I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who asked me what I thought about blogging / podcasting / creating video content, specifically as it pertains to viewership and even more specifically as it pertains to NUMBERS of viewers for content we post to the internet.

There’s a lot of talk amongst the social media set about numbers and views and influence and what makes content “worth” creating.

Unfortunately, all that talk about numbers assumes that people are equals, when we most clearly are not. o_O

Authorities & Audiences

Let’s say, for instance, that you have 100 Facebook Friends and they’re all people that you’ve grown up with or met IRL (in real life) that share no particular concentration in any industry. Let’s also say that *I* have 2,434 Facebook Friends and you and I happen not to share very many mutual friends… Logically, if I post something, it’s more likely to receive responses, hits, views, whatever, because my listening audience is immensely larger than yours.

Let’s take that same scenario and change how you created and cultivated your audience of 100 FB Friends… Let’s say that you were an expert in a particular field and the people you reached out to and also accepted FB friend invites from were all involved in or interested in your chosen profession. Let’s say you had conversations with this specialized audience and they recognized you as an authority.. Someone who was known to have interesting, important & relevant things to say and similarly useful links to share.

NOW.. If you and I post about the same information at the same time, except it happens to be along the lines that you and your friends normally kick it about, my larger population is trumped by your way smaller one because your readers are PASSIONATE about your content and mine are not.

On top of that.. All this numbers-talk only takes into account first-tier connections. If my Twitter fanbase is 10 people, except one of those 10 people following me has 60,000 followers, I might not directly have a large audience, but someone following me might. Similarly.. If I have 10 and one of my ten followers has 10 and one of her ten followers has 10 and one of his ten followers has 1,000,000… You get the picture, so there’s no actual telling who’s going to receive wider distribution when they output content.

So.. Unless your ability to pay rent depends on how many readers/viewers you have, don’t worry about it. The number is entirely irrelevant unless you can make money by serving ads to those people. You might ask yourself what the point is of creating content if there aren’t going to be very many people watching…

Content For Whom?

First of all, you want to create content FOR YOURSELF.

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to blog about, my friend Penelope Trunk told me (paraphrasing) “You should blog about what you’re passionate about… or else you’re going to stop doing it”. That had to be THE most important thing I’ve ever heard about blogging and it’s absolutely true. I’m writing this post right this very second because I FEEL LIKE IT, and for no other reason. I’m enjoying thinking about it. I’m enjoying writing it. I’m going to enjoy posting it and receiving feedback about it. :D

Second, you want to create content for your Passionate Viewers.

Again, back in the day… I was discussing the creation and production of web shows with my friend Drew Olanoff and he told me his opinions about views vs viewERs. Basically, my experience up until that point had been with the technical side of creating videos and I had had little-to-no interaction with end-users, viewers that weren’t my personal friends, and certainly not entire communities of people who interact with each other based on a common love of or respect for a show.

Paraphrasing Drew’s point.. He felt that it was better to focus on your small amount of Passionate Viewers than to attempt to cater to a potentially way larger number of people that might drop by your show, watch an episode or two and bounce.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be, but I was willing to consider the theory. I eventually agreed entirely when my own shows & blogs gained an expanded audience and I got to experience the differences between the groups firsthand.

My stats have pretty consistently looked like this for the past few years.

93% Passers-By and 7% Regulars… Except the Regulars make up 17% of my visits.

I would certainly rather keep my current percentage of Regulars than increase my numbers of Passers-By at the expense of some of my Passionate Readers/Viewers.

While it would be nice to keep the current Regulars and convert some of the Passers-By into still more Regulars, I like to think about blogging relative to real life instead of relative to other, immensely more popular blogs.

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

I currently have 118 people who subscribe to BillCammack.com by email. If you think about that… When was the last time that you gathered 118 people somewhere so they could listen to something you said? o_O … Probably “Never”, because I know that’s the answer for me.

So, each one of y’all 118 people, I appreciate you for tuning in. :) Thank You, and I try to keep things interesting around here. ;)

My actual subscriber number currently reads 244, because they add in people who subscribe via RSS and receive my blog articles in their feed readers. I’m sure a number of those are “bots” (robots, automated computer processes), but for those of y’all that are real people, Thanks for subscribing! :D

Even amongst subscribers, you have Lurkers, who read the articles but don’t comment directly on my blog. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing my posts with other people and discussing my ideas on other social networking sites & forums. I’m happy about that as well, because I don’t blog so people can come to my site. I blog because I feel like it and if someone else gets something out of it, that’s icing on the cake. If someone finds what I write to be entertaining, educational or useful, even better! :D

Then, You have the behind-the-scenes commenters.. The people that strike up conversations with me about my content when we run into each other at parties. The people that email or DM me to let me know what’s going on with them or that they enjoyed a particular post. It’s always gratifying to hear that someone got something out of an article I didn’t even have to write. It’s like when I happen to walk down a street or get into a particular subway car and tourists ask me for directions. I just happened to be there to point them in the right direction, and that’s always a good feeling.

The top level is the online commenters! :D .. I shouted out many of them 10 months ago in my last post of 2009: billcammack.com/2009/12/31/world-in-my-eyes-happy-new-year.

It’s the commenters that make my blog a community instead of a bunch of speeches by Bill Cammack. Lots of times, readers get more out of what the commenters share than what I initially posted!… I learn stuff from them also and I’m open to changing directions if someone has a convincing argument that things are actually different than I currently believe them to be.

So.. Thanks again, commenters! :D .. We almost have another full year together under our belts! :D

How Many Do You Need?

The way I see it, from my personal experience with online communities between 2006 and 2010, the only people you should be concerned with if you’re thinking about starting a blog or podcast or web series are 1) YOURSELF, and 2) the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re talking about and are willing to read, listen, watch and maybe even join in the conversation.

If that’s 100,000 people?… Fine… However, it’s ALSO fine if it’s 10 people.. five of whom are related to you. :)

If you feel like you NEED a bunch of people to consistently watch your show and click on your advertisements or else you’re not going to be able to MAKE your show, you have the wrong business model. Do it cheaper. Use fewer graphics. Spend fewer hours creating it. Edit it less. Use a webcam instead of a video camera. Output once a week instead of once a day. Output once a month instead of once a week. If you have something you want to express, just figure out how to do it within your budget & time constraints and make it happen!

In fact.. Sometimes, I’ll write an entire blog post or make a video just so ONE PERSON can see it (or maybe a specific, small set of people). In those cases, if 1,000 people watch the video and the person/people I made it for didn’t, I wasn’t successful in communicating my expression to them.

OTOH.. If 10 people watch a video and I know that the three people I made it for saw it?… Mission Accomplished! :D

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The Emperor wears no clothes.

Here’s how fads occur..

Someone does something that other people agree is a good or stylish thing to do and then everyone copies that person.

Eventually, all the guys want to buy the same car and all the gals want to buy the same boots and sunglasses and nobody realizes they’re all following one person’s idea.

One of the social media fads has been to incorrectly categorize the credit people deserve for how large their social network is.

People who are merely information-passers are being said to have influence.

This has been going on for years already. Companies have actually posted job descriptions that require the applicants to have more than so many Twitter followers. I’d like to laugh at that except that it’s so pathetic. I already explained why the number of followers someone has doesn’t mean anything at all, but let’s go over that again.

Follow Me Back

When I first got involved with Twitter, a couple of years before the Civilians found out about it and talked about it on the evening news like as if they understood what they were supposed to do with it, the philosophy of the community was “follow back”. Anybody that followed you, you were ‘supposed’ to offer them the courtesy of following them back. This was fine with me at the beginning, because the only people that knew of me on Twitter were my friends from other social media sites, so anyone that added me, I actually WANTED to listen to.

This got out of hand when randoms started following me. I became accustomed to 10 new people that I had never heard of before following me on Twitter every single day. This made me question the concept of automatically following people back because it was no longer people I wanted to hear from. My Twitter stream was being diluted with minutia & drivel instead of being a rapid-access version of forums or newsgroups I had been a member of.

I stopped auto-following people. Meanwhile, I noticed that others continued to auto-follow, going so far as to figure out programs to automatically add anyone that followed them so they didn’t have to sit there all day, clicking “follow” on their accounts. Next thing you know, there are people with tens of thousands of Twitter followers that they don’t know and that don’t have any relevant information for them and that they have zero demographics for in order to explain to someone why the community they have access to is valuable to their company.

Amassing Followers

There are some people that are celebrities and microcelebrities and weblebrities (etc, etc) that actually had a lot of people following them legitimately. These people were popular in the space or pioneers or selected a niche and always kicked out pertinent information that people wanted to listen to. This was way before the SUL (Twitter Suggested User List), and these people were amassing a crowd of listeners who were passionate about what they had to say.

Other people, I noticed, hehehehe were making rapid advances towards surpassing my number of followers without having anything relevant to contribute whatsoever. These people are social media clowns.. bums.. There was no way they should have been advancing like that, so I started studying their progress to figure out what was going on.

SInce Twitter only updates their following/follower counts once a day, it took me 3 or 4 days to figure out what was happening. The people who were progressing way beyond their personal merit always had their followING count leading their followER count. In fact, the gap was becoming wider every day.

How To ‘Game’ Twitter

If you think about this, it makes sense. If you have 10 followers and I have 2,888 (my current count as of this writing), I seem prestigious to you. If I follow you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to follow me back, first of all out of reverence for my accomplishments on Twitter (amassing followers) and secondly, so that you can say you’re connected to someone that a lot of people follow.

So.. I can essentially add ANYONE with fewer followers than I have and there’s a good chance they’re going to follow me back. On top of that, once they developed apps that told people who was following them back and who wasn’t, people were afraid of being unfollowed, so they got with the program.

These same apps added bulk following and unfollowing and then it was off to the races. The system-gamers would add HUNDREDS of people every day by going to the general population timeline and clicking “Follow” for anyone that posted anything. A percentage of those hundreds they added (which explains why their followING count is always higher than their followER count) add them back. The ones that don’t add them back get bulk deleted using the peripheral application. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

This is how people got so many Twitter followers before the SUL. In fact, gaming Twitter was so prevalent that people were getting people to pay them to explain how to amass followers. There were “clubs” where your price of admission for joining the club was that you had to follow everyone involved and your win was that everyone involved would follow you back.

Useless Community

Hopefully, you see what the problem is with gaining “followers” this way. You’re building a community of nobodies that don’t know anything in particular and have no particular demographic. People are following you IN ORDER TO GET FOLLOWERS FOR THEMSELVES and couldn’t possibly give a flying **** about what you say, ask or recommend.

This is why numbers of followers can’t possibly translate to “influence”. In order to have influence, you have to be determined to be an authority on the topic. The people that built their follower lists from people that recognized them as thought leaders, pioneers in the space or innovators have an active, useful, passionate group of listeners. THAT’S useful. What’s NOT useful is people who have tens of thousands of followers from gaming the system and providing no consistently demonstrable value to their “community”.

Unfortunately, when you incorrectly assign credit to numbers of followers, both camps look exactly the same. The person with 60,000 followers seems more influential than the person with 2,888 followers strictly by virtue of quantity over quality.

This is why companies go out like suckers and hire people based on their apparent fan base instead of whether they can do a job in a professional, efficient and cost-effective manor.

Anyway… Twitter finally figured this out and then set a cap on how much your followING number could exceed your followER number. This worked decently, but the damage was already done. People that shouldn’t have had so many followers already did. Also, they didn’t stop gaming the system by following people for no other reason than trying to get those people to follow them back, they just slowed their roll to the limits that Twitter set.

The next travesty was the Twitter Suggested User List.

Suggested User List

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

Basically, since people were joining Twitter and then having nobody to follow and nobody following them, Twitter offered people suggestions of whom they might follow… including someone’s ******* CAT! :/ (and *NOT* including then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama).

The problem with this was that at the end of the Twitter account creation process, they offered you two links.

One was a gigantic green arrow, which indicated that you could activate your account and automatically follow everyone on the SUL.

The other was a TEXT LINK that was practically unnoticeable that allowed you to activate your account WITHOUT adding the people on the SUL.

Of course, tons of people clicked on the green arrow, resulting in everybody on the SUL gaining tens of thousands of followers every single day who had never heard of them before, didn’t give a flying **** about them and probably hadn’t even heard of them before they accidentally followed them as a consequence of creating a Twitter account.

There was a hue and cry about this (as there very well SHOULD have been) from the people that had struggled to promote themselves and create their follower lists through legitimate marketing tactics and online presence management. The numbers that it took them years to build were surpassed in mere days by people who shot up from 20,000 followers to 200,000 followers in a matter of weeks, absolutely dwarfing the stats of the legit group and making them seem less popular… less… ?influential? O_o

The Town Crier

This is why it’s pathetically laughable when people attempt to equate number of followers with influence. Do you have a large network of people to whom you can quickly disseminate information? Yes. So does the Town Crier.

The Town Crier is in charge of telling people what influential people told him to say. The Town Crier didn’t make a single policy and probably wasn’t even invited to the meeting where the policies were made. He IS, however, the person that informs the masses about these policies.

Does that make the Town Crier influential? Nope. The Town Crier is a source of information.. A newscaster. An anchorperson for the nightly news. Does the anchorperson write the articles? Nope. Does the anchorperson decide what stories go on the air? Nope. Does the anchorperson film anything or interview anyone in the street? Nope. They’re not influential AT ALL, even though they’re the ones that INFORM YOU about news stories by reading from the teleprompter.

It’s exactly the same for people that have built social networks without demonstrating to anyone that they’re an authority on ANYTHING AT ALL. Are you influential because you have the ability to inform 60,000 Twitter accounts of an opportunity? Some people say “yes”. I say “no”. You’re a good person to *USE* to get the word out about something, but your numbers don’t indicate that you’re affecting anyone’s thought processes. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can get anyone to do anything they wouldn’t have done anyway without hearing your opinion. Your numbers don’t indicate how you attained them or why your followers followed you. Your numbers don’t indicate who’s actually listening to you. Your numbers don’t indicate who gives a **** what you think. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can build and maintain a community for a client and offer them an impressive ROI if they hire you to handle their social media presence.

Related Posts

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Last week, I was discussing the dating scene in New York City with my friend Ilana Arazie does a fun and interesting video blog about dating called “Downtown Diaries”.

I realized after that conversation that I haven’t gone far enough in-depth with my “numbers” theory… about the difference that it makes for a guy to be surrounded by literally MILLIONS of women vs living in the sticks, where you don’t have a lot of women to begin with, they get married earlier, stay married and nobody wants to move there for business opportunities or visit there as a tourist.

This exchange from a James Bond movie reminded me of the clarification that I wanted to make:

Vesper Lynd: Now… Having just met you, I wouldn’t go as far as calling you a cold-hearted bastard
James Bond: No… Of course not…
Vesper Lynd: But it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine.. You see women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits.
~Casino Royale

Now, I’m not comparing The Kid to James Bond AT.ALL, but I felt that line was pertinent because I’ve said stuff like “Women have no leverage in this town, because they’re expendable merely by available numbers”. Without context, that can appear to be a “use it and lose it”, “hit it and quit it” or “love ‘em & leave ‘em” type statement as opposed to an honest explanation of why tactics that work for women in other parts of the country don’t work here.

The point I really wanted to make (except it’s so OBVIOUS to me that I couldn’t grasp it to express it in print) is that here in New York City, instead of trying to CHANGE A WOMAN, it’s much easier to CHANGE WOMEN. :D Just switch. If you detect an incompatibility, stop spending time with that chick and get a new one to fill her slot. Or, if you were already “dating” several chicks, distribute her time amongst the rest of them. This is why women don’t have any leverage. There are too many lonely women wandering aimlessly around this town with nothing to do with their lives except go to work. They’re just as attractive as you are. Just as intelligent as you are. Make the same amount of money that you do. Dress as well as you do. They’re just as sexy & sensual as you are….. BUT! :D …

You think you should date for a bunch of weeks before messing with a guy and she’s down with it right now
You want to get engaged or married and she doesn’t care or at least doesn’t bring it up
You want him to get a job and she’s willing to feed him and buy him clothes
You don’t want to cook, and she enjoys cooking for her man
You want him to come to the opera with you and she likes sitting with him watching football on Sundays

So that’s the problem for women in NYC. There’s no reason to barter with you. No reason to compromise with you. No reason to succumb to sexual embargo tactics. No reason to “escalate” any form of relationship with you. New York City attracts the top women in the world for career, business or tourism. You’re not surrounded by a bunch of lesser women, like if you were the valedictorian in the sticks. If your “relationship” hits an impasse, it’s easier to drop it and get a new chick than to “work it out”.

Meanwhile, the exact same thing is going on for women with men. There are so many men in NYC that there’s no reason for a woman to commit to one that she doesn’t think is really GREAT for her. This naturally leads to women being single more often than they’re “in a relationship” because they’re busy being choosy. Even the ones who claim to be “seeing someone” are only in the stages of DECIDING whether they want to stay with that guy. Well… that, or she was LYING so you’d stop trying to get some from her. :D

The reason this doesn’t work out evenly is that men and women don’t date evenly. Women like to date guys better than them, while guys like to date women they’re attracted to. When was the last time you heard a guy say “She’s really HOT, but she doesn’t make enough money for me to date her”? That’s right. Never. Meanwhile, the women who came to NYC to make moves and build careers and have “the finer things in life” are looking for guys on their level or better. How many male executives date secretaries levels below them? Like he’s the boss of the boss of HER boss? When was the last time you heard of a female executive “dating down”? That’s right. Never. If you do, it’s a big scandal hahaha :D So, the better a woman does for herself, if she follows what society tells her to do, the smaller her potential dating pool is. Meanwhile, the better a GUY does for himself, the LARGER his potential dating pool is.

Because there’s so much choice on both sides, women tend to have a lot of BRIEF relationships in NYC. Now they’re dating someone, now they’re single. Poof. Just like that. Every day, someone’s updating their Facebook status to single or “it’s complicated” or “in a relationship”. That means that every day, the playing field changes. Women that were formerly “unavailable” have now become available. Women that were previously “spoken for” are now free agents. This happens all the time. There’s no reason to believe that because a chick’s dating someone right now, they won’t be back in the dating population a few months from now.

This is why New York City is the quintessential smorgasbord when it comes to women. There are more women of all different sizes, shapes, types, colors, backgrounds, religions, ideologies, whatever than a guy can possibly process in a single day… Meaning you meet women here faster than you can determine that the woman you met just before isn’t the best one for you. This has nothing to do with lack of discipline or morals and has everything to do with abundance of opportunity and selection. It has nothing to do with being greedy or wanting to try out every attractive woman in sight and has everything to do with the fact that as fantastic as a woman might be, there’s another woman on the next block or in the next neighborhood or office building that’s JUST AS FANTASTIC, but WITHOUT the character flaw that a guy would either have to live with or fix if he were dating the same woman in the sticks.

Actually, the best advice I have for women trying to corral a guy in NYC is to make sure they’re dating someone that’s not FROM NYC. :D Just because a guy lives here now doesn’t mean that this culture of opportunity’s permeated his thought processes yet. Find a guy that just moved here and get in good with him before he realizes where he is! :D

Are there a bunch of guys that see women as disposable pleasures? Sure. But that’s completely different from knowing a bunch of fantastic women and having no reason to choose between any of them. It looks the same, but the former is the state of being disconnected and a user while the latter is having highly-valued connections with worthwhile women and the self-awareness that the only way you would choose ONE of them… is if you were willing to trade in ALL the rest of them…

~Bill

DatingGenius Category: billcammack.com/category/datinggenius
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This season of my video show/stream/whatever is entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”, basically because the only way I could swindle myself into doing it was to pretend that I had an audience. I already know everything I’m typing, and I’ve already seen everything that I post as a video, so the only reason to post them is for other people to see/read them, for whatever reasons they might have.

The problem with this is that since the audience isn’t real, I do whatever I feel like doing. If I feel like playing guitar, I do that. If I feel like talking to myself, I do that. If I feel like making a 15-minute documentary about Harlem, I do that.

Because of this, there are lots of different reasons that people visit my site. They visit from all over the planet, but they basically arrive through a Google search. Maybe a couple of times a day, someone’s actually looking for me (or someone named Bill Cammack), but the vast majority of the time, people are looking for ONE INSTANCE of a topic that they were thinking about at the time and decided to look up on google, like Dating women in NYC and they end up here.

I know this because web sites compile stats (statistics). People go to major lengths to compile and analyze statistics in order to determine what’s working for them, what’s not working and what they want to do next or differently, going forward. There are some major problems with “analyzing stats”, however… rather… I *should* say that if you’re not sure what you’re looking at, you’re going to have a skewed view of your readership/viewership… AND… Even if you *DO* know what you’re looking at, you’re still not receiving information which accurately depicts what’s really happening with your media.

Originally, I thought stats were the answer to DoG, because you would be sure about the size of your audience. Unfortunately, stats are merely general indications of possibilities… not even PROBABILITIES in case you decide to post something similar in the future.

Stats are like getting hit in the side of the head with a tomato.

If you’ve ever tried to hit someone walking down the street with a tomato, you know what I mean. It’s hard as hell, right? :D Wind conditions… Judging how far they’re going to travel in the time it takes the tomato (or egg, if it’s Halloween) to cross the street… Anyway… The point is that when you post stuff to the internet, you’re walking down the street. People are on the other side of the street, throwing tomatoes at you, except you don’t know it because they never hit you. As long as it doesn’t pass your head close enough to make that sound or smash on the gate next to you, letting you know what time it is, you’re going to keep walking down the street like nothing’s happening.

When you make a post, it’s the same way. Unless you see stats or receive feedback from people, it feels like nobody’s throwing tomatoes at you. Thus, DoG is the remedy for inertia in that you imagine a bunch of tomato-throwers. MEANWHILE, depending on how you monitor your statistics, you’re actually missing A LOT OF PEOPLE that *did* hit you.

For example, Tyme White informed me that since I had been separating sections of my entries using the “more” tag, people with feed readers were only receiving the information up to that “more”, and unless they clicked through to my site, they couldn’t read the rest of the post. I removed my “more” tags, because I’d rather have people able to read what they want however they want than have them skip the rest of the article because they didn’t feel like accessing my site… or maybe they COULDN’T access my site, because they pre-loaded their readers and don’t currently have fast internet access or any internet access at all.

Liz Burr informed me that I could use FeedBurner to catch my audience’s feed reader stats. I wasn’t interested in going that route, because I used feedburner for my video blog for well over a year, and although it’s good to see which videos of yours are going out so that you can spot trends or popular videos that you’ve done, there’s something really important that it doesn’t tell you…..

WHO! IT! IS! :/

This is why your stats are a tomato to the SIDE of your head. When you get hit with it, you STILL don’t know who threw it! :D

When I used to monitor my iTunes feed with feedburner, if I saw that in one day, 100 of my videos were downloaded once each, I knew I had a new subscriber. I didn’t know WHO that person was, AT. ALL. Therefore, I’m content with my current stats setup as an indication of trends of random people, and I’m not interested in even MORE stats of people who read my posts although I have no clue who they are.

IME, the net is immensely asynchronous and voyeuristic. I’m ‘guilty’ of the same thing. I don’t leave comments on EVERY video I watch or blog post I read. The environment only makes DoG worse, because in one’s own mind, your audience expands and contracts depending on how you feel about what you’re doing. If you feel like nobody’s watching… They aren’t. If you feel like Everybody’s Looking At Youuuuuu….. They Are! Ultimately, there’s no reality at all. It’s just you… floating messages in bottles….

I had a couple of experiences recently that made me want to ‘talk’ about stats. The other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and I went to get out my iPod Nano (which I won in the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings game show audience survey contest. Thanks, Om & crew! :D) to show her this video I had done, and before I even got it out of my pocket, she was like “oh. I saw that.”…. :/ ….. This is always a shocking experience, because I don’t actually HAVE DoG. If I did, I would have assumed that she and everyone else with a computer had watched/read my material. It’s one of the few surprising things in life… finding out that someone knows more than I thought they did. :)

This is where I internalized one of the useless aspects of stats… for me, at least… What good does it do me to know that three people in Australia and two in the UK watched my video if it doesn’t help me to understand that my friend I’m hanging out with right now has already watched my video? I’ve had this happen to me lots of times. Most recently, I got in a car with my cousin who had some very interesting things to say about my Fame post. This was ANOTHER shocking experience, because I wasn’t aware that she even knew that I text blogged at all. It took me a while to get up to speed on that conversation, because I totally wasn’t prepared to discuss an aspect of my existence that I didn’t know she knew about… much less that she had thought about at all OR would have had any opinions about it she felt like expressing to me. :D

The other interesting ‘stats experience’ was reading Mike Hudack‘s post on the blip.tv blog called “On Stats”. 99% of the videos on my site are served from blip.tv, so I found the first paragraph very interesting:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few days about how video sites count viewership. This is an extremely important and constructive conversation to have. In general, blip is one of the most conservative video sites on the Web in counting viewership. We only count one view per IP address per session and we have a number of very stringent controls in place to prevent gaming viewership numbers, whether that gaming is intentional or not. We believe that it’s in our interests — and in the interests of the overall Web video industry — that we be conservative in measuring viewership. Failing to be conservative invites a backlash from advertisers, investors and content creators as they realize that they can’t trust viewership metrics offered by major Web video platforms. We don’t want to invite such a backlash. We want to be conservative from the outset.

Let’s say an IP address is the “name” of your modem that connects to the internet. If I understood the statement about the counting of blip.tv video views correctly, that means that if you watch a video of mine, then you play it again, it only counts as one view. It will also count as one view if your roommate watches it from the same internet connection. Similarly, if you tell your whole office to watch it and they’re all accessing the same router, they all count as hits from the same IP address. I’ll have to find out how long a “session” lasts, and like I said, I’m not sure I have the exact understanding of how blip handles the count. However, this makes sense, because it stops people from doing the old YouTube trick of refreshing their videos over and over and making themselves look popular & talented when they’re not.

The point for me, as a content creator, is that before I read this, I thought the count was the count. I was actually subtracting numbers of views from my videos. This video, for instance, currently has 315 views:

Now… Besides the fact that I know more people than that saw this particular video because Kfir Pravda showed it at a conference he was speaking at in Israel, I would have assumed that maybe 200 people watched the video and the other 115 were re-runs. Of course, this doesn’t take into account situations like people downloading my videos and showing them to people on their computers or iPods, as I was attempting to do when my friend informed me she had already seen it.

You see how, again, in the realm of video, there’s the exact same “over/under” as there is in text blogging. Almost simultaneously, you feel like the numbers you’re seeing underrepresent your viewership AND overrepresent it.

Also, like I mentioned before, the numbers are useless anyway, unless you’re trying to sell a show, get sponsorship for a show or make money through revenue-sharing. Even if the stats tell me that a video of mine was watched 60 times from IP addresses in NYC, there are MILLIONS OF PEOPLE THAT LIVE HEEEEEERE!!! :D On top of that, according to Facebook, I have 271 friends in the New York, NY area. So, if I assume (ridiculously) that only people that have heard of me before are watching my videos, and not a single “random”, I still only have about a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who those 60 are. :)

The obvious solution here is to fuhgeddabouddit! Forget about stats altogether. They’re making DoG worse instead of better. More confusing instead of less so. The point of DoG in the first place was to kick-start my creativity process and answer the question “Why should I do something, film it and post it… instead of just doing it and enjoying it for myself?”

The answer, strangely enough, isn’t in the stats or the crowds. It’s not even in the audience of ten.

It’s in the One….

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I’ve been planning on doing a few different shows for quite a while now. Just about everything is in perfect position… however, before going forward, there’s an important consideration… scaling.

My friend Tyme White is always yakking about scaling. “How does it SCALE?” “That’s not going to SCALE!” blah blah blah blah blah…… Unfortunately (fortunately?) she’s right IF you’re looking at your show being a success from when you’re still in the early planning stages.

The way I’m going to define scaling for the purpose of this article is the ability to grow your show, social site, whatever. Just GROW it. Increase your membership. Increase your viewership. Improve your google rank. Get more people interested. Receive more UGC (User-Generated Content). Get more page hits…..

The reason scaling is important… Rather, the reason that YOU should consider your project’s ability to scale is that you might be broadcasting to a niche market. Let’s say, for instance, you want to make a show about DiY Clothing (DiY = Do it Yourself). There are only going to be a certain number of people interested in making their own clothing. A segment of that population watches videos on the internet. A segment of that population will be aware of your show. A segment of THAT population will like your show and recommend it to other people and/or come back and watch it again. A segment of THAT population will become ‘passionate’ about your show and become your core fans.

Threadbanger.com => Rob & Corinne, Justin & Marissa

I remember when I became aware of / fascinated by the concept of scaling. I was hanging out in Bed, Bath & Beyond…. I know, I know. It wasn’t my fault. Blame it on Dan McVicar. :/

Bill & Dan

Anyway… I’m hanging out by the checkout line, and there’s this endless stream of people slowly making their way to the register to pay. So I start imagining how many people are passing me, and it occurs to me that it’s A LOT! :D Then it occurs to me that more people passed me in the last 5 minutes than the total number that subscribe to my show in iTunes. :/ THEN, it occurs to me that if I stood there all day, the number of people that passed me would be greater than the number of people that subscribe to many popular, established internet shows. What I took away from that contemplation was that even if you’re considered popular within your own space or echo chamber, there are still more people to reach…. A LOT more people.

One of the most successful internet video shows that I’m aware of is Rocketboom. In 2006, each daily episode was being downloaded ~300,000 times. Even with numbers like that, comparisons were being made to cable television shows, not network shows, which count their viewers by millions. Recently, this show called “Quarterlife” got booed off the stage for ‘only’ pulling in 3,860,000 viewers on NBC… Obviously more than ten times the daily Rocketboom viewership.

Of course, none of this means anything to people that are expressing themselves by putting video on the internet and have no interest in numbers, stats, revenue-sharing, sponsorships, etc. For those that do care, and whose show’s future may very well depend on scaling, it’s important to consider the “what if?” of potential success.

Actually, before you figure out whether your show is scalable, you need to figure out if your show is SUSTAINABLE, which is an entirely different issue. For the most part, there are no “seasons” in internet-show-biz. It’s a new week… You need a new show. Period. Whatever your cycle is… daily, weekly, monthly… you need to come up with a concept that you can produce consistently and deliver on a regular basis. If you can’t do that, scaling’s useless because your viewers will drift away due to lack of output on your part.

So, do like Tyme does… “Ask NOT, Will it Blend?… but Will it SCALE?”

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