My counter argument is it can be nearly impossible to build an audience outside of a kingdom. Many popular YouTubers will try and splinter off and create websites where they can monetize better. I'm even subscribed to one of these websites because I really do want to support the Creator, but I still consume almost all of their content on YouTube. YouTube makes it very easy to upload something and for people to consume it.
If your video on getting better gas mileage is on GasBro.net I'll never find it. If it's on YouTube I might .
Just bait and switch. You don't have to be loyal to the platform that helped you grow, because it has been using you from the beginning. It has always been a mutual relationship, but people somehow realized it late.
YouTube being the most profitable platform only means that people will consider it as /a/ primary target, but nothing prevents them from using other platforms. As long as the cost is justifiable, multi-platform approach is always better. Luckily, operating on multiple platform is extremely cheap.
I align with Apple a bit more as they actually do interesting manufacturing R&D; they’re all terrible on the software and privacy side.
Google is 3-4 useful websites, cloud software hype, and resource consumption.
We could write desktop software that recurses over personal data, abstracts useful metadata, and share that with each other. Users pay for bandwidth when they could just utilize their computer better.
Somehow we’ve anchored our agency to doing that via cloud providers who externalized their real costs onto startups which is why they’re rich.
I’m really hopeful the future of hardware comes with power savings and performance that make building a business with off the shelf parts tenable again. But who knows
Additionally, often there is only a single kingdom for a given type of audience. One can't simply migrate to another kingdom, and it's very difficult to create a new, viable kingdom.
One of the ways these kinds of problems could be addressed could be through laws that limit the speed and the degree to which monopolistic platforms can unilaterally change their terms and conditions. Other kinds of laws could help protect creators that earn a living through these platforms, such as laws mandating a certain rudimentary level of customer service for money-making creators. Hopefully these kinds of laws would reduce the number of horror stories where a platform simply decided to ignore a creator's customer service request to the point where they lost their source of income, oftentimes due to a technical problem caused by the platform itself, and which the platform was unwilling to have an actual human look into.
"I'm even subscribed to one of these websites because I really do want to support the Creator"
This is exactly what my article is recommending. You build a funnel. You put a lot of cool loud stuff on Youtube. But you also build a loyal customer base who will support you on a personal site.
Whoever this creator is that you are supporting is doing exactly what I am recommending.
Historically almost everyone built their castles in someone else's kingdom. The barons may have complained a lot, but in practice they were much more likely to build another palace in the capital than in some remote swampy place where the king's writ ran less.
Ok but trying to lure people to your own site they've never heard of is much more difficult than luring them to your twitter or discord. Creating a community that spans multiple widely used platforms is much more effective than just shouting into the abyss for people to come to your bespoke solution.
Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly.
For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your default choice unless you have strong indications it does not fulfill the above criteria.
If you buy everything from one hand at once (server space, domain, associated email), make sure you have a way of changing provider and keep domain and emails without it being a hassle.
Word. If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web server hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.
Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar. No, you’re probably not in our target market.
I'd argue that on today's Internet, if you don't have a .com domain, you do have an exotic/fancy TLD and therefore need to have the .com domain live and redirecting to your exotic TLD.
Except .us because the USA has so many other common TLDs commonly associated with it. In Canada, .ca is the norm, and I tend to associate .com with $USD and expensive shipping.
IIUC, there are many such TLDs, but you should really only use these if you yourself are a citizen, and your organization is based in the country in question.
My country's TLD (.pt) holds Portuguese courts as the ultimate arbitrator. There are simpler administrative procedures for suspending or claiming domains, but in case of conflict courts have the final word.
I imagine most countries' TLDs operate in the same fashion.
That's encouraging. I guess I'm wondering if suspension of domains is up to corporate discretion or if the government of Portugal precludes that and requires a court order for suspensions.
Note that .us and several other ccTLDs have the unfortunate disadvantage of not allowing "private registration", forcing you to either expose your real name, address, phone number, and email, or violate their terms by providing fake information and risking suspension for that reason.
Unless you somehow live in two countries at once, there should only be one obvious option for you. However, if what you are asking is: “If my local ccTLD is not trustworthy, what TLD should I choose?”, then unfortunately I don’t really have an answer for you.
This is why open standards like podcast are much better than being in a walled garden. Monetization will be based on the quality of content and your own efforts towards it and not instant.
Look at the ease to exit just like the ease of entry.
Author here. Hey whoever linked to my article thank you for post. I just got notified of this.
To answer the most common questions, I am not advocating "build your own youtube."
Instead I advocate what @notTheAuth said below. Basically treat youtube and twitter as my commercials. I don't care who follows me on those two platforms, they are just the entry point. The following that I truly care about is my mailing list and my own personal site. Those are my owned platforms and that is what I care about.
Think of it like the old days of TV. If I am advertising on TV channels and it goes out of business that isn't that bad. Oh shoot I can't advertise on there anymore. It would be worse if my TV show was hosted by that channel because then my TV show isn't there any more.
This lesson extends to almost everything in life. Too many people wrap up their goals and aspirations to things that are really someone elses thing at the end of the day. It frequently doesn't end well.
Well it's easy to say "don't build your castle in other people's kingdom", but when 95% of people live in someone else's kingdom and like it there it's much harder to actually pull that off.
The author laments content creators trying to bring viewers into their discord or twitter instead of personal website but conveniently ignores the fact that people are much more willing to go to and likely to return to sites they already visit.
I don't think content creators are especially happy to be reliant on youtube, or twitch, or whatever other site they're on. But the reality is that's where the people are. When creators have left those platforms they've consistently lost the vast majority of their viewers, because the reality is that there are plenty of other creators on the platform for viewers to migrate to.
The article discusses that. The idea is go where the people are and try to get them to come to your own kingdom. Use their platform to advertise your platform. I'm sure this is harder than it sounds, but it's pretty amazing the size of the organizations that don't even seem to be trying.
Well the thing is it's probably much easier to do this incrementally. If you put a link to your site on your youtube videos your conversion is going to be terrible. If you put links to your twitter and discord it will be better. Then you can try to get people on your discord to go to your site since they're already deeply invested in your community. Anyway, building your castle in as many communities as possible seems like a much better defensive tactic than spinning your wheels trying to create a new kingdom.
> when 95% of people live in someone else's kingdom
Everyone lives in someone else's kingdom, except those people who own kingdoms.
Articles like these, repeated on HN year after year because they represent popular fantasies (and are thus always voted to the front page), are universally misleading and wrong.
Challenge someone to list how they plan to build a successful business, starting from scratch, outside of existing kingdoms. You'll get a lot of evasiveness in response in terms of answers.
It applies to online businesses as well as offline businesses.
Need advertising? You're in someone else's kingdom. Need marketing? You're in someone else's kingdom. Need cloud hosting or services? You're in someone else's kingdom. Need access to the Internet? You're going to span numerous kingdoms that you don't own. Need to process payments? Again, multiple kingdoms you don't own. Need a domain or access to an app store? Kingdoms you don't own. Need retail goods to put in your store? Numerous kingdoms you don't own. Need manufacturing for your widget? Numerous kingdoms you don't own. Need delivery services beyond local? Someone else's kingdom. Need utilities for anything? Someone else's kingdom. Need government licenses for anything? Someone else's kingdom. Need to travel at distance, by train or plane, for sales or similar? Someone else's kingdom. Need teleconferencing? Very likely someone else's kingdom. Need to sell something online? Someone else's kingdom (most likely; even if you just use Shopify).
And on and on and on it goes. The alternative scenario of trying to do everything yourself is hell.
A better premise would be: be careful where you build your castle, and consider putting it on wheels.
>A better premise would be: be careful where you build your castle, and consider putting it on wheels.
No, the analogy (and the article) is fine, we're just busy torturing it all to hell on our way to some mirage of isomorphic purity. The concept of "your kingdom" does not need to be something you completely control in a 100% self-sufficient way in every conceivable context to be a useful way to think about marketing indie games or other real-life situations.
Hi "represent popular fantasies (and are thus always voted to the front page), are universally misleading and wrong."
I am the author of the article. Great, critique. I responded to how I actually make it work in another comment. Basically treat all the other platforms as advertising and pull people to your own site that you charge access for.
Sadly you can't build apps that can send notifications on the most popular phone on the planet without subjecting yourself to arbitrary censorship by Apple and a 30% cut of revenues.
You also can't build apps that use decentralized backends that receive notifications on that platform. All notifications have to come from the centralized app developer.
I did hold that belief for some time, but I solved it with the most reliable notification-method I came across thus far, and that's plain simple email from my own domain.
I understand this is not possible for specific apps that need smartphone notifications to function properly, but when you think about it: a lot of (web)apps don't need that.
In general, one might need less notifications than one thinks.
As a vendor, notifications sell more. As someone who sells things, you need to outsell your competition. Therefore, as a vendor, you need more notifications than you think.
Definitely, it's not only about games, and not even only about marketing your content of whatever topic on SM.
Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business. Or any other business that also knows how to deliver its stuff inside a package to your door.
(Just in case it wasnt obvious: Not my blog, just following it)
>Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business.
What if you can't afford to buy real estate in your local community, and don't own any stake in any local businesses? How does spending more money, and driving 20+ minutes, enrich your experience in any way?
I wrote that from the customers perspective, though. If the shop is too far away to be comfortable to reach (20mins in your example, mileage my vary), there are usually options to get it sent to your house.
Yes, you need to make a new account probably, but that's just minutes, and only in case you are shopping there for the first time.
I had a talk with someone about that, and he was like, "Well I'd had to open 1-2 accounts every week at various shops and completely loose control over it". But I think the true problem in this case is a different one.
Seriously that talking point of "buying stuff on Amazon hurts your local businesses" is such an incredibly false dichotomy. The stuff on Amazon has long often been from a local business, often one you haven't heard of because of its obscure but cheap location.
And that is before getting into the other trade fallacies, opportunity costs, and relative advantages.
Nice article, but some of the writer's earliest examples are "rug pulls" that happened 10+ years ago... surely the "new" generation of creators have ingrained these lessons already?
As a follow-up, I'd want to hear the writer's opinion on how to filter the corrupt kings from the "safe products". MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp?
It is going slower than one would expect (or desire), but I do think technology is bringing us to an ecosystem that is more equitable for creators. Personally, I'm interested in the rules and expectations for tools that would be equitable to creators while remaining sustainable. It seems like there are offerings beyond web hosting and e-mail distribution that are worth exploring.
> MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp?
The author does not say you shouldn't use other kingdoms. To the contrary he says you should use the heck out of them. Just don't set up your whole castle there.
Here I am reading, following this reasonable argument and... boom pop-up "call to action" interrupts the hell out of it.
I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? If I really enjoyed it, that seems like the point where I'd be on board with signing up.
Yep. Jump in my face, and I'm not only not going to sign up for your newsletter/install your app/whatever, I'm going to actively avoid ever visiting your site again.
Your metrics may show that you get 0.2% signups with this method rather than 0.15%, but they likely don't show the much larger number of people who won't be coming back to your skeevy site, ever.
I think that's the key distinction. On mobile you would navigate and dismiss the same way.
On a web page, I tend to scroll using a single finger or knuckle on the arrow keys. Requiring a mouse at that point (or extra keypresses, if those even work) breaks the reading experience.
If this is a castle, it's not a very inviting one.
The advice is, in essence, to prioritize your mailing list over audiences on proprietary platforms like Twitter and TikTok. This may work for some, but mailing lists seem like they would be really ineffective for a lot of use cases.
Yes, it's pretty focussed on mailing lists as alternative. Having a comment section may work too, but then, it shouldn't be hosted by discurs of course, and you have the trouble of managing it.
Same goes with your own forum, but it's not worth mentioning it almost, since nowadays everyone seems so opposed to a forum. But I believe, a good alternative for a mailing list is RSS (for the people who are tired of signing up for stuff).
A mailing list is generally made of people who are a lot more engaged and willing to support you. Twitter and tiktok are places you use network effect to try to grow your committed customer base but the conversion rate is much lower than a mailing list.
I think it also depends on business model and product but mailing lists are fundamentally more targeted than social media. You still need both to some degree.
The advice is more generalizable than that: move your audience into content in spaces that you own -- not spaces that Zuckbook or Google or TikTok own.
I don't think the advice is the move your audience to spaces you own. The advice is to move your audience to spaces you own that intersect with spaces they go often. E.g. moving users into a forum you run wouldn't work because it would require your users to explicitly go to your forum. Mailing lists work because people go to their email inboxes often. I'm struggling to think of another place people go often that isn't a proprietary platform.
Not necessarily "prioritize" so much as "make sure you have good and solid backup." Proprietary platforms are free advertising that can get taken away whenever, so understand the risks of using them. Good mitigation is to maintain strong lines of communication beyond those.
I never liked digital/virtual sharecropping. Hosting your own site might mean people can't discover you as easily, but if it means a service like Youtube/OnlyFans doesn't pull the rug from under your feet, then self-hosting is essential. I operate a BBS that has been going strong for over 15 years, and it's all self-hosted, well sort of (it's on a VPS) but the VPS provider is well-known and renowned and unlikely to go under anytime soon. The VPS provider also has many customers they wouldn't give up too easily.
That said: I have prepared myself if my BBS gets banned for whatever stupid reason. I've practiced and developed my own drill to get everything up and running again under a new provider should that happen. It's important to do this, because communities don't like down time and will go elsewhere like Discord etc if they notice a bunch of downtime on your server(s).
> OnlyFans ALMOST banned porn which would have left content creators out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only Fans (under heavy pressure) reversed the plan… for now.
This is the problem, at face value this happened and is now being used as evidence for the article's premise (which I enjoyed and agree with).
In reality it was a viral marketing move by onlyfans to promote porn on their website. You can't just come out and say to a bunch of Dads hey we got porn come take a look. But you can say hey we're banning all the massive amounts of porn we've got! oh no oops no we're not, all the porn you know and love is still there. We're sorry (TM)
Just like how no wives at some school are getting jelous how their husbands are looking at another mum's onlyfans... but I see paid articles about this all the time.
Excellent article. One of the best examples I have seen of this is an instructional wood worker named Steve Ramsey. He has excellent content on Youtube but almost every video he makes has a call to action to buy his complete video sets on his website. And, for me at least, it worked! I knew I'd be getting excellent content beyond the scope of what was available on Youtube (eg, complete with PDF plans, cut lists etc) and he charged a very fair one-off fee, not a Youtube recurring subscription.
And now, his viewership is drying up due to changes in the Youtube algorithm (and his lack of posting, caused by the algorithm preferring a style of video he's just not interested in). But he is moving a lot of content to Tik Tok and other platforms, and continues to drive viewers to his own kingdom.
Article never used the words, but it comes down to owning your own "channels" and owning "distribution". Everything else is modular and changeable without disruption to $$$.
If your local mall was attempting to secure a de facto monopoly on all commercial real estate within driving distance, and was doing so by offering subsidized rents in the short-term funded by billion-dollar funds that demand a return on their investment, then you would have taken a few steps closer to, without having arrived at, an honest analogy
That's why businesses always try to make their revenue model diverse, so that, even when one or two of them dry up, the business still have some breathing room left. This is a business 101 stuff.
When you open a store in a mall, you better have another store outside the mall. Otherwise, you'll get killed rather quickly.
If the mall kicks you out, or raises rent so high you can't afford to stay, there will be other nearby places to go, and it's easy to retain your customers when you move somewhere else. If Apple kicks you off of the App Store or YouTube bans you, it's way, way harder to keep your users or audience.
Same applies to fintech - I see a lot of new fintech startups building their solutions on existing no/low code platforms.
Whilst this gets them out of the gate faster all the problems in OPs article apply. In addition, their margins are squeezed as they have to pass on the cost of the no/low code platform. Also means the no/low code platform now needs to be InfoSec/Due Dilled which doubles that pain too.
This is nothing new. In tech circles we've been talking about this since at least the Zynga-Facebook era (eg [1]) and probably much earlier.
I mean it's good advice. Often you don't have a choice or at least the alternatives are so bad you'll hamstring yourself by avoiding a potential loss (eg Youtube).
There are risks on another's platform but there can be benefits too.
You will notice the last post I link back to a site that I own and make money from.
I am not advocating building your own Twitter or building your own youtube. Instead I just sell premium versions of what most people would most likely post on Youtube. For example I created a whole video series on a site that I created called gamemarketingideas.com. I charge for that in real dollars not ad revenue or fractions of a cent with affiliate money. I own it. That content could have gone up on youtube but I don't trust a business hosted on the back of Google.
So instead I am basing my revenue on selling it off of a site that I own.
None of this is a perfect libertarian utopia of total self-sustainability. I am 100% not a libertarian. And there is no risk free business.
You just need to reduce risk.
My advice is basically a friendly reminder to be careful with these big tech sharks. Don't put your whole head in the sharks mouth. Instead just put a hand in the sharks mouth. It is less risky that way.
Don't ask me where the shark metaphor is going it is early and I haven't had my coffee yet
A lot of people need to see this. If you don't control something, you will be disappointed eventually. Philosophically this can even be extended to your mortality.
Ah, but this brushes an interesting, yet inevitable fact: there is no such thing as control. We tend to imagine to have control to various degrees, as that makes it easier to cope with the chaos around us.
Still, we have to accept the fact that we’re all going to die, eventually, for example.
Many people never do that; they simply pretend they’re immortal, until one day something bad happens and shakes them awake.
I guess what I’m getting at is that change is inherent to life. By accepting that things will change, no matter how much „control“ you imagine to have about them, you will probably be happiest in the long run.
it's not git thats valuable, it's all the social interactions around it - your issues, discussions, actions would be very hard to move. Github is only releasing more vendor lock in features as time goes on.
Easier said than done. Mailing lists suck because email sucks. Running things off an independent website sucks because getting traffick to an independent website sucks. Platforms make things way easier because the returns to scale are enormous.
I hope that someday we have platforms that are more democratic, so that those who use them aren't at the mercy of petty dictators. Perhaps something like the Ethereum blockchain could help with that, who knows?
This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies.
Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off.
If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving money on the table. I’d wager that Japanese game manufacturers missed hundreds of millions of dollars by being late to embrace Steam.
Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science.
What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or leave, but don't pretend you're better off doing everything yourself. "Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty" as a famous economist said.
Incidentally I've been watching the walking dead again (season 8) and a lot of this stuff is the subject of the show. It's definitely had some rough patches but at its core, it's a show about how to build communities and large-scale civilizations, and what effects various leadership styles have on each society's long-term prospects. Very relevant.
The political angle here is totally disconnected with what the analogy is trying to get at. We can safely assume the author is not trying to advocate complete and total self-sufficiency in every context all the time.
Calling this article a "libertarian fantasy" seems unfair. The author does explicitly recommend entertaining new platforms, but being prepared with a backup plan for when these platforms are no longer viable for whatever reason.
Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough":
- A website on a domain you own
- A mailing list
- Own and license your Intellectual Property
- Sell your merch on your site
- Your own reputation
We can extend this logic to an unrealistic degree and do nothing but make your game/app/service completely agnostic to any platform in every way, but we can acknowledge that such perfection is unattainable without throwing out the value of being platform-agnostic in realistic ways.
> Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough":
Is there any data around why these are safer than the alternatives? Because the article is just a classic case of nerd philosophy; there's _no_ justification of the actual risks involves in these platforms aside from vague anecdotes and analogies, then using these vague anecdotes to drive recommendations.
I don't know, I think you can go ahead and use your best judgment on whether it's riskier for an indie game studio to go all-in on marketing through a social media juggernaut or trying to steer people to channels like a mailing list that they control. This is not a research paper.
I'm sure there's lots to criticize in "nerd philosophy" but an article that boils down to "avoid vendor lock-in" with a cute analogy is just a weird target to choose. If you can't help but read a certain ideological slant onto it and can't possibly understand it separate from that reading, I think that says more about you.
I've seen many examples here in HN about people who have lost access to one of these kingdoms for no good reason or as a result of some weird algorithmic decision.
I've seen people lose their data on their own blog, forget to renew their domain name and have it takes over by squatters demanding ransom, had their machines hosting Mastadon die on them leaving users high-and-dry, exposing keys to the world and getting their database stolen/dropped... The list goes on. It's not as simple as "kingdom bad, self-reliance good". Hence asking for a cost-benefit analysis.
We don't understand the dynamics of "web3" at all yet, but early entrants look pretty much like another layer of abstraction that simply rolls up to the same thing.
It's high-reward, sure, but the point is it's high-risk too. Look at everyone who was doing great in someone else's kingdom until the king kicked them out with no recourse.
The author is making a moral argument and presenting it as if it’s a business argument. It’s not. Zynga still made boatloads of money, and employed thousands of people, before the rug got pulled.
The article does not specify good vs bad platforms. Is Apple’s App Store good or bad? Would the author not want to start Epic?
What about building B2B tools for Salesforce, or apps for Shopify?
Platform Risk is a form of risk that can be mitigated. Building on platforms is itself a mitigation for distribution risk.
> I got the pixelart itch again and have a blog to write so I thought I would combine the two. This week I created a little metaphorical fable about building your castle in other people’s kingdoms.
The title (and the section headings) communicates the analogy really well, much of the following article really was a fun if indulgent deep dive into it.
If your video on getting better gas mileage is on GasBro.net I'll never find it. If it's on YouTube I might .