the same. Maybe it’ll help me to stop questioning humanity so much.
There’s been a lot going on over at Macgasm the last couple of months. To catch you up rather quickly, we moved from MediaTemple to Rackspace, Apache to Nginx and back to Apache, and we’ve gotten our asses handed to us by Google with their Panda change, or so we think.
Most of these changes resulted in one or two major downtime problems, and the other resulted in a pretty serious cut to our bottom line. All of these things had me seriously wondering about writing online for a living, and more importantly the control a search engine has over your earning power, as well as the extent that so many of us rely on Google for our web presence.
We’ve always done very little PR with Macgasm, our philosophy has always been that people will find us if they want to find us, and up until about a year ago that served our visions particularly well. It was during the holiday season of 2009 that everything changed, and I began to realize that I could probably make a decent living writing about technology online. I’ve never been the type to dream about the high-life, but during the holidays of that year it started to look like a meagre and reasonable living could be made from my endeavour into writing about Apple. What changed at that point was pretty simple — Google News.
Google News has been around for a pretty long time at that point, so it’s existence was neither new to me, nor all that innovative at the time, but our inclusion in the listings changed everything. Let’s go back a little bit for some backstory.
Advertising on Macgasm.net has always been a bi-polar affair for me. It took me a long time (2yrs) before I even considered placing advertisements on the website. Our first foray into advertising was Google Adsense, but that lasted all of a week when I realized I made a dollar all week long. We then went back to disabling the ads, then eventually, about a year later, I went to BuySellAds.
BuySellAds was great in theory, but like everything ad-related on the internet, making a living from advertisers online was solely linked to our traffic. This is where we entered into what seemed like a never ending chicken and egg scenario for the website. In order to spend more time on the website we had to write more, and in order to write more, the website had to pay out more. The circle began, eventually we broke the cycle and traffic began growing pretty quickly, by our original standards. We went from about 1500 page views a month to about 50,000 in no time at all. Things looked bright for traffic growth, and more importantly for the bottom line.
At the time BuySellAds wasn’t doing a very good job for us. We took a set it and forget it mentality, hoping people would magically find us online. They didn’t, and a majority of our ad inventory went unsold. Looking back, based on our traffic, I’m not all that surprised that inventory went unsold, but at the time, it was pretty heart-breaking.
Here we were, trying to make money with the website, build a community, and somehow cover all the news that needed covering without sacrificing our livelihoods at the day job. Then Google News happened.
I remember it quite vividly because it was a pretty exciting moment. I was out to dinner with friends I haven’t seen in years (one lived and still lives in SF, the other in Ireland), after watching a particularly crappy movie. During a brief lull in the catching up they both went to the washroom. I opened my iPhone, and checked my email. I had a new unread message from Tamar Weinberg, letting me know that she managed to convince Google to add us to Google News. Just like that we were a semi-legitimate news source for a very large number of people. Man, do I still owe her many thanks for that one (Tamar, if you’re reading this, I owe you large).
What followed after our inclusion into Google News was month after month of pretty crazy growth. Every single month our traffic would surpass the previous month’s traffic. We went from about 50,000 page views per month to over 500,000 page views per month in no time at all. Now, let me say that the growth wasn’t solely based on Google News traffic. We did a lot of stuff with the website, and spent a lot of time working the social networks to gain visibility at this point, but it would be safe to say that a very large chunk, not a majority, but a large enough amount of our traffic came from Google and Google News.
After a very long battle with increasing server costs, and BuySellAds still stagnating, I finally decided it was time to put Google Adsense advertisements back on the website. It was a matter of publishing ads, or shutting down the website for good. The results were surprising, within the first month I could easily see that there was potential to finally not only cover the hosting costs, but cover my time also for the first time ever. The second month came and went, and the ad dollars increased again, same for the third, fourth, and fifth months. I fully expected it to eventually even out, and it did for a couple of month. Ad revenue was finally decent enough to not only pay myself, but also pay a couple of writers part-time, or so I thought.
Here we are, back in May 2011. The Macgasm server can’t keep up with the readership demand, so we decide to move to Rackspace. Instantly we noticed problems with our stats and Google Adsense numbers. We expected it, but we also expected for the numbers to rebound slightly. They didn’t, and they haven’t yet. Long story short, it’s starting to look like we got hit by a huge left hook from Google Panda. After analyzing our traffic logs we can see that traffic from Google was down 15.47% the last four months, and Google News traffic was down 20.35%. The bizarre thing was traffic on the whole is up 15%, but everything coming from Google was down, down, down, including our ad revenue.
Here’s where things get a bit confusing. We’re not big on SEO, we don’t content farm, and we desperately don’t try to pull a fast one over Google. We write what we want, when we want, how we wan. Finally, after a quarter of a year, we are now getting earnings similar to we were back when we first launched Google Ads, despite having 4x as many page views now as we did then. Our CPC levels and RPM levels dropped through the floor.
After four months of trying to wrap my head around the case of the missing ad-revenue I realized something, I probably rely more on Google than I do Apple for my daily business. Sure, Apple provides me with the news we cover on Macgasm, but Google makes the coverage possible with Google Reader. Our email … hosted at Google. Our analytics … provided by Google. Our ad-revnue … primarily courtesy of Google. My main IM client of choice for the website … Google Talk. Our number one source of traffic … Google.
See where I’m going with this?
The extent we rely on one company in this industry borders on insanity. The competitors aren’t even close to comparable when it comes to the Google services I rely on on a daily basis. All it takes is Google deciding that Macgasm is spam or not worthy of another ad dollar and the whole site would go down in flames. There wouldn’t be much we could do about it either, no one to call, no one to get answers from, just web forums and outdated FAQ pages that barely even make sense any more.
Doesn’t that worry anyone else? If so, why is no one doing anything about it? Google is pretty close to owning the Internet in a way no other company has in the past. If you’re hoping to do business on the Internet, you better be damn sure you don’t annoy the man, err Google, because with a flick of a switch they could easily make it so you no longer exist. Just ask legitimate businesses left reeling after the Google Panda update.
I may have built a house on the Internet, but it’s certainly Google’s world I’m living in. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was concerned about the future of publishing online.
Given how far behind the Apple TV is from the feature set of the competition, combined with the fact that the A5 CPU has been floating around for half a year now, a new updated Apple TV doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.
Or… Apple could be working on their Web site.
Source: cultofmac.com
But gradually, I realized that my brain doesn’t work with the same rigid logic and demarcations that my digital systems require. I also realized that I missed the feeling of pen on paper more and more, and would benefit from taking more breaks from my glowing screen. I feel the same way. No matter what app I try, a pen and paper always feels like a more natural GTD methodolgy to me. Heck, I’ve even written about it.
