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Not to defend Bandcamp in this particular scenario, but I feel there's something people often miss when psychoanalyzing why companies behave this way that I thi
by buzzert 3y ago
Not to defend Bandcamp in this particular scenario, but I feel there's something people often miss when psychoanalyzing why companies behave this way that I think explains quite a lot.
Web properties, just like any property even in the physical world, become more expensive to operate in the long term. Very rarely do I hear of companies spending less money to operate something in the future than they did early on. Part of this is scale, as things become more popular, it takes more people to keep it running. Another part of it is macroeconomics, stuff they rely on, particularly labor (landscapers in the physical world or server admins, for instance) can become more expensive due to a number of factors. A lot of people, like the author of this post, assume that once a web property is built, it exists forever (like a statue or monument), but that's of course not the case.
When a company needs to make decisions to increase their margin, a lot of people attribute it to "growth," and use it almost in a derogatory way. I think a more charitable way to see it is that it's not necessarily growth (although I'm sure that is a factor), but just to even keep the website running, a lot of times the same decisions need to be made (i.e., layoffs, charging for stuff that used to be free, etc).
When you think about it this way, it really seems like either these sites make decisions like this to continue to exist, or they cease existing. This seems to track pretty well with a lot of cases I can think of. I think some very ideologically motivated people can work extremely hard to keep operating costs down to avoid this scenario (Craigslist comes to mind), but this is not easy, and it's very far from being the "default".
- meindnoch 3y agoPlease explain how exactly is running Bandcamp becoming more expensive in the long term? It's literally just a basic band website template with the cheapest read-heavy cloud storage. Ok, there's payment processing too. But that's about it.
- buzzert 3y agoIf it’s so easy, why aren’t there 100’s of viable competitors?
- rangerelf 3y agoThis part is what many have a problem with I think: "...When a company needs to make decisions to increase their margin..."; why? Why do you _NEED_ to increase your margin? You can increase your profit amount without increasing your margin by extending your customer base, by being smarter about expenses, by being a savvier customer to your online infrastructure, etc. But what is the _NEED_ (emphasis is mine) to, literally, squeeze that rock harder to get more blood out of it, therefore ensuring it will crumble in the future? The only thing I can think of is that there is no care for said future, "I'll squeeze as much as I can now, I got mine, so screw everyone else".
- RSZC 3y agoFor lots of companies, 'increasing their margin' refers to increasing their margin from < 0 to > 0. That would be my charitable reading of parent post, and does anybody believe that Bandcamp was profitable?
- buzzert 3y agoYes, exactly. With a margin of <0, either someone is working for free or the company is running off of some kind of VC/angel investment, neither of which is sustainable.
- digging 3y agoYes, Bandcamp has been profitable for 13 years so this discussion is irrelevant. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2016/05/19/bandcamp-downloads-streaming-and-the-inescapably-bright-future/ https://blog.bandcamp.com/2016/05/19/bandcamp-downloads-stre... Either things changed and Bandcamp suddenly was no longer profitable, which makes no sense, or the owners sold out for their own profit.
- joemi 3y agoI think it's clear that they meant "profit" instead of "margin" from the context of the previous paragraph and the rest of the paragraph that your excerpt is from.