Follow-up and "Foreseen Illness Delay"
Unfortunately today’s briefing is going to be delayed due to a “foreseen illness”. I will explain more when I get it to you later this week. Thank you for understanding.
In the meantime, some follow-up from the last two essays
Yesterday’s Essay: Clubhouse and Convenience
Clubhouse as New Channel: An important point I did not mention in yesterday’s essay was that Clubhouse is a new channel that MIGHT become a big channel. New channels open up the opportunity for fast movers. Already there are daily “talk shows” that are building a following on Clubhouse. Early movers can build followings that can become sticky. Some of the people who started blogging, tweeting or writing newsletters early, managed to build large audiences that those who followed later had a much harder time building. If you are a great impromptu speaker and have the time to invest, Clubhouse may be worth exploring…
More Clubhouse: Speaking of internet famous… Zeynep Tufekci has become a go-to resource in the past year writing rationally about COVID and policy implications of the virus. Last week she wrote about the rise of Clubhouse. Worth reading.
Last week’s Essay: Don’t Be Evil
Facebook’s Side of the Story: Nick Clegg, Faceboo’s head of policy, has written a “clarifying document” about what happened between Facebook and the Australian government. Also: Facebook is donating $300MM towards journalism around the world (which is being spun as an “investment”. But is really a hush payment…)
Australian News Impact: When I worked at both Expedia and A Place For Mom suppliers (hotels and senior living communities respectively) would often argue “When you send us a paying customer, we would have got that customer anyway if you were not around, and then we would not have had to pay you to be a middle man”. It was a difficult hypothetical to prove one way or the other. But Facebook ran a natural experiment in Australia. How much of their traffic was incremental, and how much would the papers get anyway if people on Facebook were not sharing links? The result was that newspapers in the country lost 15% of their total traffic when Facebook went dark.
More coming later this week (I am feeling better now, but I am not staying up any later than the time it takes me to hit send on this short one).
Keep it simple,
Edward