The Internet is for free?

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

The net is not free. Nothing is free. You either pay now or pay later. Or you get someone else to pay. In most cases, it is cheaper to pay right away than to use a service “for free” and then pay even more afterwards.

There are two points of view. That of the person who puts content online – and that of the person who consumes content. I’ll start with the “creator”.

I started a blog on Blogspot many, many years ago. It was free. Super easy, set up a blog, choose a design, get started. Google favours content that is on its own platforms in the search results, so you quickly get good rankings. Big grin on my face. Then came the GDPR, I checked and lo and behold, Blogspot is a perfect data-sucking machine for Google. So I paid for my “free blog” with my readers’ data. So I moved all the content to my own blog. Cost. Me. Monthly. And two months of work to move all the articles.

YouTube. I uploaded my films to YouTube, costs nothing, totally great. Then suddenly someone puts adverts on my videos. Investigated: Someone claims that the music in my videos is their property. That’s why he’s allowed to do that. Fats Waller may have been dead for 80 years, but make someone at Google realise that. So put the videos on Vimeo. It costs. Monthly.

Meanwhile, Google itself places adverts for videos from creators who are not allowed to advertise themselves. And keeps the money. Can you defend yourself against this? No. Only when you have sufficient reach to be allowed to monetise. Then you can protect individual videos from monetisation. Google wants to cash in everywhere.

These are the costs of the supposedly “free” publishing channel. Incidentally, this also affects companies like OMDS, who think they can use YouTube as a free hoster. Google then places adverts in front of it. For food supplements or some other rubbish. That costs OMDS its reputation. So it would be cheaper to host such videos on Vimeo or, better, on your own website.

Then there is the cost of the content. The better the content is, the more expensive it is to produce. Even a silly vlogger video, in which someone grins at the camera and comments on the new video game, costs online time and a mobile phone. And the time to shoot the stuff and he also has to test the game beforehand.

The FolyFos, which we do once a month, costs roughly 2000 euros. Per programme. Each individual contribution on pen-and-tell costs around 120 euros, sometimes significantly more.

Who pays that? Essentially me – with a loss of income, because of course the turnover from my shop doesn’t even come close to covering the costs of pen-and-tell and FolyFos.

If a creator seriously wants to earn money with his work, he either has to reduce his cost structure – produce more cheaply – or strengthen the revenue side. This means taking money from “cooperation partners”, Patreon, buy-me-a-coffee, affiliate links, YouTube monetisation and the like. All of these financing options have one major disadvantage. You become dependent on the sponsors and a large part of the income remains in their clutches. Even Patreon, which you might think would be a great way to support independent journalism, has a strange effect. People endeavour to avoid upsetting their Patreon base. You can see this very well with “alternative media”, which, against their better judgement, advocate outrageous bullshit just because the perceived, paying user base wants to hear it. Target group-orientated content.

The result is crisp: either you produce cheap rubbish – or you produce expensive advertising slogans. Or you exploit yourself. The in-between – well-paid, high-quality, independent content – used to exist at the very beginning on YouTube and Sevenload. But that’s over now. Today, as a YouTube creator, you first have to get reach and clickbait in order to get into monetisation at all. (“Leave a subscription, a like and a comment and press the bell…..”)

What does it look like on the “reader side”? Isn’t everything free there? Standard answer: You pay with your time and your data. “Pah, I have an adblocker – I don’t even see all the YouTube adverts.” Yes. But the problem lies on a different level. You’re being told crap. Lots of rubbish. And if you’re unlucky, you believe the rubbish and base any decisions on it. And that can be really, really expensive. And even if you don’t believe the rubbish – it costs you time to find out that what you’re looking at is stirred-up slurry.

Because of course you don’t get the best hits in terms of content when you search, but the ones that are clicked on the most and, in the case of “social media”, of course the ones where the operator makes the most money. With 100 hits on a topic, how do you know which of the hits has properly researched content? You have to be familiar with the topic to be able to judge that – and then you don’t really need the information.

The problem now exists in all media. Someone recently asked me where you can still get reliable information – the answer is disappointing. Nowhere. I’m not aware of any publication that delivers consistently high quality and that, when it produces crap, also makes it a subject of discussion. And without having to unleash an external shitstorm first. Of course, there are gradual differences, but there is no longer any source that you can quote without sticking a background research on it. (There are individual journalists who are fairly reliable, but they are exceptions).

And this is the problem for the reader. They get a lot of completely worthless information. This is “umsonst” in every sense of the german word. Because even if the information happens to be correct, the reader cannot recognise this. So they invest time and money in – data rubbish. What happens now? The reader seeks guidance from people they trust. And he chooses them roughly according to whether they say things that he knows to be true. Someone who tells them that everything they previously thought was wrong – these are the people you don’t believe. Confirmation bias. In the political sphere, this can lead to strange parties being elected; in the area of consumer goods, things are bought that may not fulfil their purpose or, if you’re unlucky, you invest in a Ponzi scheme or support a charlatan with your Patreon payments.

After all, it’s not as if the information you supposedly get for free from the internet has no influence on your life. People book hotels based on reviews or tinker with a sewing machine or motorbike according to YouTube instructions. The information is supposedly free, the follow-up costs can be high and someone is rubbing their hands in glee. Because, of course, reviews are faked. I know that book reviews in particular are bought or written on a large scale. And that includes both the cheers and the slams.

Yes, I do daily content here. Supposedly for free. But that’s not exactly what I do, at least that’s what I imagine. I’m bolting on reach. Not with bought followers, but with content. “Content is king” was the slogan 20 years ago when the first bloggers became millionaires out of nowhere. But for the generation of marketeers who were socialised after 2005, blogging is a form of communication from back in the day, completely irrelevant and only for boomers. Insta, Tiktok, 30-second attention spans and all that. Video is important. Vertical and short. Just like that. I recently sat there with a representative of this generation who explained to me that I was completely out of date and that things are done differently today. I opened pen-and-tell and showed her the development of my hits. “Here are 16,000 hits, the spike is 13,000 – these are outliers, normal are around 4 to 5,000 per day”. Suddenly there were questions. How blogging is going, because actually, it’s out, but such hits, in such a narrow market, with long texts…..

I’m building my reach. Why? Because I want the manufacturer to hear me. That they build good products. That I can write books about them. That I can sell in reasonable quantities. I know that’s a bit of a roundabout way of thinking, but I know that it can work. Because it has worked before.

So: I’ll feed you. And at some point you’ll buy a book from me. And then you’ll realise: nothing on the internet is free. Because one thing is clear: if I stop selling books, pen-and-tell will be over. Because then I’ll do something else. DHL is looking for parcel carriers….