Swimming With the Sharks in Facebook’s World

Competing directly with Facebook would be too dumb, even for me. Instead, like any consultant, I want to work with the colossal moneymaker, in hopes of getting a little of the excess. If corporations are sharks, we are remoras: suckerfish that hang onto a shark’s body while it swims. We get to eat even smaller parasites off the shark’s skin, and to gobble up scraps of food that fall out of the shark’s mouth. If the remora economy isn’t a model for social media success, I don’t know what is. Chum. Yum!

The trick is figuring out how to swim with the sharks and get some of those scraps from the newly unsettled online world — ideally with the tools that are already in our personal toolboxes. I, for example, already make paragraphs for a living. Could I make more through peddling myself online?

Creative people have begun to ask people to pay them for what they write through sites like Patreon and Substack. If you make a catchy video, YouTube will pay you for bringing in the clicks. “Influencers” on Instagram can make money hawking products while being cool, young and beautiful. But I don’t have video skills, and when it comes to cool, young and beautiful, I am 0 for 3.

How to get those clicks?

Well, one idea immediately comes to mind: videos of me taming lions. That seems cruel, though, to me as well as the lions. I’d get mauled in no time. Also, it’s not like you can just pick up a lion at PetSmart.

Some people apparently made money by livestreaming videos of themselves storming the Capitol, but my legal training tells me that gambit isn’t for me. And besides, it’s been done.

Sex workers put themselves out there on OnlyFans, but that’s not a likely winner for me, either. Last I checked, there wasn’t a big market for photos of gnomish old guys.

What’s left? I am occasionally funny, though my kids might disagree. And my work covering climate change does not give me a lot of opportunities to make people laugh.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/business/mutfund/swimming-with-the-sharks-in-facebooks-world.html