Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Monday, January 30, 2017
School of Life Monday - PHILOSOPHY - The Stoics
How the Stoics can help us tackle anxiety, fury and loss of perspective - and realise that very little is needed to make a happy life.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Protests Erupt at U.S. Airports As Trump Order Targeting Refugees & Muslim Immigrants Takes Effect
from Democracy Now:
Protesters have gathered at airports in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Dallas and other cities as immigration authorities begin to block entry to all refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Thousands of protesters gathered Saturday at JFK International Airport. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance joined the protest by calling on its members not to pick up passengers between 6 and 7 p.m. tonight.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other legal organizations filed an emergency lawsuit Saturday on behalf of plaintiffs who have been detained and threatened with deportation even though they have valid visas to enter the United States.
“President Trump’s war on equality is already taking a terrible human toll," said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. "This ban cannot be allowed to continue.”
"Families are being ripped apart without warning and with no assurance of when they will be reunited," said the National Iranian American Council in a statement. "Students traveling abroad at the time of the ban are horrified that they might not be able to return to continue their studies. Children are being detained along with their parents when they were just seeking to return home. This is a dark day in the history of this country."
JFK airport #MuslimBan #NoMuslimBan #NoMuslimBanJFK #NoBanNoWall pic.twitter.com/Z2iwNdXPM1
— MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) January 28, 2017
Thousands protesting #MuslimBan right now at Chicago O'Hare Terminal 5 pic.twitter.com/3fQyT1dcy5
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) January 29, 2017
Protest against Trump's Muslim ban at Logan airport #NoBanNoWall pic.twitter.com/2iMrEbMYzQ
— Amy Littlefield (@amylittlefield) January 29, 2017
Two hours into #SFO #MuslimBan protest, energy still high. pic.twitter.com/H6nRX2ddKQ
— Vivian Ho (@VivianHo) January 29, 2017
The crowd outside JFK Terminal 4 has grown ENORMOUS pic.twitter.com/RAUMX9EBhg
— Noah Hurowitz (@NoahHurowitz) January 28, 2017
Thousands of protesters at JFK, chanting "Let them in!" and "No hate no fear refugees are welcome here!" #MuslimBan pic.twitter.com/9SDiunzJDq
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) January 28, 2017
Many are asking "How Can I Be of Help?" in the wake of the #MuslimBan.
Below are some ACTION STEPS. pic.twitter.com/h0NN4li90x— Khaled Beydoun (@KhaledBeydoun) January 28, 2017
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Rewind Last Weekend!
#NastyWoman by Nina Mariah (Donovan)
Ashley Judd passionately denounces President Donald Trump's misogyny at the 2017 Women's March on Washington by reciting Nina Donovan's "I Am A Nasty Woman" poem.
THE ORIGINAL:
Friday, January 27, 2017
FOR THE RECORD Lest We Forget Bill Moyers and four historians on the big lie behind the rise of Trump.
In this web exclusive, Bill Moyers and four historians dissect the big lie Trump rode to power: the Birther lie. Nell Painter, historian and Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Christopher Lebron, assistant professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale University; and Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Professor of Government, Hamilton College discuss the fertile ground on which the birther lie was sown: our nation’s history of white supremacy.
Credits: Gail Ablow, Producer; Sikay Tang, Editor
Thursday, January 26, 2017
ERUPT AND MATTER - Are you Ready to Testify?
I've never been a fan of Moby at all, but pretty great that he made this ;-)
BONUS:
the racist & antiquated far right are encroaching upon democratic freedoms in almost every country in the western world. we need to respond by protesting, supporting progressives, and most important: VOTING
Erupt & Matter is taken from These Systems Are Failing, the debut album from Moby & The Void Pacific Choir. Out Now: http://moby.la/mvpcthesesystemsarefai...
BONUS:
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Monday, January 23, 2017
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Saturday, January 21, 2017
How an overwhelming majority of America feels
But you know so many just didn't want to vote the lesser of two evils ...
And then those so uneducated or selfish really believed the con man would help them ... such a motherfucking shame ...
And then those so uneducated or selfish really believed the con man would help them ... such a motherfucking shame ...
Friday, January 20, 2017
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Shepard Fairey Designs ‘We The People’ Inauguration Posters
from Graphic Design USA:
In response to Donald Trump’s pending inauguration, Shepard Fairey has designed a series of posters featuring groups he considers traditionally marginalized. The “We the People” series is the work of Fairey — with contributions from artists Jessica Sabogal and Ernesto Yerena — and it has raised several hundred thousand dollars to purchase full-page ads with the posters in the Washington Post to make a statement on Inauguration Day.
Fairey is reportedly collaborating with the Amplifier Foundation, a nonprofit that supports grassroots movements and which commissioned the project. The plan: buy full-page ads in the newspaper that feature the images, and encourage people to tear them out and hold them as placards or posters. Fairey is, of course, famous for his 2008 Obama Hope poster.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Monday, January 16, 2017
School Of Life Monday: History as a Cure for Our Times
+ Dr. Cornel West Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It can seem as if we are living in deeply, uncommonly troubled and crazy times. We should take a measure of consolation from the example of history, that teaches us that humans have always been cruel and mad – but that civilisation has progressed nevertheless.
MLK DAY BONUS:
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Eating Our Way To Extinction Trailer IDGG
The Plant-Based Lifestyle movement is perhaps the largest, and fastest growing movement in the world. Many of those involved are incredibly pro-active when it comes to inspiring positive social change to all around them. As people who take an active role in the betterment of our world, we need tools to educate and inspire others in the most effective way.
There are several recognised documentary films that cover the different individual aspects of the movement, and more often than not, when you hear the reason someone decided to go vegan, it was because they watched one of these titles.
We all know how much of a challenge it is to get someone to sit down and watch just one of these films, let alone three or four. So EATING OUR WAY TO EXTINCTION is the ultimate Plant-Based Lifestyle feature documentary that covers all the most important aspects of the movement:
go here to help fund:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eating-our-way-to-extinction-food-vegan#/
Celebrities, leaders and famous athletes all over the world are making the switch, and the growing interest in a plant based lifestyle is hitting the mainstream media almost every day. The film will aim to leave audiences feeling moved and inspired; that by making the shift to a plant based diet, they are joining millions of people all over the planet in a global movement that is beginning to change the world.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Eating Our Way To Extinction Trailer IDGG
The Plant-Based Lifestyle movement is perhaps the largest, and fastest growing movement in the world. Many of those involved are incredibly pro-active when it comes to inspiring positive social change to all around them. As people who take an active role in the betterment of our world, we need tools to educate and inspire others in the most effective way.
There are several recognised documentary films that cover the different individual aspects of the movement, and more often than not, when you hear the reason someone decided to go vegan, it was because they watched one of these titles.
We all know how much of a challenge it is to get someone to sit down and watch just one of these films, let alone three or four. So EATING OUR WAY TO EXTINCTION is the ultimate Plant-Based Lifestyle feature documentary that covers all the most important aspects of the movement:
go here to help fund:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eating-our-way-to-extinction-food-vegan#/
Celebrities, leaders and famous athletes all over the world are making the switch, and the growing interest in a plant based lifestyle is hitting the mainstream media almost every day. The film will aim to leave audiences feeling moved and inspired; that by making the shift to a plant based diet, they are joining millions of people all over the planet in a global movement that is beginning to change the world.
Friday, January 13, 2017
Thursday, January 12, 2017
An Incredible Circus
Watching the Implosion in Real Time
Check out Buzzfeed's article from yesterday...
But really hasn't every person with more than half a brain thought the same thing? the insanity the Dumpster seems to get away with is beyond "the Teflon Don" it's pure ignorance and insanity... and this story is just funny and exacerbates the whole shit ... haaaa haaaa haaaa!
from BuzzFeed:
These Reports Allege Dump Has Deep Ties To Russia 🤔
A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.
The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Obama and Trump.
Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.
The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.
The Trump administration’s transition team did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment. However, the president-elect’s attorney, Michael Cohen, told Mic that the allegations were absolutely false.
“It’s so ridiculous on so many levels,” he said. “Clearly, the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping that the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.”
His former campaign manager and current senior White House adviser, Kellyanne Conway, also denied the claims during an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, adding that “nothing has been confirmed.” She also said Trump was “not aware” of any briefing on the matter.
The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column.
Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the former Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain gave a “full copy” of the memos to Comey on Dec. 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos.
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Vegan? Hate vegans? you gotta watch this :
VEGAN at the end of 2016
THE [short] FILM : A Growing Movement Under Attack
2016 A YEAR IN REVIEW w/ ANONYMOUS FOR THE VOICELESS, MICHAEL GREGER M.D., NEAL BARNARD M.D., F.A.C.C. DR. JOHN MCDOUGALL, DR. MICHAEL KLAPER M.D., ALAN GOLDHAMMER D.C., DR CALDWELL ESSELSTYN M.D., T. COLIN CAMPBELL PhD, PCRM, NUTRIONFACTS.ORG, JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL, GENE BAUR, UNITED STATE GOVERNMENT, PAMELA ANDERSON, MCDONALDS, ARMANI, VOGUE, PRADA, ANITA KRAJNC, TORONTO PIG SAVE, HUNT SABS, KIP ANDERSON, COWSPIRACY, WHAT THE HEALTH FILM, RUSSEL SIMMONS, THE HAPPY VEGAN BOOK, CNN, ABC, FOX NEWS, SUNRISE, BITE SIZE VEGAN, SAM SCHACHER, QUORN, HELLMANS, BURGER KING, CHIPOTLE, VEGAN RESTAURANT, VEGAN MENU, PLANT PURE NATION, VEGAN EVERYDAY STORIES, FORKS OVER KNIVES, ANIMALS AUSTRALIA, DXE, PETA, EATING YOU ALIVE, ROBERT OSTFELD M.D., JAMES ASPEY, VOICELESS 365, HAPPY COW, VEGANUARY, VEGGIE PRET, PRET A MANGER, WAYNE PACELLE, OPRAH, ELLEN DEGENEROUS, IMPOSSIBLE FOODS, GAY RIGHTS, BEYOND MEAT, VEGSOURCE, SOCIAL JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, JOSH TETRIC, HAMTON CREEK, SCANDAL, ERIC SCHMIDT, BEYONCE’, GARY YOUROFSKY, DAIRY BOARD, EGG BOARD, CONGRESS, HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT, PROF MAARTEN HAJER, PLANT BASED BY NAFSIKA, A&C, FYI NETWORK, HBO, SIMONE REYES, TANA MONGEAU, NEXT TOP MODEL, CARLI BYBEL, ROYAL FAMILY, THE CHIC NATURAL, ALEXANDRA’S GIRLY TALK, PEW DIE PIE, KALEL, RICKY DILLON, MIRANDA SINGS, NATHALIE TRAN, VEGAN SHOPPING HUB, VEGANSHOPPINGHUB.COM, SIA , MORRISSEY, MOBY, JAMES CAMERON, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, LEONARDO DICAPRIO, MATT DAMON, IRON MAN, FORMULA ONE, STARBUCKS, JEROME JARRE, ELLIE GOULDING, JESSICA LANGE, MERRYL STREEP, MILEY CYRUS, WEIGHTLOSS, DOLLY PARTON, ANTI-AGING, GAME OF THRONES, PROFESSOR GREEN, HIP HOP, RAP, FUNK, SOUL, STEVIE WONDER, KAT VON D, VENUS WILLIAMS, CHRIS JENNA, GRIFF WHALEN, DANIEL NEGREANU, MICHELLE RODRIGEZ, ARIANA GRANDE, SERENA WILLIAMS, WILEY, 360, 3REE6IXTY, DJ KHALED, VEVO, TYRANN MATHIEU, HALEY WILLIAMS , GOOD DYE YOUNG, MANIC PANIC, KYLIE JENNA, EVANA LYNCH, HARRY POTTER, NOVAK DJOKOVIC RESTAURANT, CIVIL RIGHTS, ANIMAL RIGHTS, POLICE BRUTALITY, BEFAIRBEVEGAN.COM, MANCHESTER PIG SAVE, KEEGHAN KHUN, CHRIS HEDGES, VIVA!, ED WINTERS, DAMIEN CLARKSON, VEVOLUTION, iANIMAL, SEA SHEPHERD, GREENPEACE, SIERRA CLUB, TRUE NORTH, CANADA GOOSE, THE HERD, BEAR STORY, MORGAN MITCHELL, OLYMICS, RIO, DAVID HAYE, TIM SHIEFF, PATRIK BABOUMIAN, GUINESS BOOK OF RECORDS, WORLD RECORD HOLDER, STONGEST MAN, TOREY WASHINGTON, NATURAL BODYBUILDING, STEROIDS, BARNY DU PLESSIS, NATE DIAZ, CRISSI CARVAHLO, KENDRICK FARRIS, KJ JOSEPH, TESLA, CHRISTINA GRIMME, ANA KASPARIAN, RICHARD OPPENLANDER, COMFORTABLYUNAWARE.COM, VEGAN BROS, THE ONION KNIGHT, CHEF AJ, RICH ROLL, BOB LINDEN, GOVEGANRADIO.COM, KERRY MCCARTHY, MARGARITA RESTREPO.
Special thanks to:
1) Vegan Shopping Hub, who sponsored this film: http://veganshoppinghub.com/?ref=klau...
2) VegSource, who gave me the opportunity to go to LA this October to get a lot of content featured in this video: https://www.youtube.com/user/headveg
3) Robbie Lockie (http://www.laverita.co.uk/), who built plantbasednews.org (check it out - and sign up to the newsletter here: http://www.plantbasednews.org/signup)
4) My special patreon supporters (https://www.patreon.com/plantbasednews)
5) Anonymous for the voiceless, who exported a lot of raw footage for me: http://www.anonymousforthevoiceless.org/
To see the full links of everyone featured in the film, please click on this link (there was not enough room in the comments section): https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/us-government-exposed-in-new-vegan-documentary
************
PLANT BASED NEWS LINKS
WEBSITE: http://www.plantbasednews.org/
SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER: http://www.plantbasednews.org/signup
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Monday, January 9, 2017
School of Life Monday:
Why You Can Change The World
Though it looks like the world is set in its ways, it is in fact eminently open to change by those who dare to swim into the stream of history.
Sunday, January 8, 2017
One of the Greatest Sub Culture Documentaries Ever Made:
STYLE WARS
At the time I saw this on PBS in 1983/4 it was one of the most inspiring things I'd seen.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality
and Protect the Powerful: (VIDEO)
Noam Chomsky & Glenn Greenwald
The basis for power elite membership is institutional power, namely an influential position within a prominent private or public organization. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250013836
One study of power elites in the USA under George W. Bush identified 7,314 institutional positions of power encompassing 5,778 individuals. A later study of US society found that the demographics of this elite group broke down as follows:
Age Corporate leaders average about 60 years of age. The heads of foundations, law, education, and civic organizations average around 62 years of age. Government-sector members about 56.
Gender Women are barely represented among corporate leadership in the institutional elite and women only contribute roughly 20 percent in the political realm. They do appear more among top positions when it comes to cultural affairs, education, and foundations.
Ethnicity White Anglo-Saxons dominate in the power elite, with Protestants representing about 80 percent of the top business leaders and about 73 percent of members of Congress.
Education Nearly all the leaders are college-educated with almost half having advanced degrees. About 54 percent of the big-business leaders and 42 percent of the government elite are graduates of just 12 heavily endowed, prestigious universities.
Social Clubs Most holders of top position in the power elite possess exclusive membership in one or more social clubs. About a third belong to a small number of especially prestigious clubs in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and D.C.[16]
In the 1970s an organized set of policies promoted reduced taxes, especially for the wealthy, and a steady corrosion of the welfare safety net.[17] Starting with legislation in the 1980s, the wealthy banking community successfully lobbied for reduced regulation.[18] The wide range of financial and social capital accessible to the power elite gives their members heavy influence in economic and political decision making, allowing them to move toward attaining desired outcomes. Sociologist Christopher Doob gives a hypothetical alternative stating that these elite individuals would consider themselves the overseers of the national economy, appreciating that it is not only a moral but a practical necessity to focus beyond their group interests. Doing so would hopefully alleviate various destructive conditions affecting large numbers of less affluent citizens.
Mills determined that there is an "inner core" of the power elite involving individuals that are able to move from one seat of institutional power to another. They therefore have a wide range of knowledge and interests in many influential organizations, and are, as Mills describes, "professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs."[19] Relentless expansion of capitalism and the globalizing of economic and military power binds leaders of the power elite into complex relationships with nation states that generate global-scale class divisions. Sociologist, Manuel Castells, writes in The Rise of the Network Society that contemporary globalization does not mean that "everything in the global economy is global."[20] So, a global economy becomes characterized by fundamental social inequalities with respect to "the level of integration, competitive potential and share of the benefits from economic growth."[21] Castells cites a kind of "double movement" where on one hand, "valuable segments of territories and people" become "linked in the global networks of value making and wealth appropriation," while, on the other, "everything and everyone" that is not valued by established networks gets "switched off... and ultimately discarded."[21] The wide-ranging effects of global capitalism ultimately affect everyone on the planet as economies around the world come to depend on the functioning of global financial markets, technologies, trade and labor.
Friday, January 6, 2017
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Jeff Grosso's Love Letters to Skateboarding
Episode on SKATE ROCK
from Jeff, Buddy, Rick, Lance and Vans
It took us a few seasons to get this episode going but it’s worth the wait. Clocking in at just under 25 minutes it’s a mini documentary about the relationship between skateboarders and the music they listen to and create. Like Jake Phelps says: “We’re skateboarders, the music exudes from our bodies”.
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
[Web] Traffic Is Fake, Audience Numbers Are Garbage, And Nobody Knows How Many People See Anything
from Tech Dirt:
thanks Sean Bonner
from the stabs-in-the-dark dept
by Leigh Beadon
How many living, breathing human beings really read Techdirt? The truth — the most basic, rarely-spoken truth — is that we have no earthly idea. With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says "a million people" saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? I don't know, and neither do you. (Netflix might, but we'll get to that later.)
Where should we start? How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone's known it for years, but there's no incentive to actually acknowledge it. The situation is technically improving: 2015 was hailed (quietly, among people who aren't in charge of selling advertising) as a banner year because humans took back the majority with a stunning 51.5% share of online traffic, so hurray for that I guess. All the analytics suites, the ad networks and the tracking pixels can try as they might to filter the rest out, and there's plenty of advice on the endless Sisyphean task of helping them do so, but considering at least half of all that bot traffic comes from bots that fall into the "malicious" or at least "unauthorized" category, and thus have every incentive to subvert the mostly-voluntary systems that are our first line of defence against bots... Well, good luck. We already know that Alexa rankings are garbage, but what does this say about even the internal numbers that sites use to sell ad space? Could they even be off by a factor of 10? I don't know, and neither do you. Hell, we don't even know how accurate the 51.5% figure is — it could be way off... in either direction.
Okay, so what about TV ratings? Well, there's a reason they've been made fun of on the shows themselves for as long as our culture has been able to handle "meta" jokes without getting a headache. Nielsen ratings in their classic form are built on monitoring such a tiny sample of households that the whole country's viewing profile can probably be swayed because someone forgot to turn off the TV before going on vacation. They sucked before DVRs and digital distribution began transforming the single household television into a quaint anachronism, and now it's just chaos. Nielsen was slow to catch up with DVRs, and now the TV industry juggles scattered measurements including three or seven days of viewing beyond live air, and constantly complains that the ratings are off — specifically, that they're too low. And they might be right, in the sense that they are too low by comparison to the garbage ratings from the pre-digital age that everyone eventually embraced as a standard for relative rankings. How big are these audiences really, in terms of real living breathing human beings? I don't know, and neither do you.
YouTube view counts? Subject to all the same fake internet traffic problems, plus the fact that there's an opaque system for supposedly ignoring too-short incomplete views according to the genre and nature of the video, but good luck finding out how accurate that is. Channel operators know their length-of-view statistics, but you don't see them bandying them about much. Plus, how often have you heard public view counts casually referred to as the number of "people" who watched something, even though (especially when it comes to short-and-cute viral animal hits and their ilk) the bulk of them probably come from obsessive re-watching? Yeah.
So what about Facebook stats? Everything from impressions to simultaneous live video viewers is padded out by the most transient of idly-scrolling-through-the-newsfeed interactions. Twitter followings and tweet stats? Dig into the bowels of any list of followers, or any trending link, and see how much of it is mindless bots. Print readerships? Don't even get me started. Did you know it's common practice for newspapers to calculate their readership by applying a multiplier to their actual circulation, to account for an imaginary surplus of "readers per copy"? Yes, that soggy "local" paper that's been sitting out in the rain on your porch for two days, and that only exists to give them an excuse to deliver flyers to your door, is not only being counted — it's probably being counted five times. So are all the free/cheap copies that big national papers give to hotels. Oh, and when these companies distribute multiple publications in different channels — with newspapers, magazines and paywalled websites all being given away with each other as free cross-subscriptions, in order to pad out all three subscriber numbers — they add them all up and then try to determine the actual number of individual people they are reaching. How? By applying an opaque "deduplication" formula. I once pressed a newspaper's stats person about what this formula could possibly entail, but details were not forthcoming — because I suspect they just knock off 20% and call it a day, despite the fact that the magazine is distributed inside the newspaper whose audience they are supposedly "deduplicating" it from, and half the website subscriptions were free add-ons with print delivery. That's awfully generous when the truth is they don't know, and neither do I, and neither do you.
So who does know how big of an audience they really have? Well, maybe Netflix, Amazon and other digital subscription services. Their paywalls insulate them from the bulk of random bot traffic, and their proprietary ecosystems give them the ability to closely monitor all activity. Netflix, of course, is famously secretive about viewer numbers and insists on the inaccuracy of those who claim to have worked them out. The most common assumption is that they do this to avoid giving content creators too much leverage, and because the data can be seen as a valuable commodity — but I propose another reason: Netflix's likely-more-accurate statistics, if made public, would have zero context in the topsy-turvy world of nonsense TV ratings. They would probably look exceptionally low, giving the legacy bosses who would like nothing more than to downplay the importance of digital distribution (and there are as many of those as there are record execs who can't spell mp3) a chance to project whatever narrative they wanted onto the numbers.
So why does any of this matter? Because advertising is a multibillion dollar industry, and whenever an industry is worth that much, you have to ask: is that because there are billions of dollars of worthwhile transactions happening, or because every bloodsucker in a ten-industry radius wanted in on the action? So, so much of the advertising industry is pure waste. How much exactly is as impossible to determine as the audience sizes themselves. This is hardly a new idea (in fact it's a century-old quote) but it's probably more true now than ever, despite the fact that in theory technology could have delivered us from uncertainty.
Finally, what can be done about this? There's no simple answer, and maybe no answer at all. Here at Techdirt, we've been working to come up with good advertising solutions by focusing almost entirely on what we know our community likes and might be interested in (as in, our real community of people who talk in our comments and we can say, with confidence, exist) and paying less attention to raw numbers — both a luxury and a necessity for a smaller publication, depending on how you look at it. That's not always easy though, as we face an advertising industry ruled by metrics, where there are often ten spreadsheet-wielding interns between us and someone who might actually care about our creativity. In our experiments with more traditional algorithmic display advertising to monetize the raw traffic numbers we do have, we keep running up against what appears to be a universal truth: the bulk of the global internet ad ecosystem runs on trash. Gigantic prestigious online media brands can sell display campaigns straight to the same people who buy Superbowl ads — everyone else receives a hundred pitches a week from new ad networks that claim to deliver great, relevant content but in fact litter your site with ads for fad diets and ambulance-chasers (at best). And this lowest-common-denominator filler appears to be the only reliably successful form of internet advertising! At least, it never goes away when the good stuff does, and the proud quality networks eventually embrace their roles as crap-peddlers. "Good" internet advertising is a rickety ship navigating an endless roiling ocean of spam, clickbait and outright fraud — but it couldn't float at all without it.
I realize I've painted a grim picture, but these are (more or less) the facts. I'm surely wrong in some of my guesses, but like everything discussed here, nobody knows how wrong or in which direction. We'll never even really know how many people read this — we'll just have a vague estimate that can be compared to other posts on Techdirt. But for now that's the reality, so maybe more people should stop worrying about the supposed size of their audience, and focus on making the content they want to make.
thanks Sean Bonner
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
DJ NU MARK - Killin it!
Here's another episode of Zodiac Tracks. The Cancer one is very special to me. So many great artists born that month. Everyone from RZA of Wu Tang Clan, Sly Johnson, Kool G Rap, Missy Elliot, Chali 2na of Jurassic 5, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac and Guru of Gangstar. I remember the first time I heard him with Gangstarr. It really moved me. We lost him way too early.
R.I.P. Guru and Charlie Tuna of KBIG & K-Earth 101. Enjoy!
Monday, January 2, 2017
School of Life Monday:
Exercise for Intellectuals
my new years resolution..
All too often nowadays, people who love to exercise their brains forget to exercise their bodies. This wasn’t the way of the Ancient Greeks, who believed that true philosophers always work on their physical and mental selves
HAAA
