Hi everyone. I’m Johno the Coder. And welcome to another episode of big tech on point #btop in this episode, we’re talking about why nobody cares that you dislike the platform and that might be Facebook or Spotify, YouTube, or whatever.
There are obviously exceptions to this, you know, I realize that so some people have for political ideological, whatever reasons, boycotted platforms, more power to them. I’m absolutely not saying anything about the people that have decided to boycot platforms for their own , uh , ideological or moral reasons. I completely support it. I completely understand it, but this isn’t about them. This is about out you. And I’m actually gonna start this one with an anecdote , um , where a friend of my really good friend of my childhood friend of mine, that we are gonna call ice, ice phoned me. And I said, I am in a band. And this band is, and this is kind of important to the story, kind of really ideologically, politically left wing. And we don’t like the idea of corporations like Spotify having this amount of our money, or we are not getting really any money for people listening to our music. We don’t think that’s fair. So we wanna create our own streaming platform. Can you build us an app or something that allows people to listen to our music without us having to use app music, Spotify, iTunes, anything like that?
And I kind of understand, like I really empathized with , of their position on this because this isn’t something that’s new. You know, these big platforms don’t tend to do the best by their creators. So I get it. And I spoke to us and I had a really kind of long heartfelt chat. Cause I do somewhat agree with the point and they felt like TikTok was for children. So they shouldn’t use that. And I’m not gonna comment on it. You, I personally love TikTok .
I’ve got no issues with TikTok . Um, so we kind of had this conversation and I had to explain, and I’m sure ice won’t mind me explaining this, or, you know , retelling this story. The value proposition is with Spotify is your discoverability. The same is with YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok . We could reel off all the others. The discoverability is the value proposition that platform brings. So when you look at these platforms and you think I don’t get as much as I would want, and the same really applies to in insurance companies, you’ve got aggregators everywhere. You’ve, you’ve got some sort of lead generation pay some money. There’s a cost of acquisition for that customer. And that’s the same small businesses, big businesses. The , the channels might change the quantities. The volumes, the amount of money will change. But the value proposition of these platforms is very much the same. And you can’t really avoid doing business with them. And if you run an e-commerce and you’re not saying on Amazon, well, that’s fine. Amazon don’t mind your customers don’t mind.
They’re just gonna find someone else because they don’t know you exist. And this was the conversation I had advice about the band. I actually really like the band. I’m not gonna namedropping, cause I dunno if I’m allowed to, but talking to us about this band and we were talking about, well, why don’t you want to use these platforms? And it , it came down to this and I said, well, there’s a lot of costs involved with building your own platform. What if you get hacked? What about the development time? What if the scope creeps and the spec changes? So the development cost is higher. What if you suddenly get really popular and you’ve got 10 million, listen, you’re gonna need a whole new server infrastructure to deal with that. That you’re probably not gonna wanna upfront it for it. And this is kind of where the value proposition comes from because there is no real risk .
If I go and upload videos to YouTube and no one watches them, I’ve not lost anything except the time it costs me to create that content. But if loads of people come and watch, then my adverts, if I’ve got , um , if I’m monetized, I’ve got my adverts and stuff like that, I have to sort anything out without that . They’ll just pay me. If they decide to demonetize me in my whole business, realizing it, that’s obviously a different topic of discussion and whether they should do that, shouldn’t do that. What kind of grounds they should give. It is a whole different kind of really controversial topic that I’m not gonna broach just yet . But the value proposition of these big platforms, isn’t for you. It’s not, you are the creator. You’re the business. You’re the, it’s the same with my karate club . You know , I spoke to them and one of my last episodes, we talked about websites and what they’re important for, but actually that socials are really important. And I’m , I’m hoping that the , my karate club won’t mind me mentioning this, but we didn’t have a lot of students coming through the doors. And we started being active on socials and we put the website up there. We handed out some flyers and we did some real world . Uh , I don’t really , I don’t really wanna use the word marketing, but we spoke to people and we got people through the doors, but the socials certainly helped harness all of that. They didn’t know they were looking for us.
If you, you are a musician, your future fans probably don’t know you exist yet. They’re not looking for you. They’re looking for something Spotify do. Um , what they called suggested artist artist . You might like based on the fact that, oh , you really like lady leisure . So you’re probably gonna go and like this person, or you really like ACDC . So you probably like this band, Facebook do the same sort of thing. You know, pages are similar pages, YouTube do related videos and recommended channels. That discoverability, that is the value proposition.
That’s the point. That’s what you want is people to find you like that. And because of how their algorithms work , because it’s in their business interest to keep their users really engaged. They want to do that . They want to put creators in front of consumers, say consumers. I don’t mean consumers like, well , they might be your business customers, but consumers of that content is in their interest for their ad revenue to keep me on their platform. As much as they possibly can going through related videos, going through Instagram, read , going wheels , going through to TikTok , keep scrolling, keep scrolling. They do that by serving me content I want, but the world think about how long it takes to make a good TikTok video. That is a maximum of one minute long, but I probably skip a bunch of them. I have no idea. Really no idea how much time I lose or how much content I consume when I scroll through TikTok . So it’s in TikTok interests to find clever ingenious, automatic, artificially, intelligent, whatever ways have presenting me with content constantly that I want. Now , one of the easiest ways to do that is to find me more and more creators to put in front of me, for me to decide if I like them or not. If I don’t like them , fair enough. They probably won’t show ’em to me again. If I engage really heavily and you’ll notice this, if you follow any hashtags on Instagram, or if you start liking specific types of content on TikTok , you’ll notice all that stuff starts getting suggested to you. And you’ll start to see new creators that are very similar to creators that you already like for one reason or another. I dunno the algorithms.
So the value proposition, and honestly, and I’m not a spokesperson for these businesses, but YouTube and Spotify and TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, they really, they do care know about their creators, but they don’t care if their creators don’t like them because they know they’re a necessary part of the ecosystem. The value proposition isn’t about you that’s later on the value proposition is for the consumer. It’s for them to be, you’re not gonna get someone to download your app. You’re certainly never gonna get someone to download your app, cuz you don’t wanna be on a social platform when they’ve a herd of you. They might go and download your app or sign up to a website or take you off platform after you are invested in that creator in that brand. But realistically you need your consumer to find you. You need them to invest in you to subscribe and everything else to really kind of go on that journey with you before you can consider taking them off platform. And that is the value proposition, the monetization that’s different.
You need to learn to monetize your audience or your customers or whatever it is outside of this exchange. This exchange is about it’s a meet and greet between you and your content consumers. That’s the important bit. This is why streamers have me. This is why. Well, should I say streamers, but bands have merchant , you know , bands make. Now I think I read an article that said that music, content, creators, bands, artists, whoever make more of their money now from merchant ticket sales and stuff than from album sales . Because if I pay for Spotify premium, I can listen to their albums for free. What they’re really kind of trying a key into is, well, I’m a fan, I’m a dedicated fan.
You know, I’m a , uh , throw out I’m a top, no 0.1% fan of Stevie Nicks on Spotify. So check my bad self. But my point is what I then got was an email from Spotify saying here’s a special offer from , uh , Stevie Nicks . And there was a couple of other artists that did a similar thing. You know, here are premium tickets that are going on sale to you, our top fans first. And they tried to monetize me that way because the monetization wasn’t on the platform and the monetization was on gaining the fans and being discovered. So you have to go and use the platforms cuz your consumer doesn’t care if they miss out on your content because they don’t know it exists yet. So that’s really what you’re looking for.
Eventually, if you want to, you can try and migrate a away . You can try and move to platforms that sit better with you in terms of your ideology, whether it’s politically or religiously or whatever ideology is for whatever reason you don’t wanna sit on that platform forever. That’s fine. But those consumers won’t find you unless you’re on there . So in order to affect any kind of change, if you are really wanting to decentralize it , you really don’t want all of your content to be on Spotify, wherever it is, you have to find them there first and get them invested in what’s going on. And then maybe later at a push, you can think about trying to get off of that platform, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? So in short, the reason that the nobody cares if you don’t like the platform is because, well, the reason because it’s because, oh Hey that , so the reason that nobody cares, if you dislike the platform is a platform will be fine without you. Your consumers don’t know you exist without the platform. So they can’t about something. They don’t know exists. That’s actually it really, the value proposition is in the discoverability. It’s not in anything else to do with that platform. And if your issue is around monetization, then really what you need to try and find in terms of that monetization is a different way to monetize those audiences because they will never find you. If you’re not there.
I’m Johno the Coder. This has been why nobody cares that you dislike the platform for big tech on point #btop, follow me on Twitter or other socials @johnothecoder. And I will catch you next time.