Subscription Means Nothing

Monopoly is bad, and big companies often try to take in all the power, so others have to rely heavily on them.

Take, for example, a blog which aims to connect with readers of self-improvement. Initially, they need to write articles while thinking about Google in mind because they are the most significant search engines.

Let’s consider, Google is doing its job correctly. And the blog is shown to many potential readers.

But the author is fearful that Google might become too big. So he also actively starts collecting email address of readers. That way, she can connect with her fans even if Google decides to stop showing her blog for any arbitrary reason.

This became the norm, and all the blog owners did this. But the most used email address is owned by Google.

And so Gmail had one job to show the emails from people whom you want to hear. As such, if you have subscribed to something, then it generally means you want to hear from them.

But most of the emails started landing on the ‘promotions’ tab in Gmail which they had created to filter out emails. And they are the ones deciding which email would land where. In short, Google made such a scenario that getting new readers from their search engine became important again for blog owners.

And they are now at the mercy of Google. Also, its rules keep on changing. It helps most of the time, good blog owners. But they are not affectionate towards new authors.

Same Story

Youtube, which is again owned by Google, repeats the same story. Earlier the subscription box was prominent and when all the YouTubers had many subscribers – they changed the layout.

Also, if you had subscribed to many people, Youtube would arbitrarily unsubscribe you or don’t show video from select Youtubers.

Their reasoning was it was too much for you as a viewer to watch – so they want to make the experience better.

But that is a strictly monopoly related decision. They want Youtubers not to gain much power and still rely on their algorithms to get discovered.

That’s why now many YouTubers are making long videos because those are promoted more. Also, if you don’t make new videos, then your old videos might not be circulated too. This is a simple strategy from Google’s side to make the creators at their mercy, so they never become too big. They are fearful of losing their monopoly.

Competitors

Right now, there is too much power with top 10 technology companies, and as such, they dictate the terms and the creative freedom of artist is getting hampered.

One way moving forward is to have many competitors – we need a strong competitor to YouTube, and there are few contenders like Twitch, TikTok, among others. Also, in email, there needs to be at least equally good options like Gmail so that there isn’t too much power in one hand.

As of now, this is the hope that the future is bright and there is less reliant on one platform because that’s scary.

As for you, if you love some artists work – try to fund, support and connect with her as directly as possible.