Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone and welcome back to another edition of Friday Inspiration!
I have such high respect for successful content creators.
They are also some of the people that inspire me the most.
As an aspiring content creator, it’s hard to keep writing when the “audience” numbers are not growing. And that’s not what it should all be about anyways.
But it’s still hard when you spend just as much time on an article as someone else. But they get 20,000 views or have over 200K subscribers.
On the flip side, they are all inspirational because they all started at the same level as I did. There may have been advantages here or there like being first on a given platform.
But the bottom line is, that they all started pretty low in terms of quality and audience.
But they kept grinding and grinding until finally, something clicked.
So today, I write once more.
And today, we have 2 articles; one gave me that same kind of inspiration to keep writing, and another that gave me a different kind of inspiration.
But we’ll get there in a little bit.
Let’s jump in!
Here’s How the Most Successful Podcast of All Time Started (To Inspire You to Do the Same)
I feel like no matter where you fall in the political spectrum, the name Joe Rogan strikes some kind of emotion.
Typically an extreme one too.
People seem to either hate him or love him.
But wherever you fall, most have to admit he has one of the most successful podcasts of all time. Spotify paid him $200 million to put his podcast on their platform!
That’s insane!
I highly encourage reading the article above because it breaks down a lot of how Joe got his podcast started. And it was a pretty rough start.
I’m talking low-quality footage, phone call interruptions in the middle of the show, and snowflake effects in the video bad.
And yet, he still kept going…and look where he is now.
I will quickly summarize what the article’s main points to Joe’s success:
He started. Something a lot of people never do.
He made low-quality footage. This actually resonated and showed authenticity.
He said a lot of controversial things. Joe is not very politically correct. Political correctness is not very entertaining.
Again, give the article a read; it was really interesting!
I’m definitely encouraged by it to keep going with our running videos. We’ve been taking a break (can you even call it a break after 2?), but we’re working on figuring out a schedule for them!
Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four
I told you this article was a different kind of inspiration.
And it is for 2 main reasons.
It inspires me to keep building Spatium Stories.
It inspires me to keep creating content about web3 and the publishing world.
I’ll give you a quick synopsis of the article.
Apparently, in 2009 Amazon did a wipe of hundreds of copies of the book 1984 from people’s kindle devices.
With no warning.
They also did the same thing with the book Animal Farm.
No warning whatsoever; just one day you woke up and your book vanished. I do believe they at least issued a refund.
Now, before you go destroy Amazon, you need all the facts. Then, by all means, go destroy Amazon.
The books Amazon wiped were self-published illegal bootlegs of the actual titles. Amazon was simply protecting the author’s IP from this copyright infringement.
Here is the thing, though. That should have been caught beforehand.
Let’s take this example and put it in the physical world. Let’s say I steal a book and print it under a different title or something and manage to get it sold in a local bookstore.
Weeks go by and eventually word gets out that that book is a bootleg.
What happens? The bookstore takes it off the shelves, perhaps issuing an apology or something like that.
They don’t track down their customers and steal the books back in the middle of the night without them knowing!
So why should Amazon be allowed to do it?
Now, Amazon has said they promise never to do that again. But in 2009 we all found out they 100% have the power to do so.
What happens when someone publishes a book that isn’t woke enough or doesn’t align with Amazon’s political views? Amazon could just take it down.
And I know this isn’t crypto Thursdays, but I can’t help but mention I believe NFT Books will solve a lot of these problems.
There are many challenges within there that need to be solved.
We still need to protect the author’s IP.
But with an NFT Book, the person that bought the book is safe.
No one can take it away from them. It makes digital books mirror the physical book model so much more in terms of freedom.
It’s still illegal to bootleg copies of an NFT Book.
But we are also protected from big companies like Amazon, who over the years have become more and more politically aligned.
If that topic interests you at all, the Spatium Stories blog is about to do a mini-series on “Why We Need NFT Books.”