I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon.
The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book.
(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)
I was just listening to a podcast that included Steve Rinella lamenting that his recent wild game cookbook didn't make the NYT Best Seller list despite selling out on Amazon... If I remember correctly, it was precisely because of pre-orders. Thus, as he prepares to release his latest book, he's asking fans to buy the book, but to try and mix it up from just Amazon pre-ordering: pre-order at independent bookstores, order on release day, etc.
Amazon could easily improve their rankings by changing it from "most purchased" to "pages read" or a similar metric. "Time users spent reading per dollar cost" would be a good measure. You could add something in to get a novelty factor if you wanted.
This would solve the pre-order problem as books wouldn't rank until people started reading them. It would also weed out books that people buy but don't actually read.
> Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".
And of "To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", CYA retellings of Hamlet and R&J; and of "How To Invent Everything", a handy-dandy guide to bootstrapping modern technology if your time machine malfunctions.
AND he is the human of Noam Chompsky, a Very Good Boy.
Oh interesting. I recently ordered "How To Invent Everything" because it seemed interesting, but had no idea that the guy behind Dinosaur Comic wrote it. This makes me think that I made the right decision.
> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day.
In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did.
While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients.
Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. when you unprivate the account, only like 100 of them get approved to follow you at once, so it adds up like a currency you can spend whenever you want. to mass approve you have to toggle private and unprivate over and over again, or approve the requests yourself or via API. either way you can only pull a list of 100 or so at a time, but you can keep them in the "requested" pool forever until convenient.
So you can grow an account with like a few hundred followers to a hundred thousand+ real followers very quickly.
But engagement is more important for the utility value of the account, and so you can also post an image with all the hashtags and location tags while the account is private, and let your new followers begin engaging with it. And then unprivate the account and even more new followers begin engaging with it, and then it becomes the TOP image in the hashtag.
In prior versions of instagram it would also be in the activity section in a large web of followers of followers.
For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women. In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a popular account its a night and day difference. I don't even attempt to match with them on the dating app, I just message them on IG straight away from the popular account (30K+ followers). Real dates and intimacy off of that, even in San Francisco. Skips the queue.
That's a great summary of why social media is a dumpster fire. From buying fake likes down to plain old sleaziness, you seem to have covered all the bases.
A lot of people need the challenge of the dopamine hits, and become less interested once they know how to undermine it, or how fake or unfulfilling "success" is. High engagement can be used as a currency though, its common attribute being that you can trade it for goods and services in a predictable way.
I actually keep a very personal profile with maybe around 100 followers. I watch some of the women there - long time friends - chase fame and other guys with shiny things - and I have to laugh about it because its I always can present that way if I want to, but I watch to see if they ever mature to wanting more substance.
I have some criticisms for Facebook Inc about this though. They should really broker these transactions. There is a lot of sleeziness in the transactional side of growing these accounts. So instead of just ignoring it, they could really be getting a cut of this in so many ways.
A couple of quick questions if you don't mind, since I don't use ig but I'm trying to understand your post:
> Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private
Is this as crude as looking for large accounts on socialblade and sending them DMs? Or is there some kind of marketplace? Are there popular forums or something I should know about? What kind of pricing are you looking for?
> all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands
Why would people follow a private profile anyway? I don't see what the user gains from that. Maybe this is an instagram culture thing that I'm out of the loop on?
> For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women.
What kind of content would your accounts post? Do you have some kind of feed of popular content (imgur maybe?) where you can copy content and repost? Do you automate that?
Think of it as an economy. The venues for communication are definitely all of the above, but there are also group chats in instagram where meme and large accounts hang out and like each other's post and reshare each other's content. So for getting started there are cold DMs, there are forums, there ARE marketplaces mostly for the buying and selling of accounts, and there are also DMs.
The otherside of this economy is the ROI of the account. If you paid money for the account, or for promos, or analytics tools, you should be able to know how fast you can break even doing your own promos. Can you account charge $10 or what.
When YOU want to do promos for other people, you should already be in a position to DM meme accounts and individuals directly.
The individual market has its own tiers, anyone under 10k followers is out of the loop, but is doing okay at the social popularity game which is the crux of instagram: A follower casino where few people actually win. Many will pay $10 for a promo. More will do a reciprocal promo for free.
Regarding private profiles, people want to know what they are missing. Is it explicit and erotic tantalizing content that will be short lived before it gets taken down!? Is it hilarious content that only the cool people get to know about!? Maybe there is a sneaker or consumer electronics promo happening on this secret page, maybe a secret society that conveys long lasting advantages if you happen to be there. Yes its an instagram culture thing.
Yeah what to actually post on the account is hard work. But you don't actually have to do it much if you just want a profile with authority and power in direct messaging or real world trading for free stuff (you promise exposure, real luxury businesses give you their service). But for active posting, there are various tools to automate it, but it is really hard work either way. If you want to create a very valuable account to generate cash flow from more expensive one-off promotions, to funnel many users to a real subscriber business of your own or something you partner with, or selling the account at a revenue multiple, then you have to figure this out. You have your niches and you can have original content or not. Being able to quantify 3% engagement is a gold mine. Higher? Palladium.
Fascinating stuff. If you wrote a series of blog posts detailing how you manipulate the world of instagram, you'd probably frontpage HN.
Last question: If I wanted to throw a few bucks at it and play in the sandbox, do you think there's any actual legal concerns? Do you use a burner phone number and proxy for dealing with your accounts, or is this all so normalized now that it's fine to tie your real identity to meme accounts? (from ig's point of view, not publicly, of course)
Yeah only reason you want a burner phone is because Facebook is obsessed with SMS 2-factor because they care more about aggregating user data than security. Do they allow OTP systems yet? People that know your phone number will try to steal your popular account with SS7 attacks if they find a way to put two and two together. I think you can still sign up with email.
OH you mean to use the instagram app. Yeah thats not a problem. Just create the account however you do it and login on your normal device.
No proxy necessary.
No legal concerns with the state. With private persons you are dealing with a lot of creatives and media people, so although reposting is a fun thing, if you ever brand a page to actually look like an actual business then people will threaten to sue you for copyright infringement for random unilateral reposting. Just asking is ok, but not a standard that anyone else has to think about.
Facebook slowly lets Instagram facilitate its economy as you can have as many instagram accounts as you want logged in at the same time, and it is easy to switch between them. They should really be brokering the promotion and account trading transactions too, maybe its not as big as I imagine? But it could be much bigger too if they added confidence to the market.
So IG won't care. If you mess up with objectionable content, only that one account will get sanctioned in isolation. Although it is still possible to get an IMEI banned.
> Fascinating stuff. If you wrote a series of blog posts detailing how you manipulate the world of instagram, you'd probably frontpage HN.
I'm working on more lucrative things right now, so I'm just answering questions because the comments have gone this direction!
I knew this edge would diminish if I ever wrote about it, and on HN specifically I just figured a bunch of Gen-X people would really miss the point and only see objectionable unrelatable social media stuff they don't want to think about, a "get of my lawn" attitude, with the idea of a social media economy they can't perceive being something they would just argue the semantics of. So I had imagined it was only downside.
Thanks for all your answers! I think a lot of us have just ignored social media and missed out on all the interesting hacks that have happened along the way. You've cleared up years of stuff in just a few posts, and it's much appreciated :)
not to mention that you get what you deserve wrt. the outcomes / kind of people this attracts. honestly, seems like good matchmaking to me-- shallow meets shallow.
agreed. i don't view people like him as competition at all, as their and my interests in the dating pool are nearly completely disjunct.
that said, no one ever asked for anyone's "judgements" ever-- not here, nor anywhere else. but yet they have this shiny "comment" button, and i guess i just can't help myself... welcome to an online forum, where people share judgments (among other things).
Even in that context it would be a weird comment: "I worry about what kind of people would fall for such spam, probably stupid attracts stupid"
It is an insult-like judgment coming from moral highness, both of the posters and of the women mentioned.
As an example, in both cases a comment like "this is a disgusting toxic way to use the platform" would have been less of an unwarranted insult that still communicates strong feelings.
Yes, I agree with that. I just found it odd that people jumped to defend the guy that clearly was doing something pretty unsavory, especially when the line of defense was "well it works for him" - spam and dark patterns also work, otherwise people wouldn't use them.
whats unsavory about sending messages from a popular profile and people finding that attention intriguing and less likely to ignore?
not "earning" the popularity the way anyone imagined? every form of valuable popularity requires capital and external help. it has the same affect with the populous. sycophants with romantic interest are predictable.
> Women who value popularity on instagram tend to be pretty hot as well.
hot, yes, and another important factor being: fun!
the combination is anomalous in SF since the demographics do not select for it, so the evolutionary pressures are non-existent.
but here and everywhere you see them on dating apps and they don't see you at all and won't respond to you at all on the gram as this is their way of passively increasing their follower count and engagement. But when you show up with a lot of the thing they value? It is disingenuous to find this perplexing. Its wealth, social proof, and ingenuity in a tough market all in one. This has been attractive to our species for a very long time.
The profiles can be about anything even scantily clad women (maybe not actual memes though, but maybe), and they don't even know what I look like and they come through at least to the cafe. No different than any other date, just all the exceptions you ever wished for, and with fun and hot people that otherwise ignored you. Its more about getting a response than anything and recognizing that you are incapable of being the strangest or most precarious circumstance that many women have ever been in, just offer and invite. You are already rich, in followers, and recognize that this is a currency, just like they do.
oh shoot! It was when I said social proof wasn't it! well the other term I was specifically avoiding was demonstrating higher value. Yes, gotta update those concepts to conform to things people actually value this decade, especially when wealth and education credentials are more ubiquitous and not unique (in SF/Bay Area) and both genders have it more often. I just don't want to be associated with the twisted and lost "red pill" crowd so I don't use the terms but try to describe similar concepts.
The appeal is to remove the randomness from society and specifically regarding attraction and consensual intimate outcomes.
I didn't like having an average case success with average people an average amount of times. I was and still am very allured by having best case success with consensus attractive people an above average amount of times. Consensus attractive and whatever I specifically find to be extremes of attraction, of which there is significant overlap.
Most of the attraction things I would do are gender neutral and are useful outside of courtship contexts. More like sales. Live in a desirable neighborhood, enjoy certain experiences. If I would portray a certain accurate lifestyle in a client meeting where the business itself is in the back of our minds but relevant, I would portray it on a date where the "business itself" is in the back of our minds but relevant.
Yeah, I find sales and marketing to be distasteful in general, and casting human relationships into that mold turns something beautiful about life into a hollow commodity. I have strong desires for community, and personal meaning, so I am happy to have deeper relationships even if it means they are fewer in number. It also feels to me that the urge to pursue a large volume of experiences in this gamified way is an attempt at finding validation without being vulnerable, which is ultimately self-defeating. But hey, if it makes you happy then who am I to say anything. But that perspective is why I don’t understand the appeal.
It was an analogy about how benign it is and not exclusive to cisgender courtship. Things that make me attractive in one environment make me attractive in another environment as well, compared to putting on a hallow mask temporarily for women. Oddly enough, I don't mind their makeup.
> It also feels to me that the urge to pursue a large volume of experiences in this gamified way is an attempt at finding validation without being vulnerable
Or its exclusively an attempt to have sex with a variety of people that look like the people I always wanted to have sex with, and it is as fulfilling, entertaining and intriguing as I expected it to be? I was wondering if you considered that.
> Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.
I'm confused, why is it easier to get people to line up to follow a private account based on...nothing?
Curiosity. Intrigue. Boredom - well not necessarily, it is a form of entertainment for the instagram culture.
There is also silly user experience on instagram where you can share photos from a private profile to your friend but your friend can't see it at all unless they request to follow the profile too. Some content types get this behavior, more like animals, tropical landscape photography. Sometimes women/models, but thats more of a personal fawning.
Based on an endorsement from a page they already follow. Private meme accounts with tens of thousands of followers or more are not uncommon, so it's not especially suspicious
Thanks for the information! Could you share how much does it cost to create "one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women"? E.g., let's say I wanna create another meme account with 5k followers, how much shall I pay for other meme accounts for a promotion on average? And I was always thinking that the engagement ratio is low for meme accounts, any information about it?
Buy the account and rebrand to similar content. Don't grow the account from scratch, let teenagers in eastern europe and malaysia do that. Try not to get scammed when buying the account.
Anything you do from then on is to offset the decline in followers.
De-risk and break even on doing promos for other people. (lets say you bought a $5k account for $50, do 5-10 promos for other people, done. Start with more capital and get a more compelling account, don't go too big though, 30k is a sweet spot.)
Engagement ratio of 1% is bad, 2% is ok, 3% is great. Not super important when talking with individuals. Only when trying to charge more for a promo, or selling the account.
No I'm kidding, I don't have a patreon, but I don't want to give my favorite markets up.
Ebay has accounts and some rudimentary price discovery there.
You can also just message existing pages on IG. My primary procurement accounts are just anonymous blank accounts that just send out a direct message with an offer. Money talks.
Emailing is usually possible too.
The main thing you want is price discovery, understanding how things are priced or understanding value. Its some formula between followers and engagement. If I were to guess I'd say
(Followers/100) x (Engagement x 100 x 1.75)
Engagement is a percentage so it has to be by 100. Eh and the multiplier for engagement is probably nlogn. after 1, 2, and 3% engagement would have a large delta in prices between them, but 3+ wouldn't.
There was no dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women in that paragraph. Please don't dilute real issues with your general awkwardness and discomfort.
> In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a popular account its a night and day difference.
Can you elaborate on how you would acknowledge that valid reality? Is there a different wording you would use if it was indeed common and accurate outcome? From my perspective there is no contempt, only circumvention and the reason why.
Before claiming that group X does Y to cause outcome Z that is unpleasant to someone, it is worth considering:
1. Is Y really a behavior exclusive to group X?
2. Is behavior Y fair to generalize across members of group X?
3. Is outcome Z the intended purpose of behavior Y, or is a side-effect that someone might take painfully?
For example, the sentiment of “In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them” might read like at best someone low-key thinks women owe others attention.
Using a dating profile to promote another social media profile is something any attractive person might reasonably consider, and (barring some extraordinary looks, etc.) reaching out to them from a social profile with a lot of clout could be a way to get attention—clout likely being what that person respects, as they themselves are purposefully trying to acquire it.
But this wasn't a quantitative analysis on what other combinations of people experience. It was acknowledging a shared cisgender experience with women. It doesn't matter if other combinations of people do or don't experience this, and I didn't suggest it was exclusive to any one group. It also happens, which I think is the most important thing here.
I have LinkedIn profile and ignore it. HRs may say it loud, sorry, most of the time I do not seek job offer. Would I respond if someone I value send me an email? Government: "Only you can save Earth from Aliens". Hell, yeah!
It is not language that hurts, it is what behind it. I see nothing wrong behind original sentence. In yours I feel lie - there is something shameful, something that can't be said.
Also you've changed "dating apps users" to "any attractive person" which is awful judgement. Population versus gamers of one particular style.
This style strongly reminds me of George Orwells "Politics and the English Language" (1946), I hope it will not live.
I also ignore my LinkedIn, but I would not mind it being popular just in case I lose all existing customers and need a gig for whatever reason.
With that in mind, imagine I link to my LinkedIn from my Instagram (let’s imagine my Instagram is very popular), and then see some tired headhunter tweeting “In general on Instagram, software engineers are funneling recruiters to their LinkedIn profile to ignore them”.
Whoever wrote that would come across as a needy, frustrated, and possibly as someone who thinks I’m obligated to respond to their messages; but until recruiters start to ambush us engineers in dark alleys I’m not going to worry much about that claim, even though it’s factually incorrect.
Now, that scenario becomes a bit more charged with a claim that plays to gender stereotypes and generalizes across a group with a history of discrimination and violence against.
> I see nothing wrong behind original sentence.
I will rephrase.
The original sentence, addressed to a group of supposedly mostly men, attributes scheming or malicious intent (“funnel to ignore”) to something that women do.
The wrongness of it is akin to the wrongness of a broke person saying that Apple with its ads “funnels people into stores to withhold shiny gadgets from them”. (Apple is not the only company that advertises; that’s not why it advertises; etc.)
The difference is, in our culture as it is now Apple can’t possibly take damage from such a statement, while women regularly suffer violence from men. Why add fuel to this fire if you can express the same idea without?
I don't understand what's going on with gender speech.
No matter how I want I can't give birth to baby. Not carry, not breastfeed. This results in different roles in hunter-gatherer society, optimized in genes throughout millennia.
We should have same rights but we can't expect same results. We have different stats, we have different brains (hormones whatever). Even children. Boys compete a lot and are in material science. Girls builds groups. It is awesome to watch. Like girls emotional intellect on average is much higher. And boys EQ is much dumber.
I believe I can say this. But for some reason in games based on EQ... no, we should be equal.
I dance salsa. It is very asymmetric social dance. Man and woman have very distinct roles and we enjoy it a lot. Woman waits for invitation, man can invite, woman can reject. Thus balance is formed. Each dance starts with mini game - invite the one who wants to dance with you. And it is all just for fun. Also men are not expected to reject. I've seen woman inviting men on each dance, that ends badly - exploitation of rules - loss of goodwill. A month later noone invites her, rejected by society. Hope it shows that "ignore" is not bad in some cultures.
We should grew respect to who we are and each other. Accept strong and weak sides. That is the best antidote against unreasonable expectations.
Sorry, but I think your understanding is just a reflection of yourself.
More accurate and neutral rewrite would be speech from personal experience:
> Woman I've contacted on dating apps overwhelmingly respond to popular account, otherwise ignore.
Like nothing changed at all. No excuses, no expectations just naked truth. That's how it should be read.
> The difference is, in our culture as it is now Apple can’t possibly take damage from such a statement, while women regularly suffer violence from men.
So your counterfactual claim is that if statements about about women "scheming" didn't exist, violence against women would be lower? That seems like a pretty strong causal claim when all we have is correlative data.
It could simply be that the people who are violent against women start and perpetuate such statements, rather than that such statements causes people to be violent towards women.
I believe that (A) discovering what is considered normal in one’s community influences what one thinks, and (B) what one thinks is not disconnected from what one does.
The trap of entitlement is easy to fall into, and if a statement can be interpreted in a way that implies you are owed something and deprived of it by a group who can provide it (that group already having reasons to fear violence from your own group) then I oppose the wording.
The existence of such a statement in vacuum does not matter, the trouble starts when it is published in a community. Bonus points if it’s mentioned casually in passing, implying it’s nothing out of ordinary. Bonus points if it goes by unopposed by the community (thankfully, not on HN).
Someone in the community may have their existing line of thinking reinforced. Someone else, who does not have an established opinion on this matter but is going through a difficult period in life (which during formative years or early adulthood is not uncommonly associated with lack of intimate relationships), may start considering this idea for the first time.
Start feeling belonging to a group where this is normal, and a feedback loop may be formed with horrible publicized outcomes[0] and not unlikely many cases we don’t know about.
If you believe that there is no causal link between those outcomes and perpetrators being able to discover communities where relevant opinions were considered normal, then we disagree and I hope you eventually change your mind.
To be clear, this may not even be purposeful. We may not phrase things carefully at all times, and in some cases casual accidental phrasing can imply things we did not actively consider before. Being aware helps.
> I believe that (A) discovering what is considered normal in one’s community influences what one thinks, and (B) what one thinks is not disconnected from what one does.
It hasn't been considered "normal" to inflict violence on women for decades, so that's not really the context under discussion. The question is, under present circumstances in which domestic violence is a huge no-no, and everyone knows it's unacceptable, would the absence of comments about "scheming women" really prevent or reduce such violence?
There are communities in which it is considered normal and/or advocated. If you read the link, you would be astonished that such communities could be found as close as on Reddit until end of last year.
In many (most?) parts of the world, for a woman walking alone after dark to see a group of men approaching often means to fear for her safety or life; in domestic conflicts women take much, much more damage from men than the reverse, the statistics are readily available.
If you consider “I don’t think it’s normal, so I don’t care what others say or write” a viable position in this context, then we disagree and I hope you will change your mind.
Generalizations, misattribution of intent and other biases against a disadvantaged group may exist in someone’s head, but when vocally expressed in a community they have the power to exacerbate an already difficult situation; especially if the majority of said community belongs to the very group that historically caused the disadvantage of the former group. (This is not limited to men vs. women or gender in general.)
It is worth phrasing things in a neutral way, even if it takes more words.
Everything you've pointed out is common knowledge in the developed world, which is what we're talking about. These communities you speak of aren't created by the language to which you're objecting, they create that language.
You're confusing cause and effect, which was my initial point. If those objectionable statements did not previously exist, incels and others would create them. This is why policing language is stupid. It's a symptom not a cause, and focusing on the language as the problem also punishes people who would never abuse another person.
Comedians run into this wall all the time. No one's going to hear a racy joke and then think it's suddenly ok to go assault someone. Even if someone were contemplating assault, the joke wouldn't be some "final straw" that drives them to do it, and trying to classify it as such simply ignores the real underlying issues.
I don’t understand your point, or why you’re still making it.
The language one uses cannot influence the mindset of another person? Providing avenues to advocate for certain behavior should not be expected to increase the incidence of that behavior?
Then we have disagreed back here:
> I believe that (A) discovering what is considered normal in one’s community influences what one thinks, and (B) what one thinks is not disconnected from what one does.
and we will continue disagreeing.
I hope eventually you will change your mind, but I’m not prepared to (nor expecting to be able to) argue you into that.
It’s not a “valid reality”, it’s the anecdotal experience of someone who uses dating apps to collect attractive women. In general, this is not how women behave on dating apps. This is how models who are obviously self-promoting through dating apps behave; it’s only your general experience because this is clearly what you are drawn to.
This isn't the least bit true. Tinder and the like are filled with spamming "influencers" that are pretty much only using the platforms to funnel simps to their IG and other social accounts, in order to gain more followers. Modern day spam, essentially.
I don’t doubt that they exist, I’m saying that in no way do those accounts outweigh legitimate, non-spam accounts that stick out like a sore thing to anyone with a shred of common sense.
its "anybody that puts their instagram profile in their dating app bio" not "models self-promoting that represent any meaningful amount of what I'm drawn to"
people passively grow their instagrams and don't have any interest in checking their messages
the behavior I actually navigate is completely outside of the dating apps
I see the billboard (on the dating app) and found a way to get to the top of their inbox for quality time (outside of the dating app). Never even attempting to "match with them" on the dating app. The other side of the control group is an experience of what happens when a normal bloke tries messaging them on instagram: absolutely nothing
Equating a desire for sex with women with misogyny is in itself discriminatory. I'm not sure if its discriminatory against women or against men, maybe just both, but its certainly one of them.
> Equating a desire for sex with women with misogyny is in itself discriminatory.
It fits the definition for misandry. Ironically. Equating courtship advantage things men do with contempt is inherently misandrist (or we're at an impasse). I hope people are able to reconcile their corrosive relationships and prior life experiences to be more collaborative.
Please do not confuse misogyny with facts. If he said "I would to that and that would have worked because women are like this" that would be misogyny. But stating something he tried and did succeed is a fact.
Motivation (derivative of travel & lifestyle but with quotes overlaying the images)
Fitness (derivative of motivation)
Oh yeah, I run my own fanpages for my own pages. lol. Thats another technique. Fanpages are just downgraded main pages when another account grows up or is acquired in the similar category (and rebranded back to my brand, with the lesser account being rebranded - often as a fanpage - sometimes as a business providing non-social media goods and services).
That's down right amazing. I've been working on a software to get and repost images to a suite of IG accounts using InstaPy, but IG has too many account blocks and throttles.
You have shared some very insightful information here -- especially about buying accounts and engagement rates. And have definitely executed something that I have only thought of.
I'm working with a client right now to find influencers in 1m+ range to do 24h posts for their apps. Maybe I'll get to retry automation soon.
It's clear that you are trying to sell something here. Might as well be obvious about it. Direct marketing works best in some cases (and definitely yours going by your other posts).
Im not trying to sell anything, I'm done with growing Instagram accounts and am satisfied with the women in my life so I don't care if these industry techniques have diminishing usefulness when too many people start trying them, and which post, the Goorin Bros one?
I remember reading that Scientology did this with their books. Bookstores were complaining because the "new" books arriving would have previous price tags on them.
While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!
If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.
The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.
When they ‘four wall’, they pay a single fee to rent the entire cinema (the ‘small fee’ they paid to a friendly cinema owner.
They then ran 5 viewings.
So they are claiming being sold out for each of the viewings. (5 * seat capacity * ticket price), but didn’t actually pay themselves for all the tickets (no revenue - small fee = small loss)
It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird....
They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves.
They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.
"Four-walling is when distributors rent out a movie theatre and buy all the seats," Mr Tabach, who used to work at BuzzFeed making viral videos, explained.
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre, and any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets. The moment we realised that was an option of distribution, we went for it."
They pay the fee to the theater, but as the distributor of the film they then get that money, or some large percentage of it.
Sounds to me like they're renting the theater, so they can then sell tickets they way they want. So they "sell" the tickets to themselves. They pay rent, then the ticket sales are a wash, but can be reported as "ticket sales."
Even if they did buy the tickets, they paid themselves with those tickets.
They paid a small fee for four walling (which they probably got for a token amount because of COVID and the fact that one of the guys might know the owner since he worked there). And that was pretty much it as far as actual costs were concerned.
Generally the listed budget for a movie is the production budget, which does not include marketing the film. Generally for a big "blockbuster" style movie, you can generally assume the marketing budget is almost equal to the production budget.
To me it sounds like they basically just lied to the maintainers of the BoxOfficeMojo list, because it’s a list of revenue, and their movie did not create any revenue at all, even though they rented a cinema and did five screenings, nobody paid to see the movie.
I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding "Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue.
For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!
It's a story repeated ad nauseam, but the founder of Zoom came from Cisco, after having been in charge of WebEx there. Cisco had refused to let him do what he saw needed done to radically improve WebEx, and so he left and created Zoom and did it there.
Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing software. They were wrong with their decision, but it's an entirely understandable one.
The weird thing is that even with Cisco $$$ Webex still isn't as good as Zoom at streaming. I wanted to watch a Youtube stream simultaneously with friends and tried it out with Webex, Hangouts, and Zoom. Hangouts was unwatchable, maybe 1-2 frames/second, but hey, it's a "free" product. Webex made it possible to see what was going on, but honestly it was pretty crappy. Zoom looked more or less like the original stream. Pretty amazing for a product that until last year was mainly known security holes.
I've been using Zoom via work for over 4 years now. It has been a stable and very good video conferencing solution for all that time. It is the first time I've honestly dealt with video conferencing software that "just works", which is a huge deal. I've never sat in meetings with people dithering about trying to get it to do what they needed.
Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product.
And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
Zoom actually is profitable and was one of the rare technology companies to be profitable at IPO. Although they do offer a lot of free services they nailed the freemium line - 40 minute free calls - since the most effective business meetings are 45 minutes.
I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people.
That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.
So much this. My kid's school went with Google Meet for the online class chats, and gave us meeting codes. So far so good. I get the app, wants a Google account. I would have stopped right there if it was an option. Then, constant problems and apologies from presenter, just like in the bad old days of laptop presentations and projector resolutions. App is not the best either - rookie UI mistakes like the meeting code text box obscured by a CTA. A UX so bad that it boggles the mind.
The school district ended up distributing their own Gmail credentials to use for the meetings, too, which was behind a hard-to-find edu-website login. That's a lot of friction that Zoom solves.
In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get my parents into a family call.
You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on getting people in.
Also, it's asynchronous unlike something like FB messenger or Facetime (ie it doesn't push you the meeting, you can pull it at your convenience).
I think this makes sense, and it is indeed a major contributing factor to the UX. The hunger for data from all the other players essentially hampered the product adoption.
I would really like to know what went wrong with Google especially. They've had years to develop Hangouts and Meet, yet it's so, so behind in both performance and quality. Are both of these products just riddled with technical debt to the point that these improvements take significantly longer than normal?
I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand.
Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they needed but are too tied into the everything on the browser mindset and their own ecosystem to see they're shooting themselves in the foot before their horse is even out the door. At this point its too late, Zoom's aggressive pre-marketing, simplicity, and ubiquity is a real force now and everyone else is just playing catch up.
> I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand.
Disclaimer: I have not investigated how Zoom and other video conference apps work, but I do work with real-time video.
I don't see why the browser would be the limiting factor in performance / quality for videoconferencing.
What is the local client doing? Recording video and audio, and playing a real-time video stream. Sure, you want it to be low-latency, which involves its own bag of tricks.
But native-code libraries and/or hardware are doing all the heavy lifting (like H.264 encoding or whatever they use), the browser (and Javascript) is just the UI.
You have much more leeway if you can tune ffmpeg decoding settings manually, skip frames whenever you want, etc than if restricted to what webrtc gives you. Also Zoom is built with Qt which is pretty efficient :-)
I have repeatedly found Meet much higher quality than Zoom - straightforward to launch from the browser with a single click, clearer settings, better video quality, and no scummy installed app practices.
That might be because of my location or some other factor, but I really don't understand why people find Zoom so much better - it doesn't match my experience at all.
I doubt it's anything more than the cyclical nature of trends, and chance. There was already a movement away from Zoom to platforms that were less closed, but then the pandemic happened.
But the movement to leave Zoom happened due to the prominence of Zoom in many B2B companies that didn’t realize they were risking their security. Just reaching the status Zoom reached in 2019 is bonkers considering the competition had been at it for decades.
Patents are an extremely poor signal of required innovation; I strongly suspect they’re worse than random. Most innovation is retained as trade secret rather than patented. Patents are more an indicator that you’re a big business, or that you are operating in a domain where hostile use of patents is rife (and video is one such area).
I just did a very quick skim through those patents (just reading what’s on that page and not the actual claims), and these are my impressions. ’390: obvious, prior art may also exist, as what it describes has been a standard technique even within video codecs for many years. ’900: obvious, also an abstract idea so it shouldn’t be patentable. ’511: obvious and probable prior art, the technique has been used for DRM for years. ’454/’218: no idea, could be valid, but (personal opinion) it doesn’t sound like it should be patentable anyway.
Funny, patents were originally intended to stop people keeping trade secrets, now so many patents are just nonsense, all the important stuff is kept secret again.
Network software has made it possible to keep trade secrets perfectly. When you deployed something physical, people could analyse it in detail, trying to figure out what the ingredients to your drink were, pulling apart your widget and measuring it very precisely, that kind of thing. Some would be easy, some would be hard, but it was all at least physically theoretically possible. So the patent system said “save us the trouble of figuring it out, and we’ll grant you a monopoly on this particular approach for a while”.
But with network software, the interesting part is out of reach, so you can’t reverse-engineer it.
One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?)
- Unfriended - Dark web (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/)
aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie.
I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.
Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.
In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.
It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat * 10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).
This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took advantage of it.*
But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm".
Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today.
* I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.
> Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie
The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater.
> Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices.
> ...
> That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film.
Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100.
I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.
either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.
I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels, and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box-office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie about Captain Marvel.
The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...