First comes carriage (E)

This episode delves into the concept of "carriage" in the media, discussing its historical evolution and its impact on culture and business strategies.

1. Carriage, or control over media distribution, has historically been a powerful tool for influencing culture.
2. Innovations like remote controls and cable TV expanded viewer choices and disrupted traditional network dominance.
3. Ted Turner's strategic use of carriage allowed him to build a media empire by distributing content across underutilized UHF channels and later cable networks.
4. The digital revolution, exemplified by AOL's aggressive distribution strategies, further democratized media access.
5. In the current digital landscape, control over carriage has shifted but remains a pivotal factor in content success.

1. Early TV and Ted Turner

Explores the evolution of television carriage, focusing on Ted Turner's innovative use of UHF channels and cable TV. Seth Godin provides historical context and discusses Turner's impact on media distribution.

• Seth Godin: "Ted Turner used the UHF station to break into the television market, fundamentally altering media carriage."

2. Carol Burnett and Control

Discusses Carol Burnett's control over her variety show's carriage, illustrating how it allowed her to reach millions consistently.

• Seth Godin: "Carol Burnett owned an hour of time from 10 million people every Saturday night."

3. Joni Mitchell's Music Career

Examines the challenges Joni Mitchell faced in distributing her music through radio and record stores, highlighting the limitations artists faced without carriage control.

• Seth Godin: "Joni Mitchell had to rely on record stores and radio stations to reach her audience, which was not always guaranteed."

4. The AOL Strategy

Details AOL's strategy in the early internet era, focusing on its use of free CDs to secure a direct line into consumers' homes, illustrating a digital form of carriage.

• Seth Godin: "AOL distributed millions of CDs to ensure they controlled digital carriage into homes."

5. Modern Media Landscape

Discusses the modern digital media landscape where carriage is less controlled, and content creators have more opportunities to reach audiences directly.

• Seth Godin: "Today, carriage doesn't matter as much, with platforms like YouTube democratizing content distribution."

1. Leverage existing platforms to maximize content reach.
2. Consistently produce quality content to build and maintain audience engagement.
3. Utilize social media to amplify content visibility.
4. Collaborate with other creators to tap into broader networks.
5. Keep abreast of technological advancements to exploit new distribution channels effectively.

Time to build your own

Akimbo is a weekly podcast created by Seth Godin. He's the bestselling author of 20 books and a long-time entrepreneur, freelancer and teacher.

You can find out more about Seth by reading his daily blog at seths.blog and about the podcast at akimbo.link.

People

Seth Godin, Ted Turner, Carol Burnett, Joni Mitchell

Companies

CNN, AOL

Books

None

Content Warnings:

None

Seth Godin

Ted Turner, Carol Burnett, Joni Mitchell, Ted Leonsis, and you. Hey, it's Ben Skoda, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

Today. When most people think of Ted Turner, perhaps they think of CNN, TBS, or Jane Fonda. But Ted Turner was a pioneer in our understanding of carriage and how it changes the media landscape. Let's go back 50 or 75 years and realize that if you bought a television, which almost everyone did, it came with a tuner, you could change the channel. In the old days, you had to stand up and walk across the room to do it.

And then they invented the remote control. It came with 13 channels. This was the VHF band of the spectrum. If you wanted to broadcast on one of these channels, you needed a license from the FCC. They were pretty cheap to get at first, but as more and more people got a television, the value of one of these licenses went up on televisions later on, starting in the sixties, there was a second dial.

This dial was for UHF broadcasts, a different part of the spectrum. These channels weren't worth nearly as much. Chalk it up mostly to laziness. Laziness and fidelity. The UHF stuff didn't look quite as good as the VHF channels, but mostly people stuck with the three tv networks.

Being one of those networks was practically priceless. So first, Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett's variety show was, for its time, hysterically funny. Us here in Canoga Falls would like to send special greetings to our sister city of Bellbird, which is as much a part of Australia.

Was sort of like the best of YouTube. Every Saturday night at its peak, just over 10 million people watched Carol Burnett every single week, week in and week out. Carol Burnett owned an hour of time from 10 million people. She got to decide what they would see. She used that position for years and years to entertain people in a way that she was proud of.

She had carriage. Someone was carrying her work from the studio through the network to people's homes on Saturday nights. Okay, so what about Ted Turner? Ted Turner graduated from Brown and went to work for his dad at a billboard company in the southeast near Atlanta. His father died when he was 24, and he took over the company.

They sold billboards. Ted realized soon into it that he could make money selling billboards, because if you own the billboard and no one else does, you control what the advertiser is able to put in front of people, and you could sell it over and over again. But Ted was restless, so he bought a UHF station, a UHF station in a town that didn't have many alternatives. And so showing old movies and cartoons. He was able to scrape by with the tv station, but then he realized the power of carriage.

He discovered that there were tons, hundreds of UHF stations around the country that didn't have enough to broadcast. And so he went to them and he did a deal. I will beam my content to you and you can broadcast it and we can share the money. Fast forward a little bit to the beginning of cable. Cable tv is a game changer, because now the lazy consumer goes from having three channels to watch to having 30 or 40 or 100 channels to watch.

And Ted realizes that once again, carriage is up for grabs. CB's was sort of slow to get the joke about distributing on cable. The three big tv networks were happy with the carriage they had. They forgot to learn the lesson of what happens when the FCC or someone else gives you a slice of people's attention. And so as cable grew, Ted raced to create things that he could get carriage on.

He also used the money that he was making to buy cable companies. So he controlled who would get carriage going forward, which meant that if you were starting a new tv network, I don't know, the food Network, you had to go to cable operators and pay them for the privilege of being carried. Carriage becomes the lever that changes our culture.

So what about Joni Mitchell, the extraordinary Joni Mitchell? Well, at her peak, she was selling a lot of records altogether. There's that number again, 10 million records sold.

But Joanie and her label didn't control the radio stations. By law, they weren't allowed to pay the radio stations to play her songs. They didn't control the record stores. Yes, there used to be buildings where people would go to buy a record. And so the record label, elbows out, had to push its way onto the radio stations for her, into the record stores for her.

And at her peak, she was selling a lot of records because she was making something that made record stores happy. She was making something that made the programmers at radio stations happy. And then she decided to stop. She wanted to make the music she heard in her head, not the music that would make the masses happy.

I could skate away.

Seth Godin

She stepped off the carriage go round and chose instead to make her art. Ok, over to Ted Leonsis. Ted Leonsis was one of the first presidents of AOL. And at the time, AOL, before people knew what the Internet was, you've got mail was the Internet. It came after Compuserve, came after difficult to use bulletin board systems, and it had a user friendly interface.

Well, Ted, working with Jan Brandt, who was in charge of their direct marketing figured out that if you gave people a floppy disk and then eventually a CD, they would put it into their computer and install the AOL software. And at enormous cost, we're talking hundreds of millions of CDs printed and distributed. They were surely the number one act on CD at the time, bigger than the Rolling Stones by far, because they were giving away these CDs, they were buying carriage, their own version of spectrum. That AOL grew to more than 10 million users who paid them every single month so that they would have a channel into people's homes. And Ted and Steve cases Vision was to create an alternative to cable carriage, once again owning the pipeline.

At their peak, they started something called the greenhouse. And the deal was simple. You would come make a pitch. We want to start the Motley fool. We want to start.

Plan it out. We want to start a content channel. AOL would take a piece of your company, give you some cash, you would make the content, and then they would give you carriage. They had the pipe, and so the controller of the pipe got to decide what was going to be broadcast to people.

So you're probably already guessing where this is going, because the Internet is the friend of infinity. YouTube has an unlimited number of channels. The people who run YouTube like to pretend that they have power, that they can bless something and make it a hit. Not so much. In fact, almost all the hits on YouTube are surprise hits.

They didn't become hits because YouTube somehow magically put them on the homepage. They become hits because people tell other people that WordPress powers a third of the Internet. WordPress has almost no power because their channel is so wide and so deep and that anyone can build a blog or build a website on blogging software that no one knows which one is going to be the hit. Back in the day, when I was at Yahoo, if you were on the front page of Yahoo, you would get a lot of traffic because Yahoo was the homepage of the Internet. It's where everyone started.

One of the biggest ideas I had at Yahoo, which wasn't adopted but would have been fascinating to imagine, is that we could have bought Netscape. At the time Netscape was for sale for, I think, $2 billion. They had been completely demolished by Microsoft, who were offering a free browser. The Netscape browser at the time cost $20. So what should Yahoo do?

Well, my proposal was, let's buy Netscape, leave it exactly as it is, improve it, make it free, but just change one thing. Make it so you can't change the start page of Netscape. Make it so that the start page of Netscape is Yahoo. If Yahoo had done that, they would still be the homepage of the Internet. It would be the place where people started.

And if it's the place where people start and you own the pipe and you control what's in the pipe, you then have the power to change the culture. But that's not what happened. And it's probably okay that that's not what happened. What happened instead is we keep blowing up the choke points and instead have created this massive peer to peer, messy, ever changing landscape where carriage doesn't matter, that you can be seen that when you build your blog or when you tweet or when you build whatever it is you're going to build on the Internet and publish your podcast and your video, you start next to millions of other people. Now, with patience, you can build a following.

With patience, you can build a permission asset, the ability to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to your readers who want to hear from you. And there are people who try to get in the way of that. Google will push your emails into the promotional folder because they come out ahead if you need to buy carriage from them instead of talking to people who want to hear from you. Facebook seduced many creators by using a bit of a bait and switch at the beginning. They would say, here's a new way to post on Facebook.

Say Facebook live or some video. And you would post something and it would spread. It would spread because Facebook was sharing some of their carriage and then over time, they would change the rules. For example, back when I started doing Facebook lives, it wasn't unusual for 100,000 people to be reached by one of my live sessions. Within a year, that number has dropped by more than 80%.

It's not because the sessions are less interesting, it's because Facebook has added a big button that says you can boost this and reach those people you used to reach just by paying us, once again, carriage. Changing the conversation back to Ted Turner for a second. One of the things that Ted did as he started to gain carriage was he bought a baseball team. The Atlanta Braves were hardly a well known team in the center of baseball culture. But Ted Turner had something the other teams didn't have.

He had carriage. And so fairly quickly, it became America's baseball team because more people were watching Braves games than any other team because Ted had carriage. So where do we go from here? One route is that you can work to make a quick hit. You can realize you don't own anything, that all the channels that aren't controlled the way Google and Facebook are, are essentially wide open, huge peer to peer networks.

So you can try to write the tweet of the day, you can try to cause a sensation to become that quick hit.

Open Gangnam star, Gangnam Star. And then next week you can try again. The problem with this approach is you have to compromise your work, and once you have a hit, there's no guarantee you're going to have another one. The alternative is to earn your own carriage to build a permission asset drip by drip. My blog, 7500 posts later has never had a hit post.

Seth Godin

Not one of my posts has been ten x or 20 x. The normal not one has won the Internet for the day. That's on purpose because I'm not writing listicles or seeking controversy. Instead, I am showing up writing for the people I seek to serve. And many of them subscribe, earning me carriage a little like Carol Burnett.

Except I'm not relying on the tuner in the television. And some of these people tell their friends the same thing is true in the world of podcasting. You could hold your breath and hope that Apple picks you, puts you on the home page, shares some of their carriage with you, and then you win. But that's really unlikely to happen. The alternative is to build a subscription base.

One of the ironies of the successful podcast networks that we see growing is they're not acting like networks. They're simply acting like a collection of unrelated shows, sharing a salesforce. The opportunity. For example, if you make overcast the way Marco Arment does, perhaps the best podcast listening app on the the iPhone is to use the fact that you are building this connection, this carriage, to create value for and by the podcasters and the listeners. Not to be an agnostic pipe, but to be a pipe with a point of view.

So the carriage rules keep changing, and they're no longer controlled by the FCC or by someone like Ted Turner who owns a network or a cable company. They are instead flowing back and forth from tightly controlled to not controlled at all. And for the first time, each one of us has the ability to earn and groom a following. Look at them yo yos. That's the way you do it.

You play the guitar on the MGV. To build our own carriage, to get to do the work we are proud of, as opposed to paying or pandering to someone else who owns the carriage to fit into their business model. No, this is the moment, a rare moment, when each of us has the chance to build our own. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth.

Ben Skoda

My name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi, Seth. Alicia from Charleston here.

Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi. This is Caitlin. Hi, Seth.

Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex.

Hey, Seth. Hi. This is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is.

Ben Skoda

And that completes my question. As you know, I'd love getting your questions to ask. One, visit Akimbo link. That's Akimbo Lin K and press the appropriate button. While you're there, you can check out the show notes from any previous episode.

Hi, Seth, my name is Gwen, and I am calling from Los Angeles, California, and I recently read your book, the dip, and it was an absolute life changer for me. I quit my job that I had worked for 13 years that was in an industry that I absolutely despised, and I am now switching gears into a creative field that I am new to, but I am really looking forward to being part of. And my question is, as somebody who's new, what kind of work can I create and put out that will position me better to connect with people once I have an idea that I'm ready to share? So is it.

Educating myself? Is it connecting with other people who are on the same path as me? Who are at the same point as me? Is it connecting with people who can teach me something? Is it just exposing myself to the industry or the field?

What can I do now as a beginner, as a neophyte, to position me for the future when I have something that I am ready to share? Thanks so much, and I love the podcast. Bye. This is a great question with lots. Of layers to it.

I'll divide it into two parts. One, how do I gain the skill to hone my craft? How do I get better at what it is I hope to do in this new field? And the second one, a little bit less stated, is, how do I let people know that I've gained the skill? How do I establish my reputation, my status, so that I get better gigs from better clients?

Miles Davis went to Juilliard in New York City in the 1950s, partly to learn music theory, mostly, I'm guessing, to make his mom happy so that he. Could get a certificate, a piece of. Paper, a diploma that proved that he had learned from the best. Well, Miles dropped out of Juilliard, and it's more and more clear that a piece of paper might work in an industrial setting, but that going forward, we're looking for different marks of status and skill. So let's start with the first half.

Creating your skill set, honing your craft. This needs to be done with intent. And if you do not make it a habit, a habit to ship to ship often, then your work will not improve. It certainly will not improve as fast as it needs to. So this idea of gigging two, three, four times a night at a jazz club in New York, of shipping your posters that you are making for any nonprofit that will take you on to do free work, of creating not one, not two, but five podcasts a week on different topics so that you can explore the edges of what you do.

You need to do an unreasonable amount of shipping of the work. You need to create the habit of shipping work that you are not yet proud of because you know it will lead to you doing work you can be proud of. So if you want to use an alias, use an alias. If you want to figure out how. To post your work anonymously until you want to sign it, fine with me.

Seth Godin

But the first step is to ship. The work, and to ship the work often. The second step is to put your name on it, even though you know it's not perfect. Because ask any successful creator to look. Back at the very early work that.

They did, and they will acknowledge that it could have been better. Of course it could have been better, because as you hone your skill, you're also honing your taste. And your taste is teaching you what could be better. So if you want to get better at acting, don't go on auditions, because that's just going to teach you how to audition. Go perform.

Seth Godin

If you have to start your own. Troupe, if you need to do soliloquies, stand up at the local mall and start reading Shakespeare. Ship the work. And the second half of this, which is more important than the first half, is to organize the others. This is the hard work that is.

Ignored by almost everyone who seeks to make a difference by bringing their craft, their art, their passion to the world. Because they think the hard part is learning the scales. The hard part is figuring out how. To edit the paragraphs. No, lots of people can do that.

The hard part is looking other human beings in the eye, is leading, is saying, follow me. If you show up in your industry and start to organize people, they will notice your ability to organize, to connect, to lead, to establish a standard, to build a shipping club, a mastermind group. It will pay dividends 100 x what you expect because this is what your peers need. And the people in the industry, the ones that you want to show that you have paid your dues with intent. They will see what you have organized.

That if you want to be a fine artist, it sure helps to have. A gallery it sure helps to have. A gallery that you organize with other artists who are also struggling to make their mark. It helps if there's a scene, you can move to a city where there already is a scene. Or much more directly, you can make your own scene.

And the way you make your own scene is by organizing one. There you go. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Seth Godin

We'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.

Seth Godin

We'll see you next time.