FanLib: FAIL

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

December 28, 2007 — The Christian Science Monitor holds forth on the good and bad in the "digital race" of 2007. In their annual summing up, FanLib is the "bad" object lesson for "Web 2.0".

Digital race? WTF, dudes! It isn't a race, it's a freaking big bang spreading outwards in every direction.

The corporate attitude towards "Web 2.0" is so darn inane, based on the belief businesses can, and should, shape the Internet into nothing more than a customer support and marketing research group. For the company's benefit, of course. Assholes!

CSM: Fans responded by dissecting and criticizing content on the FanLib site and eventually forming their own site dedicated to archiving and protecting fan fiction, called the Organization for Transformative Works... The takeaway? Companies need to understand what motivates audiences before creating business models around them.

The takeaway? Oh, please! The Internet is not all about the corporate bottom line! The Christian Science Monitor is falling into the FanLib trap here, judging Internet "success" by how thoroughly customers are exploited.

Yes, my period is over. Why do you ask? *munches chocolate-drizzled caramel corn*

Note: The Christian Science Monitor has a circulation of 70,000, and an estimated online readership worldwide of at least two million. It is the largest news service to carry a FanLib story (negative or positive) so far. Before this article, FanLib was mentioned only in trade and academic news publications with circulation of at most 20,000.

Comments

[liresius.livejournal.com]

Oh, Fanlib were "THE BAD"! LOL! Thanks for the link!

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

It is certainly satisfying they have become the "don't do this!" object lesson.

[liresius.livejournal.com]

Oh yes! *g*

[kurenai-tenka.livejournal.com]

...proving that we can get our message across just as well as they can and without a budget? XD;

[tejas.livejournal.com]

*Better* than they can.

Morons.

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

No budget, and we forgot to have meetings. :)

[kurenai-tenka.livejournal.com]

Assuming they remembered them, of course. XD

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

I think it's a step in the right direction that they even recognized that FanLib fucked up; they could easily have tsk-tsked the selfish, whiny fans or something. The whole point of the article was the relationship between big business and the "new" internet, so it's not at all surprising that they took the POV what companies can do online for their own benefit.

Angie

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

I'm probably expecting too much of them. CSM is a big business, and reflects those values. Still, this really irked me:

Companies need to understand what motivates audiences before creating business models around them.

Calling fanfiction writers and readers an "audience" is missing the point spectacularly. It's like calling a major league baseball player a "sports fan."

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

By the way, I just had a personal reminder about the intense greed currently surrounding "social networking."

An old friend is developing a product that will be sold online and at events. It's not fandom related, but it's similar in its narrow appeal and need for word of mouth. A marketing guru told him he needed "affinity marketing," and thought they should build a social networking site just to sell the product.

Totally bats? Yes, indeed. It would be like setting up one to promote... reproductions of tin flour canisters from the 1950s. Really a small niche, and not profitable enough to justify the labor and expense.

I told my friend social networking would happen around the product with or without him. :p

Perhaps one day corporate America will understand social networking is not something they can buy or build, but people, millions of them. Right now, though, they believe it is a magical, inexhaustible gold mine. It will be the next bubble to burst.

[lttledvl.livejournal.com]

Perhaps one day corporate America will understand social networking is not something they can buy or build, but people, millions of them. Right now, though, they believe it is a magical, inexhaustible gold mine. It will be the next bubble to burst.

I don't see that happeninng until companies (US or otherwise) realize that not everything in the world is sellable. Though admittly, they are pushing that route too.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

But if you're publishing Pro Athlete magazine (or trying to get a certain target population to come and "live" at your Virtual Sports Field social networking site), and you're selling ad space in whichever of those venues, then that baseball player is your audience. That's how they're looking at it. FanLib isn't there primarily to spread fanfic around -- they're there to sell contests and ad space, and the fanfic is just the lure they use to attract their target audience.

I think that line you quoted is right on, actually. Before these business models of theirs will work, they need to understand who the audience is (in FanLib's business, that'd be us, but it might be that pro baseball player or anyone else, depending on whom they're targetting) and what our values are and what our culture is like and what we'll respond positively or negatively to. That's why the IJ guy's business model is working, with all those ads plastered all over his site but with people like you and me and a bunch of other folks who are angry with FanLib or LJ all fine with it and with him. While LJ (with a lot fewer ads-per-user, if you get right down to it) and FanLib just pissed people off. It's not so much what they're doing (OMG ads!!) as how they're going about it, how they're presenting it, and how stupid they think we are. It's not knowing the audience. It's exactly a problem of creating (or modifying, in LJ's case) business models without understanding the audience they're designed to work with.

We might not like being thought of as an audience, or as a target for business models, but that's one of the attitudes that has to be understood by any company that wants to build a business around fannish works. The only way any of CSM's readers are going to have any interest in fannish works (unless it's in the social section of the paper and someone's ranting about immorality or whatever, but that's another issue) is from a business perspective, so it makes perfect sense that they'd see us as the audience. Yes, we're producers, but from the POV of the target audience for that article (see, they're an audience too), we're still an audience to be marketed to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself. But if Entrepreneur X or Company Y wants to market to us, they need to understand us, which includes understanding our dislike of being blatantly exploited, condescended to, lied to, or generally disrespected or used. That's part of playing the game and FanLib fucked it up six ways from Sunday. Someone else might come along who can make money marketing to us -- offering something we want and can't provide for ourselves, and offering it fairly and respectfully, with no hidden gotchas and without violating any of fandom's values or traditions. That person or company will be welcomed by fandom, because they'll be trading value for value without dissing us or planning to leave us holding the bag if it all goes pear-shaped.

I don't mind being considered a target audience. I do mind being believed to be so damn stupid that some get-rich-quick asshole thinks he can get me to buy a crock of shit and do the work of shovelling it onto my own head. But if someone intelligent who's willing to do his or her homework thinks they can offer me something I want for a fair price (whether that's a direct payment or the right kinds of ads or whatever they can come up with), with a respectful attitude that makes me feel good about doing business with them -- hey, bring it on.

I'm waiting.

[crickets]

[tumbleweed]

:P

It's not that it's impossible. It's just that no one's thought of a way to do it yet. It'll be interesting to look back in ten or twenty years and see whether anyone's come up with anything that works.

Angie

waiter, this food is terrible and the portions are small

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

Please forgive me, because I'm going to have two somewhat contradictory views. And it's long. :)

One, did FanLib screw up purely as a business? Yes, as the CSM article outlines, and as you describe above. All along, they've shown a total lack of respect and understanding for their audience/users/customers.

Two, was the entire concept of FanLib flawed from the get-go? I think it was. FanLib should never have existed, even if they had done everything "right."

We all know how FanLib screwed up. But the ways they messed up are inherent in the "user generated content" business model.

I got a FanLib news alert from the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119877686744052987.html?mod=googlenews_wsj) today. I was excited—Wall Street Journal! —then found it was an error; there was no mention of FanLib. But the article was still on topic, because the author believes corporations miss the point of the Internet and related new technology: that it connects us.

The connection corporations miss the most? That new tech connects the "audience" to the business. Corporations don't listen; they still think it's a patriarchy dictatorship. They get that customers are talking to each other, finally; they still don't get that customers are talking to the business. Take any LJ news post as an example. ;)

This fatal flaw appeared as soon as corporations turned to the Internet. In 1999, a bunch of geeks put together The Clue Train Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/), a warning to businesses that what was happening was "a global conversation," not a marketing opportunity. Nearly a decade later, corporations still haven't gotten it.

Corporations cannot reconcile their essential purpose, to make money, with our essential purpose, to communicate. To make money, they must exert control over our communication (or fanfiction), and we ain't having it.

The Cluetrain Manifesto says, We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings—and our reach exceeds your grasp.

Back to the WSJ article. The author, who lives in Singapore, writes:

I didn't start my own blog until early 2002, but I was immediately hooked and have kept it going since. That said, I had no idea blogs would usher in such a remarkable revolution of collaboration, knowledge-sharing and creativity.

I just wish we'd stop trying to shrink-wrap all this individual creativity—blogs, photos, videos, wikis—as if it were a product by calling it User Generated Content. We should dub this massive shift something grand like Community Creativity, or the Knowledge Renaissance, or something. UGC demeans it.

There is a place for corporations on the Internet, but it is not in the realm of "user generated content." Online, corporations can sell products and tell us their 1-800 number. When they stick to traditional business, they are fine. When FanLib acted solely as a marketing company, with writing contest promotions that had everyone "coloring within the lines," it was mildly disgusting, but it didn't step on anyone's toes.

When FanLib got into the wild world of user generated content, it shot itself in the foot. Maybe the abdomen. As you said, FanLib is attempting the totally stupid: make money off of content which lacks both the polished skill of professional writing and the raw sex-n-romance of fanfiction. But it can't help itself. It must control the "conversation."

What happened with FanLib and OTW is something we shall see more of: the lowly "end users" giving corporations the finger. Not because corporations get it wrong, but because they can never get it right.

Since the industrial revolution, communication technology has been out of our reach. The new technology is dirt cheap. It doesn't require a corporation to make it happen (*brief AT&T paranoia moment*). All that is needed is us. The eyeballs, the audience, and the end users are coming into their own.

Re: waiter, this food is terrible and the portions are small

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

I see where you're coming from, and I agree with what you're saying. The corporations just don't understand what it's all about. And I agree that it's because they're still seeing us as a passive mass of wallets to which they can peddle stuff.

But I'm considering the possibility that that basic misunderstanding is fixable. :) Maybe it is and maybe it's not, but I don't see the clueless stupidity of FanLib or LJ or anyone else as conclusive proof that it can never be done right.

It's like, I hate commercials in general. We have a DVR and record pretty much everything, then watch programs while skipping through commercials.

However, I do like movie trailers, and every now and then I'll see something that looks like an interesting movie trailer. So I'm all, skip, skip, skip-- Wait! Backupbackupbackup! And I'll watch the trailer. Or a commercial for a new TV show will catch my eye (anything with Alton Brown on Foot Network, ferinstance). Or just a commercial with a really cute puppy. [duck] So we skip over like 98% of the commercials, but there are some we'll back up for, and occasionally (usually with movie trailers) a commercial gives me information I'm actually pleased to get. So from my POV as an individual TV watcher, commercials can be done right; they just aren't done right very often. But just thinking with my keyboard here, if there were some way of filling out a survey to tell the networks, "OK, give me movie previews, and commercials for new (not existing, but NEW) TV programs featuring [this list of variables], and any commercial that has at least ten seconds of a cute puppy," that'd work. If I could get that and nothing but that, I'd probably watch all the commercials. At least until they started repeating.

My point, though, is that commercials on TV are something a lot of people, including me, really hate, but there are exceptions. And some way of making sure I only saw the commercials I really want to see would make commercial support of TV really work again. Right now, commercial TV is sort of coasting. Everyone knows that more and more people record shows and skip commercials, and the networks have been scrambling for a new business model. (When their execs haven't been throwing tantrums about how people who skip commercials are committing theft or whatever. [eyeroll]) But for me at least, it could work.

And something similar could work online too. If they could figure out how not to piss people off, which would of course have to start by not trying to make money off of fanfiction, which could bring the house down on all of us. (That needs to be a car on the Clue Train, seriously.) And if they could figure out how to show us ads we want to see, rather than just ads from the 4.5 companies that've contracted with them to advertise. A large chunk of the problem is that I'm just not interested in Pepsi Free or whatever, no matter how much money Pepsi pays LJ to sneak ads for it onto my computer screen. After that fiasco, I wouldn't try Pepsi Free (or whatever it was called) if someone offered me a free can, so that definitely Did Not Work from Pepsi's POV.

So it's to their benefit as well to figure out a mode, a strategy, a model, a paradigm -- something -- that'll show me ads I'm actively interested in seeing, and do it without pissing me off in any other way. No one's figured it out yet, and it's going to be tough. It might require something completely new and different in the whole ad-supported-whatever concept to get it to work, particularly as it involves the whole social networking thing. But I'm not willing to swear that no one will ever figure it out. I'm not holding my breath, mind you, but I expect there's a chance it'll come along some day, whether or not it's within my lifetime. Maybe.

And I think FanLib was doing okay until they went after fanfiction in general. I have no interest in their studio/publisher-supported contests, but I don't find them actively offensive either. If they'd stayed there, I'd have no argument with them. It was the whole fanfic archive deal where they really blew it IMO. :/

Angie

Re: waiter, this food is terrible and the portions are small

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

I've debated on whether or not to show you this, because it's kind of hideous and may ruin your week. It's the new trend in online advertising:

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/business/31virtual.html)

From a business point of view, it's a work of genius. It's the new approach that is needed, building on wildly successful advertising endeavors of the past, instead of piggybacking on user generated content. Sort of Disneyland meets the Pet Rock.

The corporations' advertising panic is explained. They aren't merely worried about cashing in on new trends. They are desperate to fill the growing void as viewers abandon network television, use tivo to block ads, and so on.

Attempts to co-opt existing stuff is failing (Second Life, for instance). Future successful advertising could very well look like Club Penguin.

*boggles*

Re: waiter, this food is terrible and the portions are small

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

You've got to be a registered member to read that. :/ Give me the gist, maybe...?

Angie

Re: waiter, this food is terrible and the portions are small

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

Oops! You can register for free. And give them false data. :)

It's about corporations creating their own version of Second Life-like worlds for pre-schoolers. They don't have to buy advertising because the entire thing is an advertisement, like Disney World.