Social media is a rip-off

Much of the angst about social media revolves around how they deal with your personal data. They sell your attention to advertisers. They sell your online activity, tendencies, and interests to people who want to sell you products. Personally, this doesn’t bother me, because I prefer ads for things I am interested in over ads for things I will never buy, but your mileage may vary. I get it.

I reserve my outrage for something that you may have have given little thought. What really gets me is that we do all the work, but they make all the money.

It is said of social media that if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product. As noted, they sell your information to advertisers. But of course, the advertising is only effective if you actually visit the social media site. 

We are the world

And when you think about it, you come to the site not to see what Twitter or Facebook or Instagram has produced, but what all of us have produced for them. We are the ones that write the clever posts, show the pictures of our cats and kids, and share our Wordle scores. Our friends and followers come to the site to view our posts, and see a few ads as well. We produce the real value on the site, and the social media companies take the money.

Not only do we produce great content and do the work of building up a following, but the social media sites actually control all of that. If I work hard to write lots of witty, interesting tweets and build up a large group of followers, Elon Musk can, on a whim, take all of that away. He can ban me for something I say that he doesn’t like, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m left out in the cold.

Even if Elon Musk doesn’t pay me any attention at all, I can’t just pick up my content and subscriber list and go elsewhere. If I want to communicate with my fan base outside of Twitter, I am completely out of luck. Twitter has me trapped.

Social media influencers do make money. Most social media companies pay a small number of content producers, but it’s a pittance relative to the fortunes the companies make off of the content that we produce. Generally, a tiny percentage of the folks who make social media valuable make money from their popular content, but the take rate—the percentage of revenue generated that ends up in the platform’s coffers—is well in excess of 90%. Even YouTube, which is best known for paying content producers, has a take rate generally believed to be over 60%.

We do all the work, and they make all the money.

Own your work

This is why sites like Substack are attracting content producers. Substack might look like just another place that locks you in, but it actually isn’t. Writers on Substack use the simple but ubiquitous and totally open internet protocols of SMTP and POP—otherwise known as email.

Content producers can control their email list, and use it as they please. The content they produce ends up in their email inbox, something that no one else has any control over at all. Substack’s take rate is a modest 10%, leaving the rest for the folks who, you know, actually do the work. 

At a modest $5 a month, it doesn’t take very many subscribers for a writer to make a nice living. And fans are often pleased to pay for content, knowing that the majority of it goes not to a corporate overlord, but directly to the person who is actually producing the content.

Thus, it is no mystery why many content producers have left platforms that make money off of their skills and talents for a place where they can both control the entire process and make most of the money.

And this is a trend that I think will continue. Social media networks are currently locked up by large corporations, and our access to them is controlled, literally, by a handful of rich men. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Substack is merely a step in that direction.