I hear this line a lot, ‘the more you like and comment the
more they smile all the way to the bank’, that line is fallacious.
While there exists a lot of opportunities on social media
for an individual who has a massive following and more importantly who has an
engaged followers, comments and likes themselves do not translate to money in
the account.
To take a step back, the verbal war between Akothee &
Alai/Nyakundi is sad and sad indeed. Sad because it reveals the moral decadence
that exists and more so because the effect is far reaching and wounding
especially to the third parties involved.
Akothee may have developed a thick skin over the years but
her kids/parents/siblings/lover (all who are her active followers on her
various social media platforms may not)
Alai maybe immune to insults over the years but his
wife/siblings/kid(s) may not.
In order to deliver killer punches, the insults are now
targeting third parties – the insults are scarring.
There is some level of respect that I have for parents
(however young your kid is), there’s some level of respect that I have for
mothers, there is some level of respect that I have for human beings in general
that uttering some insults even as basic ones as ‘guok’ sounds sacrilegious to
me, I wonder the ease at which others can easily say them.
Morals aside
Bloggers have different revenue streams - if we exclude outrageous
exceptions where some donations are pegged on for example the number of likes/comments
that cleavage/mjulubeng can gunner – these revenue streams are not directly
pegged on likes.
Yes, having a sensational even scandalous post that is bound
to go viral and drive traffic is good for this third rate bloggers of ours as
they more often than not increases the said bloggers following, mere likes
& comments do not cut it.
Revenue streams
- Content marketing – The higher the number of engaged followers you have, the more likely other organizations ‘might’ use your platform to advertise their products and/or services, there are a number of variables to this as well, your reputation as an individual will help filter out the kind of organizations that use your platform/page to advertise.
- Payoffs to malign/scathe – the dark side of ‘blogging’ especially for the bloggers who lack in morality but have huge following is the fact that an individual/company may pay them off to run scathing attacks on a personality/company
- Payoff to create awareness/promote etc - back to content marketing
- AdSense – if you have a blog/website, a blogger can register to have Google enlist their blogs/websites for AdSense, majorly for PPC (pay per click) kind of advertisement.
So, unless someone has been paid to run scathing attacks on
an individual, the kind of foolish exchange we see between Akothee & Alai
has no commercial angle to it however, it may gain Akothee & Alai more
followers which then allows them to have a higher bargaining power when
negotiating advertisement deals or brand ambassador representation because:
- They will present the number of followers that they have on all the platforms
- They can clearly demonstrate (and we have back-end tools to provide this statistics and analytics) the level of engagement that their various posts normally gather – by engagement we are looking at viewership (for video), reactions for Facebook post (likes, shares etc), reach, exposure, retweet level etc.
N/B,
We will be dissecting this blogo-sphere in the coming days…
Stay tuned!
