Know when to walk away

 

Sometimes you just have to walk away

by Ariella Brown

Pip should have walked away from Miss Havisham when he first met her. I applied that lesson today.

Today I walked away from a potential job. Admittedly, it wasn't a really good gig, given the combination of hours required and pay. But it wasn't the low pay that was my main turnoff; it was the delusions of the person in charge. For the purpose of this post, let's call him Irving.

If you've ever read Great Expectations or seen one of the many adaptations produced over the past century, you'd have an indelible image in your mind of Miss Havisham who keeps the moment she was anticipating her canceled wedding frozen in time for years and decades, never moving on.

.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/dixon/15.htmlScanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

In this case, it's a site that is forever frozen in 2008 like an extinct woolly mammoth in ice, never updating its approach or appearance or assumptions about effectively engaging an audience.

Irving is not interested in crafting what will truly resonate with people. Nor is he interested in improving the social media outreach to potentially attract more viewers and subscribers.

Irving is only interested in having editors bring his vision to life, maintaining the delusion that this is the way, and it will become perfect. When I pointed out that if it hasn't happened in over 15 years, it is unlikely to arrive at this point, Irving brushed my argument aside.

The site itself and the static cards crammed with hashtags and no images that are used across all their social media channels are stuck in the convention of nearly 20 years ago while the world has moved on. Like Miss Havisham, Irving is stuck in that moment in time when his print paper crumpled, and he's unwilling to change.

Freezing the moment

Backstory: there was a newspaper that did well enough in its market early in this century. But in 2008, it lost its advertising revenue and had to close up shop. The owner decided to pivot to an online format modeled on "The Drudge Report," which he still thinks is the pinnacle of journalism.

No one else think that, certainly not in 2024. Over the decades, Drudge has been criticized repeatedly for biases -- first on the right and then on the left -- and for promulgating hoaxes as real news. Yet, Irving doggedly maintains that this is "an art form" to craft "pithy headlines" that convey a story of the events when grouped together.

Bad models assure bad outcomes

Irving even directed me to the examples on the Drudge site that actually generalize a number of headlines to make them read as a title followed by support. More often than not those modified headlines overly generalize to the headlines of the stories they link to the point of real and deliberate misrepresentation.

As an authentic and honest person (even in marketing) I don't like misleading spin. I don't trust any outlet that does that and don't like contributing to it. Aside form the sleaziness factor, it's not even effective at winning attention and influence.

Why this is a doomed venture

Taking on this job with the intent to improve the site and extend its audience beyond the average of a single visitor a day is doomed because of two fundamental errors in Irving's thinking.

One is that his faith in the power of quality products. He clarified that his primary goal for the site is to make it -- what it has not yet become in over 16 years -- a "quality" site. The assumption that quality will always win out is patently false, as I explained in Building Alone Doesn't Lead to Success. 

Irving's second fundamental error is in how defines quality, taking the Drudge Report model is the ultimate measure of quality for a news site -- in 2024. That's analogous to declaring the Blackberry the ultimate in mobile technology. It was once upon a time, but not since it was forever displaced by the standard set by Apple's iPhone in 2007. 

Irving has not moved on since that time period, maintaining the site just as it was set up in 2008. That is completely out of touch with people's expectations of the internet today and that both Gen Z and Gen X have now become accustomed to take in our news through social media posts shared by those we follow.

No one (with the possible exception of the die-hard Drudge fans of a certain age like Irving himself) wants to take in a slanted account by reading blocks of text made up solely out of paraphrased headlines. No one would consider that journalism, no matter how much Irving insists that the pithy headline is an art form. .

No profits and no metrics

While stats as a baseline are essential to measure progress, Irving admits that he knows they're dismal but won't look at them. So I used the power of the internet to find out such public information.

How bad is it? Very.

Site traffic: just one visitor a day, which is likely Irving himself.

Social traffic: zero

Referring links; zero

Domain value: zero. For a site that has been active for over 16+ years and that boasts of 25K subscribers, that is beyond pathetic.

How can the site remain active for so long when the cost of running it with two part-time editors and hosting has to come to somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 a years?

The site is not monetized in any real way. Ostensibly, it has ads, but the ads are all from nonprofits and other projects directly connected to Irving. I suspect that he may just have the nonprofits pay for the ads just enough to cover the operational cost of the site. Alternatively, he may just be keeping it on a money loser to counter-balance profits from his for profit businesses.

In either case, this is a lesson about how markets can only force greater efficiency if you are subject to market conditions. This site -- still hosted on Dreamweaver, a product that has not been supported for years -- would have folded over a decade ago due to its failure to retain the audience it had first won over in print. It's can only be maintained like Miss Havisham herself because there is money coming in from another source to artificially keep alive something that should have died a natural death.

Related:

Building Alone Doesn't Lead to Success

Pride and Prejudice in Job Applications

Hsieh on Happiness and Zappos' Success

Zappos.com is often presented as the paradigm of branding success. In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, the company's CEO tells the story of  the creation and evolution of the distinctive company culture alongside a bit of his own life story. Of course, the only reason everyone applauds Zappos is because it has turned out to be a success, but it was on the verge of failure many times. Hsieh sank a lot of his own money into keeping it going when he could not find other companies willing to invest  in it. Hsieh does not focus on success as such but on attaining happiness.

 Hsieh's book reminded me of two others. One is Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the other is Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad.  Hsieh's account of his  parents' expectations for him generally fits the model that Chua presents for Asian culture. The goal was to go to Harvard and then acquire a PhD. Along the way, the child is not only supposed to earn top grades but devote time daily to practicing an instrument Hsieh's out of the box thinking was at work there to foil his parents' musical aspirations by recording himself and replaying previous practice sessions rather than actually practicing during the designated time. He makes it sound like they never caught on.

Despite the stereotyped expectations, though,  Hsieh's parents did allow him to indulge in his passions for business ventures, some of which failed instantly -- like a worm farm -- and some of which actually took off with great success -- like his mail order button business.  In that way, though they may not have taught him the "Rich Dad" lessons, they did let him find out for himself, and that is the education he gains in college -- not from his classes but his various ventures, like the pizza business he sets up.

He does graduate from Harvard and accepts a job at Oracle that pays very well but leaves him very bored. On the side he and and a college friend who also works at Oracle set up what becomes LinkShare, a business that they, ultimately, sell for millions.  Though his parents could not see the sense in leaving a secure position to start something new and risky, (which would be the "Poor Dad" kind of thinking)  in his case the risk paid off very well.  It is the same sort of approach that he carried over in starting other companies and in devoting himself and his personal assets to building up Zappos.

At the end of the book, Hsieh shifts his focus to discussing happiness. He says his goal in writing was "to contribute to a happiness movement to make the world a better place" (p. 239). Now that sounds utterly sappy, but the idea of fostering a certain type of culture is that you create a context in which such statements are acceptable. He also said that Zappos is about delivering happiness to the world" (p. 230). Hsieh believes that happiness can function as an "organizing principle" for businesses. While for an individual, passion and purpose combine to arrive at pleasure, in a business, those two goals combine for profit.  There is something that is undoubtedly appealing in that model, but I do not buy it altogether. There are many businesses that are far more successful than Zappos who developed different models for their own culture of success.

There is also the question of happiness that Hsieh brings up: "Most people go their lives thinking, When I get ___, I will be happy, or When I achieve ___, I will be happy" (p. 231).  There is the low level of happiness that fades as soon as the novelty of having that ___ fades, and one reverts back to a state of looking at what goal to set up next. Hsieh's own story shows that he feels happy while in pursuit of certain goals. When he finds the thrill is gone, he does look for new ventures. Though he has not admitted to getting disenchanted with Zappos, he has taken on a new challenge --trying to turn around a big part of Vegas, around the company headquarters. Perhaps he feels that fits into his stated goal of making the world a happier place in a more substantial way than wowing customers with service in delivering their shoes, accessories, and apparel.