Chinese Wall
Well, I don’t think the usage applies soundly to what I’m about to write. But I’m optimistic about the intelligence of the people reading this at the end of the day. The biggest question on my mind has always been this - What’s the difference?
And what am I talking about, you wonder? Think YouTube. Think Facebook. Think about their evolution over the years, from consumption to a platform for creators. We’ve seen social celebrities rise from the benefit of these platforms. But pushing to 20 million subscribers, for example. Was it easier for nigahiga or PewDiePie? The term here is ‘easier’. What they’ve achieved is incredible. It’s in the tenth percentile, or even lower maybe. But easier? I think PewDiePie.
There’s a reason for this thought. And it’s accessibility and tolerance. nigahiga worked through building his brand and foundation when YouTube wasn’t thought of to be commonplace, or even a necessity. Not everyone signed into Google when accessing YouTube even. Clicking on subscribe must have been met with so much more inertia at the time. Why create an account? Why like or subscribe? I can still access the content without needing to do all that. And that’s the degree of difficulty nigahiga had to overcome.
YouTube is a definite, viable career option now. And as difficult as it is to build an audience in a now saturated creator space, it’s definitely a lot easier to expect your target viewers to already have an account. It’s easier still to expect them to hit subscribe now.
How does this connect to me?
Well, interestingly, when I thought about running a social media ad (just to test the waters) on the link to my webnovel - Curse of Immortals, I noticed a lot of clicks to the story, a lot of increase in views across chapters, but zero subscriptions and likes. It wasn’t that they were bouncing off from the first chapter; I noticed a view uptick across the first 40-60 chapters at least. As with most things, I know there’s going to be retention drop-off along that path. But still, to have held a reader for 40, maybe 60 chapters and have nothing to show for it except the views? Well, it was disappointing. I thought it was. And then I realized that I’m at the cusp of non-ubiquity right now. Same with the era of YouTube with nigahiga on the come up.
The platform I post at, Tapas claims to have millions of readers. And seeing the readership on some of their flagship works (comics and novels), I don’t doubt it at all. But there’s a Chinese Wall between the creators and the readers. There’s no way to communicate with them directly. And your growth is directly proportional now to the quality of your work, or the demand of your genre. It’s an interesting platform. And I like to think that I can overcome it.
But what about the people reading this? Would you be able to break inertia and subscribe to my work if you enjoy it? I’ll be interested to know. Until then. To this commonplace challenge, I say - bring it on!