Everything is up, up up!
. .. well, kinda.
Aside from the fact that there are not 35k of people that I’ll never get to know their story or get to potentially meet, this pandemic so far has nearly infected close to 800k (let’s just say a million at this point) and that’s in the last few months alone — it could be a heart wrenching emotional week.
Instead of wallowing in the dirt and the sadness of the notion of pandemics and giving it any more power than it deserves I thought I’d refocus my attention to the things that I’m able to do today, right now, in front of me, while I’m fit and well, try and apply myself not like nothing is happening but to use my energy for positive things.
So I have a positive thing to share.
For what feels like the first time since the internet arrived on shiny little silver cd rooms in the form of 1000’s of hours of free dialup access we are starting to see the internet get utilised like never before.
We are seeing the creaks, the heavy weight of traffic, the new world of the online warfare, mis-information battle and just general need for the average person to live out their lives through their internet connection in isolation.
Delivery sites for food have had to improve their systems and balance load from a mass of people hitting their websites like a DDOS all trying to get their food delivered and with crossed fingers that it’s not gonna be longer than the majority which currently show all slots booked for weeks from now.
On the other corner of that hexagon (very hive like) we have people for the first time trying to conduct their business online, from streaming video at home and understanding that for the first time to wanting to set themselves up an e-commerce store and work from home — work life and everything that surrounds it has gone online and digital all of sudden.
For me, I’ve seen the traffic to my online videos that are hosted on a variety of sites jump in traffic dramatically, lotta eyeballs out there right now focused in on what you are doing online because they are home, in isolation, looking either to be entertained or educated — huge potential for teaching and learning to happen.
I also think it’s important to get this message across to people who have considered doing video but never did because they were worried about the numbers to start off with — if I don’t get X amount of views in a period of time then nobody cares and it failed.
Let me be first to tell you that is completely the wrong way to look at online digital media. The play is actually a lot longer play than that and you don’t get to dictate where the audience spends their time today.
The long tail of video and SEO is alive and well on the internet. It’s the reason why media companies by the content and licenses of classic movies and music talent.
it’s the reason why twitch streamers and you tubers are finally realising that they can open source a free music album for streamers to use as a backing music track for their streams and make micro income from the amount of ‘plays’ those tracks get over hours and hours of a game streamer who can potentially be online for 8/12 hrs a day!
You do the maths.
While a lot of you tubers who went all in on their channel as their main career or income stream are suffering right now from advertisers pulling back their advertising spend (due to lower ordering volumes or the inability for people to get out because of lockdown) some channels are reporting an 80% loss in monthly YouTube revenue — they have focused on that one thing and things like stickers and t-shirt march.
That’s not enough.
The game is multi-threaded, multi-income streams and the latest metrics are free to play tiktok content, authentic potential to fall onto your other digital properties instead of putting together marketing spend on campaigns — the window for attention got smaller.
In some ways it feels a little bit like we have gone back a decade, what with YouTube and Netflix restricting the playback for HD to 480p because of bandwidth concerns, the internet would be hella slow if we all just streamed at HD from Netflix right now, we simply don’t have the capacity to do that 24/7 around the clock — you can be sure we are learning a lot however right now about connectivity and capacity.
Looking at things from where I’m at right now if I went in hard on my courses on all platforms, improved my search ability on YouTube and other platforms I could quite easily sustain myself remotely month by month with my current situation.
Obviously platforms change, so the more you get comfortable on a platform the more you need to be looking at other forms of distribution, combining all these platforms together to give you much better reach, even platforms like twitter/YouTube have advertising mechanisms built in to bring you an audience in.
There has never been a more prime time to be into video on the internet, with 5g around the corner from global rollout and elon musk firing starlink satellites into the night sky you can be sure that the unified global blanket covering of the earth is coming fast — low latency, always on, globally connected, constantly distracted human beings waiting for an update.
Past just earning an income from the knowledge you have and can share with others what does this make us on a global stage? Are we just nodes in the network or is there a potentially higher purpose and utilitarian aspect we can factor in, what would the geo located blockchain human look like?
Never been a better time in history to digitise the world around you, time to get online.
__humble x
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