Mass amateurization occurs by removing or weakening the entry barriers to a professional field.

However, we should keep in mind that Clay Shirky has used the notion to address an emerging trend in the media.

He describes the trend as follows:

 …Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management.

…Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media.  The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.

Mass amateurization diminishes what he calls “professionalism.” In his view, professionals often enforce strict and difficult-to-achieve standards in their profession, not only to maintain high work quality but also to protect their turf from amateurs.

It’s no longer necessary to be a professional photographer for your work to be noticed. Even for a non-professional, far-from-standard photo, there will always be some audience. The reality is even more bitter for professionals: Their work may no longer get noticed, as it might become buried forever under millions of photos taken and shared by amateur photographers.

The same trend holds true for other types of content, including but not limited to articles, podcasts, and ebooks.

Who coined the term “mass amateurization”

In some textbooks and articles, I have seen references to Wolske, Johnson, & Adams (2009). They titled their paper: “Citizen Professional Toolkits: Empowering Communities Through Mass Amateurization.”

However, Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody was published a year before the above-mentioned paper. Therefore, although Wolske and his colleagues did not mention Shirky’s name, the credit belongs to him.

Mass Amateurization and Media

Shirky has titled the third chapter of his book “Everyone Is a Media Outlet.” He believes that effortless publishing leads to many more outlets, and the news provided by media will get diluted in this ever-deepening pool of content.

He describes the effect of mass amateurization on the media (specifically the news industry) in a brief yet convincing statement:

[news will change from an] institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem.

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So just to feed my curiosity, googled “evergreen tweet” to become sure that the term “evergreen tweet” is an oxymoron. But I was wrong. A tweet from Bernie Sanders was considered as an evergreen tweet by most media. A three-word-tweet about the AHCA:

Such a tweet can be considered as a vivid description of the current state of the politics without considering any specific context, even beyond the United States political landscape.

So it seems that I’ve to change my mind about the term “evergreen tweet”. Most descriptions of the politics can be considered timeless and evergreen, especially if they are talking about corruption, incompetence, and disgrace.

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SAC is one of the major factors in your cost structure and a good leverage point to think about when designing or optimizing your business model.

Definition of the Subscriber Acquisition Cost

As the name suggests, SAC is the cost of acquiring a new subscriber for your business.

In other words, subscriber acquisition cost is the average cost of adding one subscriber to your subscriber base.

Calculation of the Subscriber Acquisition Cost

Usually, you have to specify a reference period and calculate SAC over it.

Many sources suggest you to choose the reference period based on your shortest subscription interval. For example, if the monthly subscription is your shortest offer, you might consider the last 30 days leading up to today as a basis for SAC calculation.

However, if you are looking for a reliable indicator, such a time interval would not be accurate enough, as most of your costs spread over longer timespans. Most of the marketing campaigns last a couple of months and many marketing services (such as email marketing tools) offer quarterly and yearly services.

Therefore, I do suggest to check the frequency of the costs incurred by your marketing efforts and choose your calculation period based on your marketing and advertising cash flow.

SAC Depends on Your Business Scale

The subscriber acquisition cost depends heavily on your business scale. Thus you are not able to predict it for long-term if you have scale-up plans in mind.

Usually, SAC will be reduced after you scale-up your business. However, in mature and competitive markets, SAC might be increased as your business grows. Because instead of converting non-customers to customers, you have to convince subscribers of the other businesses to accept the switching costs and turn into your customer.

Subscription Acquisition Costs in Different Industries

You have to be careful in benchmarking your SAC against other businesses and industries.

Here are some of the reasons that such comparisons can be misleading:

• SAC depends on the business model and you cannot compare the SACs in a vacuum.
• Some of the acquisition channels are cheaper than their alternatives, but their’s subscriber lifetime would shorter or churn rates would be higher. So you may have higher SAC comparing to your competitor, but still be more profitable because of the higher retention rate.
• SAC depends on the age of the businesses and awareness of the brand in the market and among the people you are trying to reach. So you can’t compare SAC of a fresh company with the one which is working for a couple of months and years.

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Content Optimization (CO) is a subset of SEO helping you to audit/edit your content and make it more appealing to search engines.

Of course, the tools and technics used for content optimization depend on the content type. However, you can consider the following subcategories of the content optimization as the most important ones:

• Article optimization
• Image optimization
• Video optimization
• Link optimization
• News optimization
• Product review optimization

Further reading: Content Marketing Institute‘s guide to content optimization is a good starting point if you’d like to know more about this topic.

Note: Do not confuse the content optimization technics with similar topics such as landing page optimization. Although these concepts are equally important, the former is about attracting more organic traffic while the latter is concerned with conversion rate. Sometimes these two dimensions are aligned with each other, however, there are many cases in which, there is an inevitable trade-off between them.

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The lizard brain is commonly contrasted with the mouse and monkey brains. While the former represents the part of the human brain responsible for memory and emotion, the latter denotes the newer part of the brain, capable of complex cognitive functions and higher-order thinking.

The following diagram depicts this so-called triune model of the brain (+):

No matter how close to reality, this simplified divided model of the brain has been attractive for authors of management, psychology, and personal development books. For example, Seth Godin, the well-known business writer, has used the term extensively in his book Linchpin. Here are a few samples:

• Everyone has a little voice inside of their head that’s angry and afraid. The voice is the resistance, your lizard brain, and it wants you to be average (and safe).
• The lizard brain is hungry, scared, and horny.
• The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away.
• The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It’s real, and it’s living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival.

John Medina, the author of the best-selling book Brain Rules, is also comfortable with using the term “lizard brain”:

Criticism of the model: lizard brain, mouse brain, and monkey brain

Lisa Feldman Barret, the well-known and respected neuroscientist, the author of various academic books, and chief editor of The Emotion Review journal, has criticised this model in simple words understandable for the non-technical audience.

In her book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Barret describes the model as “one of the most successful and widespread errors in all of science.”

Look at the following passage from her book:

Barret tells the story behind this model and the way it got traction and survived till now. A physician named Paul MacLean has visually inspected the brains of lizards and mammals, including humans, and concluded that part of these brains is similar. He considered it as the old part, shaped in the early stages of evolution, and responsible for basic survival functions. In such a model, the human brain has extra parts sitting over this old brain, which evolved in later stages of evolution, responsible for complex cognitive functions.

But what’s the better description of the brain’s structure? Barret tells us that:

Why lizard’s brain is attractive to authors, coaches and mentors?

Most of the courses, classes and discussions about behavioral modification and emotion regulation revolve around a fundamental yet essential point: “You must monitor your first reactions and manage your impulses.” Or in other words: “Think twice before any judgment or doing anything.” This recommendation is crucial, and authors and coaches prefer to reinforce it with scientific evidence. Thus, instead of simply saying, “Beware of impulsive behavior,” they like to put it beside “scientific” pieces of evidence. Neuroscience is an attractive and persuasive term, and why not use these kinds of pseudo-neuroscientific descriptions as support for our recommendations?

Is it wrong to use this term? No. This simplified model can be helpful in teaching. The term lizard brain is much shorter and more understandable than “all fast emotional conservative automatic responses of the human brain.” But we have to remember and remind that we are not talking about the brain’s actual structure, and it’s just a metaphor.

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