Little Fish In A Big Pond

Indeed the world has gotten much smaller in the last twenty years.

So small that good friends around the world almost seem local to us.

Tools like Facebook and Twitter bring us the status and relevant thoughts of their lives in short snippets of text. In Twitter the limit is one hundred hand forty characters. Facebook provides a bit more.

And tools like Skype let us call and talk and see each other while we do.

Global events like the World Cup soccer tournament can now be analyzed and debated – scrutinized in real-time as the match is being played – with the world – amongst the noise of the cheering fans typing in their cheers and jeers as well.

The internet has changed the world drastically. So much that the name Internet no longer really represents this global connectedness.

The opportunities this new connectedness (a phrase coined by the online gurus of this new connected world – first seen by me in tweets from great pundits like Ian Aspin Andrew Keen and Patrick Dixon) has opened up a world of opportunities.

Opportunities we are still trying to get our heads around.

For example, it has allowed for me to write here on headstuffing – and share my musings with the world (or at least my .006% of the Earth's population that I can reach) – in hopes of that someone of influence will trip over my stories and open new doors for myself and my family – to let me put headstuffing to work for my daughters education and to maybe add to the pittance of a retirement fund I am acquiring after twenty years of dedicated service to the various employer's throughout my career.

Sorry, I got on a bit of a tangent there.

But you see what I mean.

When I was a young man – first looking to get my foot in the door – my Uncle Fred once told me that if I offered my services for free – then the parties that benefit from those services would gladly pay you to do them once they realiuzed their value.

A debatable concept – which led me to poverty in my early twenties – until a friend – already successful in the field – suggested that I charge an exorbitant fee for my services – because that would create the illusion of value.

My friend was right. And together we made a pretty good little living together for a couple of years.

But neither of these concepts seems to work on the Internet … err … in this connectedness.

You can't charge people for what they get for free. And you can't charge exhorbitant amounts of money for something people can find online for free – by sources much more talented than yourself.

This connectedness has taken all the big fish in small ponds and thrown them into one great ocean. And the whales and the sharks in this ocean simply overshadow – and sometimes eat – the once big fish in small ponds.

Newspapers are the shining example of this – once great fish – in their local ponds – overshadowed by online news services - extinguishing their readership and subscription revenues as people find that bundled little gem of local news on their doorstep to be of less and less value. Overshadowed like the tiny elm that can't get nourishing sunlight because that damned gigantic maple tree next to it has left it permanently in the shade.

Would you pay your local newspaper as much as you do for a subscription – merely to see the local high school sports scores?

Maybe in the case of the Atlanta Journal of old – and that was the only place you could get the latest Lewis Grizzard column. But in those days, Mr. Grizzard's writings became valuable enough a service that he became a syndicated columnists printed in thousands of papers across the United States.

In short – he jumped from the little pond to the big ocean of the connectedness available before the Internet.

So how do writers like myself and headstuffing – and others as or more talented than I – how do we find that next level?

Some would say the best source of revenue from a blog (and I hate that term so desperately) is to put tiny little advertisements all around it. Monetize it.

I did. Not a single Google Ad cent over the last four years since I started. Not a single nickel from Amazon for touting their books on my pages.

Of course I didn't go chasing those nickel and dime clicks very hard.

But advertising someone else's wares to earn money when you want your writings to be respected seems to me to be a bit – hypocritical? No that's not the right word.

Misdirected.

"But it's your writing that will draw people to the ads … the ad money directly correlates to your popularity as a writer".

No it doesn't.

I don't buy into this concept that people are so prone to impulse buying that they will click a link off of my site to go purchase a hat or a sweatshirt or the latest paperback novel.

Not unless they could only get that merchandise from headstuffing. A headstuffing hat or t-shirt or sweatshirt – a collection of headstuffing stories in a book form.

Do I want to be a merchandiser? They say the big Hollywood movies make more money on merchandising than they do on the movie – some times. It depends on the movie.

I doubt seriously there was tons of merchandising opportunities for Brokeback Mountain.

I guess in short – I am simply wanting for what those of us who call ourselves writers want … to be called writers by other people.

That respect goes a long way. And opens even more doors.
Some of the great writers have earned tremendous fortunes from their writings. Because their writings became books. And their books became movies. And their movies often became merchandise.

Damn, there's that merchandise avenue again.

But it's such a big ocean. The little ponds are all gone.

And I'm wondering if I am a good enough swimmer.

Reaching Out To .006%

I was just reading Ian Aspin's blog ReallyGoodThinking – I go there a lot because Ian is a very talented fellow who makes me think.

After reading today's piece – I started thinking about who is really reading headstuffing. Who am I reaching?

Headstuffing, from the emails that I get, and the comments left, and from what my friends tell me when I see them, is read pretty much by people of all types.

That's pretty cool.

All though the younger crowd doesn't really get me.

That's pretty cool too.

But I like to try to bring everything down to one common denominator. So I spent a lot of time thinking what are the most two most common characteristics of people who enjoy my little ramblings?

After a lot of thought – too much really, because I am very busy and should be putting my amazing thinking powers to more immediate concerns right now like raking the back yard leaves or finally putting the new door knob on the garage door (there's a big hole there now and I have to move a chair in front to keep the stupid door closed), or hanging the Halloween decorations for tonight's festivities! – I finally came down to my two lowest common denominators of who reads headstuffing:

They have to be able to read the English language - or at least my impression of what I think the English language is.

And they have to be able to use the Internet to get to headstuffing.

Okay, that's three lowest common denominators.

Then it struck me. There are roughly somewhere between eight and ten billion people on the planet earth right now. Of those eight to ten billion people, how many are literate, English reading Internet users?

Being one myself, I thought I would find out like all literate English reading Internet users learn research stuff now-a-days.

I'll Google it.

I typed in this simple question to the Google search bar:

"How many internet users speak English?"

I figure if you're using the internet you most likely can read – otherwise the web browser is pretty useless … right?

The answer came up on the first selection.

464 million. That's a lot.

But out of say … 10 billion? That's only 5% of the Earth's population?

That's not very many.

Over the course of three years of writing headstuffing, my Google Analytics account tells me I have had about 250,000 unique visitors.

So that's only .006% percent of the total potential persons -people that I can reach?

That's not very good.

But it's pretty close to the percentage of people that I know that think like I do.

Headstuffing would likely touch a lot more people that think like me if I could publish it in different language. According to the chart, 251 million Internet users read in Chinese.

Hmmm. Would the Chinese get me?

I work with a lot of Chinese people at the office. We get along really well … I think – I can't really understand what they are saying when they talk amongst themselves. I doubt I ever actually come up in conversation.

So I called up one of my colleagues at home – Lo Hi. I think he was still sleeping.

"What you want Brill?"

"Hi Lo, I was wondering if you had ever read my headstuffing blog?"

"You woke me up to ask me stupid question like that?"

"I'm doing research actually, sorry I woke you", I apologized. "I'll make sure I credit you in the post with your answer."

"Yeah, I read that stupid blog one time. You not very funny Brill!", and he hung up.

So, I guess that's not the answer I was hoping for.

That makes sense though, Lo never laughs at my jokes in development meetings.

So I guess that unless I either change my sense of humor, or I learn to speak, then write in another language, I am going to be stuck with reaching only .006% of the entire English speaking Internet community.

Which is ok I guess.