Bach In the USA

The internet sure is becoming professionalized.

Became, I should have said. It used to be a scattered bunch of thought suburbs. Shotgun shacks of text. There were a few dirt roads linking early adopters, and visitors just happened by while out riding.

Everyone’s roped and branded now. There are megalopolises of text, linked by a superhighway with no on ramps. There’s still a lot of churn, of course, and websites come and go, but it’s ever so much harder to get your head above water than it was just five years ago or so.

The users appeared before the internet did, really. People wanted to look at stuff, and there wasn’t enough stuff to look at, no matter how much of it got pasted into websites. You could put almost anything on the internet and some people would find it and look at it.

It strikes me as a zero sum game now. If you’re going to get prominent on the internet, you’re going to have to pillage someone else’s audience. That takes money, and dedication. Mostly money. Not many people can hang in there until they reach critical mass and sell enough tschotchkes to keep body and soul together.

You could point a video camera at anything five years ago and put it on YouTube and someone would watch it. Nowadays, you better deliver polished goods like this video.