Email Times Best Seller List
Context isn’t just king—it’s all there is. We learn about informational liquidity, segmenting audiences, and why individualization is the future of the internet. ℹ️🌊🎯
The Start of the Internet
Today, there are two billion websites on the Internet competing for our attention. 😵💫
But back in 1993, there were only 623 websites in the entire world.
That was roughly 4 years after 🤩 Tim Berners-Lee 🤩 invented the World Wide Web protocol.
But that wasn’t the start of the Internet.
The URL Internet was built on the backbone of the Voice Internet.
The Voice Internet (telephone network) was invented by 🤩 Alexander Graham Bell 🤩 , who strung the first permanent outdoor wire in 1877.
But that wasn’t the start of the Internet.
Before humans could modulate sounds over copper wires, we could manually start and stop the electronic connection between endpoints.
🤩 Samuel Morse 🤩 invented the Static Internet (telegraph) in 1844. By 1866 humans were laying cables across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean from wooden ships.
But that wasn’t the start of the Internet.
The Semaphore Internet began around 1790 as a series of hilltop stations with movable signs and powerful telescopes.
Semaphores work line-of-sight, just like smoke signals.
But that wasn’t the start of the Internet.
In 1737, 🤩 Benjamin Franklin 🤩 opened the first post office in America.
At the time, it took more than a month for a letter to travel from Philadelphia to New York on the Postal Internet.
Franklin invested heavily in road cutting and overnight riders to reduce the delivery time to 24 hours. 🏇
Alexis de Tocqueville said our Postal Internet was “the only entity capable of circulating the information essential to sustain America’s bold experiment with democracy.” ✉️🦅🇺🇸
But that wasn’t the start of the Internet.
Before English, before Latin, before Cuneiform tablets, we had the Aural Internet.
This is literally the word-of-mouth traveling from person-to-person-to-person, the best messages slowly oozing their way across vast distances.
The start of the Internet was between the first two humans who learned to communicate.
The Internet has been here as long as we have been here.
The Internet will be here as long as we are here.
Like beta GPT-3 said, “Mankind in both its slumbering and awakened state is an enormous machine.” 🤯
So here, in this final story of Chapter 5: Attention Economics, I want to explain why I published my book in an unusual way.
Reason #1 - I was guilted into caring about you.
In 2019, I co-hosted a party during South-by-Southwest with tech expert, Azeem Azhar.
The cocktail party was for the readers of his new Substack. Azeem has grown that into maybe the smartest (and most powerful) email audience on Earth right now.
After the party, a few of us went out for dinner, and I told them about all the science experiments I performed on myself and my kids — how we lived an entire year with only one carry-on suitcase each. 🤪
Azeem asked if I planned on writing up the results of my research.
I said, “Nah, I as just doing it for the lulz, for my own curiosity”.
Azeem asked, “How much capital do you think you invested in all that research?”
I told him it was millions of dollars.
He said, “Stuart. Think about all the other scientists out there who will never have access to your kind of personal research budget…
Don’t you think it would be irresponsible of you if you didn’t tell the world what you learned?”
I gave Azeem all kinds of excuses, but I knew right away that I would have to lock myself in my house one day to write this book. 🙄
Azeem was right.
You probably won’t have access to my research budget.
And even if you did, my research required lots and lots of time:
1,100+ nights on the road
15,000 hours of reading
5,000 hours of video lectures
5,000 hours of writing
Despite all the sacrifice, I’m willing to tell you everything I learned, for free, for one simple reason.
I lived most of my childhood below the poverty line. So I deeply care about poor people and their diminishing opportunities in this world. 🥺
My education provided a way out of my circumstances. 💸
I hope it helps you find a way out of your circumstances. 🧑🏫
So reason #1 for publishing this book on Substack: I want it freely available for anyone willing to learn.
Reason #2 - Amazon Doesn’t Pay Anyway
When we buy books on Amazon for $15, Jeff Bezos and the book publishers only send those authors about $2.50.
For example, look at author J.K. Rowling.
She should be way richer than she is. 🤔
J.K. Rowling sold more than 600 million physical Harry Potter books worldwide, but she’s only worth $950 million dollars.
That’s messed up.
Even if I sold 500 million bird houses, I would still expect to be worth more than $950 million dollars.
How could she not make more than $2 per physical book?
If you bought my book on Amazon, the publishing industry would keep 83.4% of my money.
That’s way too much tax to pay. 👇
Instead, I would like you to donate $15 to FunFreQ Foundation.
Our AI will use your money to help widows and orphans.
Reason #3 - High Informational Liquidity
Publishing this book on a Substack gives my content an “Informational Liquidity” that physical books, Audible books, and Kindle books just can’t match. 🌊
Book publishers are only interested in formats that tightly control distribution to ensure each reader pays for the product. 🤑
The tradeoff is that they are incredibly difficult to share. 🔒
Audible and Kindle can only be shared with other members in a family plan.
Physical books can only be shared with one other person on Earth at a time.
By distributing these stories on Substack, even the people who can’t afford to buy my book can still afford to share it.
We would rather help more people than make more money.
High informational liquidity is also the reason I published this book as a series of essays that can be read in any order.
Most people don’t have time to read an entire book, so the 15-min essay format enables our content to reach a much wider total audience.
To create the most liquidity, I break each essay into multiple sections so busy people can quickly skim the stories to find topics that interest them.
That’s also why I highlight words and phrases within each paragraph. So skimming eyes can quickly flit their way through the text.
Usually, the quotes in my share buttons are intended to:
make you laugh out loud 😆
surprise you with new information that may be critical to your future 😳
offend you so badly that you “clutch your pearls” 🤬
That’s because those emotions create the most virality on the Internet.
Here are the emotions that make us to tap our share buttons most often. 👇
Ideally, you will share my snarky quotes on Twitter because all news starts on Twitter these days.
Their low character limit (pun intended) creates the lowest “status update friction” in all of social media. 🌊
Side note: I really hate explaining my own jokes, but the genius of Twitter is limiting each Tweet to 280 characters.
The hard limit forces us to say more things in less words. 🤐
That makes the information on Twitter so much more digestible.
Okay, so the other reason Twitter has a low character limit is because some of the people on Twitter have low character. 😈
It’s the tiredest joke on the internet, but belaboring the pun helps us see why we should all prefer low character limits in our social media.
News unfolds on Twitter so much faster there than anywhere else.
Here are a few 2023 stats that demonstrate just how important Twitter is to the News Industry:
More than 80% of young journalists rely on Twitter for their job
94% of people on Twitter express interest in current events
85% of people on Twitter watch, read, or listen to the news at least once a day
83% of people on Twitter Tweet about News
75% of people who come to Twitter follow Politics
In the first six months of 2022, there were 4.6B News Tweets in the US and 10.4B News Tweets globally
If you have followers on Twitter, please start as many healthy debates as you can about my stories. 🙏
Some of your intellectual discussions will turn into hot takes and reviews on other microblogs.
The web traffic on those microblogs will get noticed by the pixel trackers from Big News corporations (pixel trackers do exactly what you think they do. They watch where all your 🫵 traffic goes).
Big News instantly expands the hottest microblog stories into features across all their channels and publications.
So think of each conversation on Twitter as a campfire among friends. Some of them will get hot enough to light up the Internet. 🔥
You could help us acquire millions of eyeballs that we could never afford to acquire on our own.
I don’t care if your audience thinks I’m crazy-smart or crazy-crazy, we just need them arguing about it with the hashtag: #FunFreQ 🤣
Reason #4 - The Medium Is the Message
Not having a book publisher creates the biggest challenge for us.
If we want to distribute enough copies of this book to qualify as a “New York Times Best Seller”, without (buying) help from The New York Times, Amazon, and a book publisher, then we need your help.
As you read these stories, share them with as many people as you can, preferably by text message or email. 📧
Remember, if you share this on Facebook, only 4.5% of your total audience will even see your post. 🙈
That’s the average organic reach on Facebook.
With average click-thru-rates (CTR), maybe only 2% of your 4.5% will investigate further. So maybe 0.09% of your Facebook friends will attempt to read the story you shared?
Conversely, when you share a story with your friends by email, almost all those links get opened. 📧
Remember how we learned the medium is the message?
Well, the likelihood that any person will start reading any of our stories is most strongly influenced by their relationship to the person who shared them.
An email between friends is the medium, but an email between friends is also the message. Those people know you care about them.
And the absolute best way to share these stories is by text message. 📱
Even in business marketing, links in SMS get opened 20-35% of the time, while links in junk email only get opened 2-10% of the time.
Reason #5 - Knowing Our Audience
Amazon computers know everything about the people who buy books on their platform, but they don't share that information with the authors. For example, author Robert Greene has a best seller on Amazon right now called The 48 Laws of Power. Amazon knows the email address of everyone who bought that book plus all the other books they’ve purchased. On Kindle and Audible, Amazon knows how fast each person read The 48 Laws of Power, or where they gave up. They even know if a reader shared the book with other people. All that information is incredibly valuable to Robert Greene, but Amazon is never going to share that with him.
By publishing these stories on a private social network, we get to see:
which stories are read most often
which stories are shared most often
which links are clicked most often
which videos are watched most often
which stories generate the most financial support
which stories generate the most new subscribers
We convert a small percentage of our readers into monthly subscribers that we can talk to for free. So when we publish new books and stories in the future, we already have a core audience of readers to learn from.
Reason #6 - Segmenting Our Audience
One of the biggest benefits of a private social network is that it will allow us to “segment our audience” in a way that books never will.
Segmenting the audience is making sure the right message gets delivered to the right person and it’s a major problem everywhere, even on social media. For example, Kim Kardashian has 350M followers on Instagram. She probably harvests more human attention from all her platforms each week than CNN. Some of her Instagram followers are there because of her reality show, some are there for her fashion, and some are there because she’s a smoking hot mom. The problem for Kim is that all those people are interested in a different message from her, but she has to post the same message to everyone. Only Instagram gets to choose the specific reach into her audience for each post, and they only give everyone 9% of their reach on average unless we pay to promote.
If you want to learn more about reach, read:
To combat this problem, I use @mentions to specific audiences in each of these stories. I think of them like “Cubist Literature”, where each story has more than one audience. @mentions are the easiest way for me to talk “inside baseball” to a tiny group of experts. This trick will work in a physical book, but in the future, the artificial intelligence that runs funfreq.com will translate my original content into a better, shorter story for each reader based on everything it knows about their age, education level, personality, mood, and past interactions. That’s why we serve our own webpages—our computers learn which stories you read, which ones you share, and which videos you watch. The future of audience segmentation is individualization and you can only deliver that through the web.
Hopefully you will never read this sentence because the artificial intelligence we train should know you better than I know you and it should decide that this sentence is intentionally superfluous.
I love this joke. ☝️
Reason #7 - Hearing Our Audience
Authors who distribute their content in physical books, Kindle, and Audible don’t have an integrated forum for their readers to discuss their reactions. All throughout our stories we invite readers to email us, comment, or ask questions while they read. That’s what makes this a social network. Our foundation owns all the content generated from these reader interactions, so that’s what makes it a private social network.
This feedback helps us improve the most confusing and boring parts of our stories for future readers. We don’t have first editions and second editions—we update these stories continuously from the feedback of our audience. 🙌
Reason #8 - Emoting with Movies and GIFs
Kindle, Audible, and physical books can’t include YouTube videos and GIFs without a disruptive QR code. They could include emojis like this 🙄, but isn’t this eye roll so much better?
@bestsellingbookpublishers: I have a few more books that I want to write for profit. This foundation only owns the intellectual property I’m willing to give to the world for free. I have published hundreds of 400-word essays on Instagram for my real life friends over the past decade. I have covered everything from guns, politics, and racism; to parenting, history, and technology. I want to turn the best concepts into several thousand-word pieces for an anthology. I’m thinking way less science and religion, and something more like Arguably by Christopher Hitchens.
Also, I have been pitching material for a parenting book I’m calling, “Sticks and Stones: Will Break My Bones but Words Will Irreparably Damage Me Forever.”
If you want to publish either of these books, email me at:
@bookagents: If you represent some of the best authors in the world and you’re willing to represent me, I want an agent who can get me more than $2 per book.
Continue reading…
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