Writing, like nearly all creative work, does not in and of itself generate money. Something, books, subscriptions, tickets, advertising, and so forth must be sold to turn writing into cash. So publishers, media executives, and the like exist, making money from writing (and other creative works).

The content units mindset makes AI replacing human writers inevitable. This AI future won't just replace writers, when the goal is churning out more content units, ever cheaper, every creative is on the chopping block. The sword that will cut their jobs is being forged with their work.

https://www.masonpelt.com/ai-enabled-greed-and-stupidity/

The advertising economy is starting to resemble a collection of interconnected multi-level marketing schemes. Some kind of intermediary firm sits atop each pyramid brokering the serving of ads to eyeballs. Under that are ad agencies, and tech firms that work on sales and bid management. The bottom are ad buyers, perhaps too few to sustain all these pyramids.

https://www.masonpelt.com/the-advertising-pyramid-scheme/

Today HackerNoon deleted not only my profile, and every article I've published on the site; they also deleted every article that referenced me. The reason for the erasure is a dispute about canonicalization for syndicated content. It's as dumb and disrespectful to writers as it sounds.

I syndicated multiple stories to HackerNoon with a correct (according to Google) canonical URL to the original content. HackerNoon removed those canonical URLs without my consent, published the articles, and refused to add them back after multiple requests citing "best practices" that they refuse to clarify.

https://www.masonpelt.com/hackernoon-doesnt-respect-writers/

The Business Of Helping Build Businesses by Mason Pelt was first published in HackerNoon on January 12, 2020. While This article was published first on HackerNoon, the website's editorial team deleted it following a copyright dispute. This article is updated with more context and published in MasonPelt.com on May 3, 2023.

This goes out to freelancers and those who run professional service companies. Are you building a business or helping others build theirs? It can be both. But that requires awareness, caution, and focus. 

https://www.masonpelt.com/the-business-of-helping-build-businesses/

To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you'll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better.

BuzzFeed built a digital brand that can only be understood by living online during its heyday. The way reposted videos of TikTok fill Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, is only slightly more pervasive than the level to which BuzzFeed content once filled social feeds. Everyone knew BuzzFeed, but few loved it.

The media company built traffic without an audience. BuzzFeed appeared to show you a compilation of oddly satisfying power-washing videos or a quiz to learn what kind of potato you were. Like the big-name cola that isn't Coca-Cola, people knew the brand, but it was a preference for very few.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://www.masonpelt.com/buzzfeed-news-and-twitter-blues/

People strive to be brands creating a loss of self, and often a loss of any potential brand. Brands try to be people, in programmatic and contrived ways. Both are organic as a Twinkie asking how the fellow kids are doing.
On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://www.masonpelt.com/brands-as-people-people-as-brands/

Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney for a promotion. Mulvaney is trans, and while famous, not Beyoncé famous. Also, Mulvaney is not the kind of person normally associated with Bud Light, causing some uproar. The buzz has probably been incredible for Bud Light directly, but certainly for AB InBev.

Bud Light is a joke among many; It's the water of beers. It's cat piss in a glass. It's also the top-selling beer in the US for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and I stopped looking. Bud Light can handle people posting social media videos of them shooting the blue cans.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://www.masonpelt.com/get-woke-gain-earned-media-coverage/

Google grants access to information kings didn’t have 50 years before. I have consumed so much content, books, podcasts, movies, articles, songs, and possibly the Ph.D. thesis of a woman from Chesapeake. I cannot remember it all. Like most, I’ll occasionally use Google to find a specific but only half-recalled crumb of content.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://www.masonpelt.com/why-google-search-sucks-and-a-tribute-to-neil-gaiman/