PRACTICAL THINKING. —「The parallels between technology adoption and finding an audience for your writing . . . and the science behind it」
「Search costs are very real and significant」
. . . practical thinking . . .
High traffic with low competition is right. Because of a thing called market position. Let's discuss that. It's very relevant.
( I saw a post discussing the topic of finding a low competition but high traffic subject about which to write, when looking for an audience. As usual I made a long comment . . . )
There is a famous paper in the economics literature, which suggests people will search until the benefits fail to exceed costs (George Stigler, The economics of information, *Journal of political economy, 69(3):213–225, 1961.6). It's also, basically, wrong. A standard reference to an alternative point of view is now Al Ries, Jack Trout, Positioning, New York: McGraw Hill. That point of view is highly connected to the networks and percolation literature now found primarily in Phys. Rev. E.
Mosts individuals have resources which are not above threshold to make any appropriate search meaningful. They search a tiny fraction of a product space, if they search at all. A fraction that is below threshold to finding sufficiently often the better products they seek, to the extent that search is discounted away.
If potential consumers, prospects, do search, usually resulting in a loss for them, they find what they already know in their mind when they first think of the space: — what's most popular, what was first,
This simply because there's a feedback look regarding what is discussed most often being what is known to most being what is most easily and often found when randomly searching, when sampling a tiny part of the product space. (The market system is an endofunction; output can serve as input to the same principle.)
If you're not in a top three for a subject in the mind of your prospect, you'll have a hard time. Why?
Because there is not a dearth of information, but a surplus of it.
There are often thousands of competitors and nobody has time sufficient to search the product space. So they go with what they know, unless it offended them in the recent past, or what's most popular, or what's first. ``From those who have not much, all will be taken, to those who have, more will be given . . . '' Feedback loop.
That means you have a problem even if you have a good product. Even if you've the best product. Nobody searches much of any space, they can't afford it. So the probability of covering your costs for a product, or doing better, with purely stochastic purchasing is very low, very low indeed. Most people will not see your solution to their problem, they just won't see it. You have the best potatoes, let's say, but nobody is aware you're selling potatoes, let alone they are the best.
Here on Steemit, you might want a tag in which your post will probably be at the top for at least several days, for example.
「The parallels between technology adoption and finding an audience for your writing」
. . . theoretical thinking . . .
Completely agree with the high traffic low competition idea. Here's an interesting presentation by Richard Gabriel at Stanford, a few years back, that also discusses such things, Most things in it apply to publishing also.
Gabriel suggests he gap between new product and beginning of acceptance ``represents finding a niche market you can overwhelm, own, and expand.''
Here is a rather interesting paper about finding a niche: Laland, K., Odling-Smee, J., Feldman, M., Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change, Behavioral and brain sciences, 23(1):131–146, 2000.2
Here is their book, if you find that interesting: Odling-Smee, J., Laland, K., Feldman, M., Niche construction, Princeton : University Press, 2003
I'll be updating this post with a longer discussion of the presentation, and another paper of the author on this topic, and a long discussion of the themes of the book and the paper. Both in the original context and then typing this to networks, whether in publishing traditionally or on social media or technology adoption as was the original context.
〈 PRACTICAL THINKING 〉
#creativity #fiction #writing #creative #technology #steemstem
#thealliance #life #isleofwrite #writersblock
I usually write stories which are 10,000–25,000 words . . . 40–100 pages.
ABOUT ME
I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.
The magazines which I most recommend are Compelling Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Writers of the Future.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a work of fiction. Events, names, places, characters are either imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events or persons or places is coincidental . . . . Illustrations, Images: tibra.
Deep and insightful. Your article clearly shows that you're a scientist..what field, If I may ask? About the theme of your post, I would be tempted to say..that's why advertising and marketing exists. In fact nowadays the content is becoming less important than the container. This is clearly shown here by the quality of certain steemit blogs in comparison to the little feedback that they receive (and also the contrary: poor quality / hi feedback level).
Mathematics.
Positioning is a further development in advertising. Advertising is largely broken in most spaces: advertising is around 100 billion USD. If you spend even 100 million USD on advertising amidst competition, you will all the same reach far fewer people than needed to move above an existing market position in your space.
A lot of the trending, recommended, etc, platforms are really not advertising per se, which operates via search and percolation, but a system were most people don't search at all.
Almost no amount of advertising at this point will displace Coca Cola, for example, from restaurant menus, even if there appears an absolutely amazing new drink. For the soft drinks market.
But if somebody comes up with a distinguishable drink category and advertises it aggressively, they will show up on menus, right above or below Coca Cola, so long as the product is also good.
The issue is that people settle for what's easily found, and don't search. Most advertising is blocked or ignored. (Increasingly many people ignore the trending page, hence Steemit Inc moved it to the center from its previous location in the far left.)
The concept of randomly opening up one page filled by various algorithms and searching only that, whatever the outcome, because all other outcomes are discounted off is really a type of strategy in artificial intelligence called reservoir computing, and merits further discussion.
An academic type question is: You have algorithms that cover part of a torus, then reset. That is one cycle, during which you can randomly walk subject to thresholds (which vary depending on results of past random walks in past cycles) only on the covered part of the torus, until the reset. A process grows itself on the torus manifold, and we ask how many cycles can a process survive, compared to how many cycles it takes for the random walk to cover the process, or better, the entire manifold?
My grandfather used to say, "Math is the language of the universe."
That's a great point of view, although, the issue with that would be payout. Most people don't post on niche tags because they may not get noticed as much. That's just my opinion
A niche need not be synonymous with small. Rather what you're looking for is something where there do not exist already a 1000 other positions. The ``niche'' might be very large, or at least growing rapidly, but it must not yet have any clear market positions established. For example, this very post is trending in two of its tags. And these are communities.
In general, identifying a niche is quite hard.
A classic example is plain paper copying. You can't rely on statistics, because prior Xerox nobody was doing much plain paper copying. But the process was convenient and amplified communication, argued Alan Kay. Then the niche was dominated for decades by Xerox making them enormously valuable.
Otherwise, the payoff will be small anyway, else the vast majority of network participants will not have the resources to find your content, no matter how much you put into advertising. (This doesn't apply to Steemit, where 100 SBD bid will put you in trending on the front. Rather it refers to the wider market, where advertising is around 100 billion USD. If you spend even 100 million USD, you will all the same reach far fewer people than needed to move over an existing market position in your space.)
One challenge for Steemit might be to create new tags that grow quickly. They key would be payoff that are growing.
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