Greedy Goblin

Friday, October 21, 2016

The (EVE) media is poor, so cheap

I read Riverini in disbelief, that "A good portion of the isk came from the five advertisers we had on the site, each paying a sum of about 3 ~ 5 bil/mo each, rounding it to about 20 – 30 bil of income per month." Then I read the Goon propaganda site - which is finally renamed to "Imperium News", acknowledging that they are the Goon propaganda site - that they offer "Write something related to Eve Online and receive 300m isk." Assuming 1 posts per day, that's 9B/month. Even with 3 posts it's just 27.

Jesus, these people are dirt poor. No wonder IWI could buy his narrative with pennies. If I had any idea how cheap these people are, I'd throw 1/4 of my GRR money to EN24 and no one would question that it was me who brought Goons down.

And I mean it literally. Media has huge power to influence socials (if it's written by "relevant people", it must be true) and this influence is on sale. Lenny often linked articles as evidence of his exploits - articles he bought, instead of any original sources. Lenny never had - or even claimed to have - any evidence that he did anything. He was merely credited by "everyone".

So I made a mistake not even checking the prices of EN24, assuming they are - like a blogger who writes for his own passion - not for sale, at least not for trivial sums. I could reach much more people by buying articles there. This reminds me of the "media conspiracies" that Trump assumes, while it's likely similar deals. The journalists, working for pennies will write anything the client wants. Instead of crying "rigged NYT working for Clintons", he could just buy it.

The media is nothing but a soapbox for the rich. And not in the sense of "rich as a government", but "top 0.1% earner." I could buy EN24 with less than half of my EVE income if I ever thought of buying it.

PS: some kids took League of Legends too seriously.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Industry standard for writing an article is actually 250mil. GSF decided to increase their payout after the other news sites started crying poor following the casino bans. My guess is that they're trying to one-up the competition now that their revenue stream took a hit.

Anonymous said...

We all know that journalism was an under-funded profession even before it became heavily dominated by the free-content model. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It's an open secret that gaming magazines have always been under huge pressure not to upset their key advertisers.

Anonymous said...

What the heck is this "choking game" popular in LoL the kid died of?

Rob Kaichin said...

There's been a sustained drop in quality and quantity of articles at TMdC, which may or may not be related to interference from the owners.

It is probably an attempt to get some of the better writers to join TMdC so that they can pretend to be functional for a longer period of time.

maxim said...

this reminds me of gamergate for some reason

Smokeman said...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that their "advertisers" pay them, and they pay their people principally in ISK:

"At any given month EN24 has about 10 – 20 members involved in various degrees of commitment to the project. Our official staff rounds out at about +40 writers."

All that for 30b a month?

I assume, or at least I want to assume, that they at least all have day jobs... because I'm pretty sure that grocery stores, even in Iceland, don't take ISK.

Basically, this comes down to "Will work for PLEX for one account."

Kines Pavelovna said...

IDK, most of the articles on EN24 read like they were written in 10 minutes, so it might be better to write for 300m an article then any/most in game activities, at least from an isk/unit effort point of view.

Anonymous said...

Smokeman. Actually, grocery stores, especially in Iceland, take ISK.

The point being: For some ISK is a real currency, for others not. I personally think that those Authors are on the social side and that the "currency" isn't ISK (real or virtual), but fame.

Smokeman said...

Anonymous said...

"Smokeman. Actually, grocery stores, especially in Iceland, take ISK.

The point being: For some ISK is a real currency, for others not. I personally think that those Authors are on the social side and that the "currency" isn't ISK (real or virtual), but fame."

What?

No grocery store can take ISK as currency because it doesn't exist in their purview. Just like they can't take Quatloos as currency.

I suppose you could be referring to the Icelandic Krona, which also goes by the title "ISK" But I think it's PRETTY DAMN CLEAR we're talking about "Interstellar Kredits" here. Which don't exist outside of the game.

Andru said...

I think that you wouldn't have paid a single ISK on media presence, Gevlon. Back when you ran GRR, you strived to at least have some kind of objective measure stick on which to base performance.

Paid journalism is difficult to measure, because you can't just measure up social feelings to see if your media campaign has any impact or not.

Unknown said...

Andru, but You are wrong. You can measure it up, by number of threads that support Gevlon case on reddit, by number of upvotes, by new members/organisations joining his cause. Above all else, with all the media going -how important content creator Gevlon is-, Falcon could react to him differently.

The thing is, it would just go against what he strived to prove. That You can win over socials with rationalism and objectivism and not manipulation.

Unknown said...

I cannot believe that an out of EVE activity, like writing an article or fixing IT problems for an EVE related website, are paid in ISK. Or rather that people accept ISK for their work. CCP should put down the banhammer for such in-game currency abuse...

And the miserable amount of iskies these folks are willing to write for...
No wonder the quality was never good and has deteriorated a lot recently...

maxim said...

First you buy the media, then you need to use fuzzy metrics to measure investment on return, then you go full social :D
You don't ever go full social.

Unknown said...

Marketing is the whole science dedicated to measuring "fuzzy" stuff. Its often hard and rarely u see someone useing marketing in the right way, but there is sure rational way to measure impact of media, promotion and PR expenses versus costs. Its just often much more labour intensife, than easy processed data like total ISK destroyed.

Gevlon is philosphy crusader, hence he cant use some dirty tricks upon his sleeves if he wants to make his point. But if he wont bother with "how I win", sponsoring his own media agenda would be a logical choice. I mean, socials care for what other says. So if the whole EVE medias would go "goons are crazy weak right now and here is the -analyze- why so" and reapeat it for long enough, people would eventually believe that, instead of Gevlon facts and numbers. That is not some crazy, random, stuff. That is how socials works. You make them feel, like their peers think A, so they start to think A themselves. Much like everyone and their mother tough Imperium was no. 1 Powerhouse in EVE, while there was really weak.

Terry said...

@99smite
Actually CCP specifically allow it. From their point of view it allows them to build a larger internet presence for allowing players to transfer ISK for their time spent. It's massively beneficial to them.

As for the amount they are paid, yeah, it's not particularly high, but then the payment isn't to pay someone to write, it's to pay them to write there. Most EVE writers would write for free, running their own blogs or submitting to media sites. But think of it this way: if you could either write for nothing or write for 300m isk/article, which is the better choice?

It's simple, being paid for the thing you would do anyway for free is in most cases a better choice. You write your article as you would have but now you get 300m isk, you get on a bigger site with a bigger audience, and that site grows in size by bringing on another decent writer. Everyone's a winner.