This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:
-
This is actually the OPPOSITE of doomposting but:
Don't let Cohost make you think that better things aren't possible online. Cohost actually had a better conversion rate than most websites by FAR. People WERE in fact willing to pay for a site that doesn't try to trick them into watching ads or engaging for clicks. They just had a poor business plan. But I've seen posts like "guess nobody's willing to pay to not be the product..." and that's not what happened here at all, people were in fact willing to pay, heck some people were buying extra subscriptions (which functionally did nothing) just to pay MORE.
-
When Cohost says they needed more users to survive, it's not because there weren't enough people paying. It's because their salaries were too much. This was never going to be a well paying business because social media never has been for anyone (grifting VC with social media sure but not social media itself).
And more users wouldn't have saved them because the amount of new users they would have needed signing up AND subscribing would have been so many that they would have HAD to have hired another moderator, at the same salary as everyone else, and been fucked.
-
I don't know if there IS a solid business model for social media to be profitable or at least break even AND pay a staff that kind of money.
But that doesn't mean that that's the only option and that doesn't mean that we can't have nice things. You just can't have nice things without a solid business plan. But the problem was never the users not doing enough, they went above and beyond on their end towards trying to keep the site afloat. The demand is there and people are willing to pay.
-
@lori one conclusion I've come to is even the name "social media" suggests exploitation. "Media" is the content produced specifically to run ads in, and "social media" is the content produced at zero cost by the company running ads.