Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.

This is the legacy version of twitter.com. We will be shutting it down on June 1, 2020. Please switch to a supported browser, or disable the extension which masks your browser. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help Center.

  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Nitin Khanna

      Good question. There's a fork in the road at some point in a blog's growth. Either you add staff managerial and support roles (promotion, ad sales, copyediting) or you accept limits to growth set by automation and stick to pure line roles (writers, writers who sometimes edit)https://twitter.com/nitinthewiz/status/1092168225528238080 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Nitin Khanna @nitinthewiz
      Replying to @vgr
      once you’ve reached the level where you have, some overhead needs to be managed. Most people get a social media manager kind of persona. Some get a professional photographer. Most *need* a sysadmin once a few months.
      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      This is a decision with consequences. Managerialization is kinda like going from amateur to pro in sports. On the other hand, keeping amateur status, doing it all yourself, or with a coop of others who primarily write, with some automation has non-obvious advantages.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      The biggest problem with outsourcing "uncreative" tasks to non-robots (or people who you don't have to deal with personally, behind a SaaS service) is that you are in relationship with people with different incentives. Two examples.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      First, some guy emailed me excitedly a while back offering to rep me to look for and win good advertising deals for "quality content sites like yours." Unlike generic overtures like for low-end ads (which run $50-$100/mo on high traffic pages) he seemed like a sports-agent type.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      I said sure, I'll take a call. He seemed like a nice guy, with a decent track record doing this for other sites. But when I shared my traffic stats with him (just shy of 0.5 mil visitors/year at that point, same as now) he sounded deflated and I never heard from him again.

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      A bit of research revealed that the represented ad sales for blogging by anybody who actually knows how to do the job, requires an incentive structure (commission based) that only works north of about 2 million visitors/year. To get there, I'd have to prioritize viral clickbait.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Second example. Early on (like 2008) I briefly hired a guy off odesk (now upwork) to do promotion for me -- post comments on other blogs, do some tweeting etc. Nice kid, who tried sincerely, but in 2 weeks it was crystal clear it was the dumbest idea in the world.

      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Incidents like these, together with some thinking led me to a conclusion. If you want to hire people to do the boring parts, you need a proper magazine-style business model that can support people with different risk appetites and compensation expectations.

      1:57 PM - 3 Feb 2019
      • 4 Likes
      • vidy thatte DJ 🐲 (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)و  🃏 🎹🎛 Jonathan Grant Ciarán
      4 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Writers are the easiest. They'll work for free for exposure (I don't pay people on my editorial board) or for a nominal price (I pay regular contributors $100/post). Good artists always require pay. Anybody else requires non-artist compensation based on market rates.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          It's not the $ equation. That can be solved. The operating budget for ribbonfarm, if I wanted to break even, would be about $3000/year (primary direct income attributed to affiliate sales, the only monetization I run, not counting ebook sales). That's about 1.5-2k after hosting.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Subtract miscellany like Mailchimp ($90 a month right now), domain registration etc. and basically I'd have maybe enough in budget for 4-5 guest posts at most. Anything more needs capitalization and growth ambitions.

          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          There's occasional "random acts of revenue-generation" like the recorded longform blogging course we released last year, which added $4k or so to the warchest, but it's not a systematic renewable revenue source.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          If I wanted to grow to a stable, non-loss-making site of say 2m visitors/year, I'd probably need an op budget of around $25k to do the managerial staffing up with a mix of direct pay/rev-share incentives. It would also mean more systematic/better compensation for writers/editors.

          2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This equation does NOT balance in the valley-of-death between top-end of the "amateur" range of operations and the bottom-end of the magazine scale (where you have a whole different host of problems cf. Buzzfeed/Vox/Vice). The way people in the zone force a balance is: Patreon.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          But the bigger problem is, whether you navigate the valley of death with crowd money or VC money, you're beholden to some source of other people's money (OPM) for growth capital. People who are NOT interested in writing as a frontier act of discovery.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          VCs want ROI (hence Buzzfeed etc), which means giving up on a discovery/exploration mission for chasing a slice of a shrinking advertising dollars pie, while crowdfunding capital demands returns in the form of Tribal Capital. It is no accident that Patreon is a set of tribes.

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This leaves the "stay amateur" option. Which means expanding and growing operations ONLY at the rate at which automation increases your leverage, without having to deal with creeping managerialization. A sort of slow-food, never-run-a-deficit bootstrapping mentality.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This is not about minimizing financial risk. It's about minimizing risk to creative processes. Maintaining the freedom to be in discovery mode, and maybe write/publish stuff that only 4-5 people will get. It means never having a "sales quota" mindset of "3 viral hits a month."

          2 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Feb 2019
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          This is why I can afford to publish stuff for no other reason than that I personally like it and think it explores interesting new thought spaces. Like this piece by @nolangray_ that is one of my favorite pieces to come out of the blogging coursehttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/02/07/shift-register-code-breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ …

          0 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
          Show this thread
        13. End of conversation

      Loading seems to be taking a while.

      Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info