Yeah. Speaking as someone who ran a rather large fansite about NIN in the 2000s (the entity now basically exists as a Twitter account), you really cannot just "grow organically" on today's internet. I like to tell people I have a marketing allergy. Self-promotion feels gross. The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than can possibly be consumed. But I realize that if I want something that I'm doing to gain any traction at all, I have to get other people talking about it, and that there are pretty well established ways of making that happen.

When the internet was a smaller space occupied primarily by nerdy types, you could make something interesting and by the nature of the medium, a lot of people found it. You thought you really hit it big if you made Slashdot, but getting featured on television took it to a whole different level. (For example: The Dancing Baby) You didn't need to have a face or a personality - your content actually could speak for itself. But even back then, taking those extra steps usually didn't hurt, either.

Now, the internet is full of professionals of all stripes, and that means you're fighting for attention against people or entities who have a budget for marketing and PR. I can take the most beautiful photos in the world and put them on Instagram, but if I'm not actively marketing that account, no one will ever see them. Meanwhile, some dope with a fresh set of credit cards rents a Lamborghini for a photo shoot, buys batches of followers, and that will grow a following, and maybe he'll get a free night at a posh hotel out of it.

Maybe Bloomin' just does it for the love of it. Maybe Markipler has been able to quit their job and make YouTube their profession. I bet both of them wish they had aspects of the other's experiences. As much exposure as I got to being a small-beans niche internet 'celebrity' (like, on the level of local weatherman), I wouldn't wish fame on my worst enemy.

The question is what can we do about it? Are we stuck in the game of attention engineering forever?

>Are we stuck in the game of attention engineering forever?

More or less. As the content generated exceeds limits of human attention, it is our ability to pay attention that is scarce and much sought after. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Joe Edelman talks about an alternative that I find compelling, if not slightly idealistic.

https://medium.com/what-to-build/how-to-design-social-system...

Basically, if you focus on how people want to approach their goals/passions, instead of the goal itself, you get a really good idea of why they're doing something. If you know why they're doing something, you can design systems allowing get better genuine engagement. So, you stop designing for attention (which can be exploitative and bad) and start designing for meaning (which is empowering and enjoyable).

Applied to this problem of the lonely blogger/streamer, I'm not sure what the solution is... I'll think about it and post a reply later to avoid a wall of text.

There's no silver bullet, but I think you just have to pick a scope of specialization. I'll see if I can analogize it to my day job: I work for an ecommerce platform with built-in search, CMS, and business insights. That doesn't sound like specialization compared to, say, Shopify, but often times the companies that fit well for us are ecommerce companies that find they're spending too much effort being an IT shop, instead of focusing on marketing, merchandising, and branding. You can absolutely have a go at building a homegrown ecommerce platform that suits your needs, but are you thinking about maintaining that effort in-house five years down the road?

My wife's a composer, and between the work the two of us have put in around her music, she's gotten pretty good exposure - a piece of hers went fairly viral in 2009, with peak exposure probably being a couple of segments on the Rachel Maddow Show (and a lot of law blogs leading up to that). I built a custom CMS for showcasing the music she writes, and we take advantage of social media... but we've also seen friends of hers, also composers, short-circuit that by hiring a PR firm, and suddenly they're being reviewed in the New York Times. Throwing that cash around is way more efficient than, say, marrying a web developer and dabbling in media creation alongside maintaining a career in music composition.

On a larger scale, Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails has been through a couple of cycles of this. Started out on an indie label (1988), found it wasn't serving them well, basically struck out on their own to earn enough credibility that a big label bought out the contracts (1991), which worked well until it didn't (2000), went almost entirely in-house (2008), which did okay but didn't scale, and post-2010, works with different people or agencies with different strengths, between selling merch, manufacturing & distribution, tour management, publicity, and so forth.

> The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than can possibly be consumed.

This resonates with me deeply. I've always lived by that sentiment.

It's also one of the reasons I love the points systems on Reddit and Hacker News, as it's the fairest way to objectively rank things people make, rather than by how much advertising and marketing they can afford.

It's kind of broken though as most people will only view the most upvoted comments because once again there's just so much content it's impossible to view it all, so you upvote what's already been upvoted. If you're there first you generally will get a lot of karma even if better comments come later.

This is why new comments get put on top, and if after a decent amount of views, they don't garner enough upvotes, they sink.

I wouldn't say growing organically is completely impossible. However, it's very, very unlikely unless either:

1. You are exceedingly lucky, and your work somehow attracts the attention of a person or organisation who's already famous/has a massive audience. This is how many indie games take off, with examples like Five Nights at Freddy's and what not becoming popular after being played by the likes of Markiplier and PewDiePie.

2. You somehow find a very specific niche that no one else on the planet has decided to compete in and that somehow has a decent sized audience interested in it. This is far less likely than it used to be in the early internet days, but it's still technically possible. One of my own forums is like this, since it's the only site dedicated to a certain video game franchise on the entire internet. Another example may be the likes of Boundary Break on YouTube.

But you're right that it's certainly not a practical way to grow your channel/site/business/whatever, especially as the only way someone can succeed that way is basically through sheer dumb luck.

This applies to every form of attention driven media that I'm aware of. From your start-up to your new Instagram, if you want attention -- you need to hustle.

> Growing organically isn't possible

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this.

I used to watch a few Youtubers like Ethoslab, Davidr64yt, Caliform, TheTolhe, etc. that seemed to grow completely organically. I’ve never seen them do any kind of “marketing” for their channel nor clickbait bullshit and they seem to have made it anyway. I think luck plays a big part in this, as well as your experience & charisma when doing your initial vidéos (if those suck, most viewers will just move on instead of giving you a chance to get better as time goes).

The corrollary of "you need to break the rules (such as view-botting) to get ahead" is that only people who are willing to view-bot "make it", which in turn really reduces the diversity of the content which ends up in the 'mainstream' (or main-stream for twitch, meaning front-page or top X when listing by game).

I dunno, Dunkey managed to do it.

Do you mind going into more detail about how Markipler marketed his youtube channel, besides publicity stunts, bots and click bait titles?

I don't know his marketing plan by any means, and I certainly can not claim he botted views, am I actually fairly certain his views are mostly authentic but that is just me going off of what I know of his moral judgement.

I do know he was extremely outgoing, almost weirdly so. I don't know the full extent of his 'hustle' but it wasn't just booting up amnesia every week.

that's unfortunate, it would have been extremely interesting to understand the timeline of actions/events that led to his success! O well

Thanks anyways.

There doesn't seem to be a youtuber by that name - unless he deleted his account or his videos.