Each and every one of us is a user of one thing or other, be it this music streaming service, that video-on-demand platform or this gadget.
But I want us to stop and think about what being a user really means. And to help with that, I wish to paint two contrasting pictures, so, please, indulge me:
At the end of each week for the past year, you’ve had a meal at a restraurant a few minutes’ walk from home. With the passage of time, you get acquainted with a particular waiter who gets to know you well enough to tell when you’ve had a good week and are in a celebratory mood or when you’ve had a bad week and just want to decompress.
Even as you keep your interactions professional, little flourishes here and there inform you that this particular staff member cares enough about your well-being to want to ensure you have a good experience. (Of course, being nice to the waiter and offering a generous tip will go some way towards cultivating this interest in your well-being. Seriously, be nice to your waiters.)
Now, contrast the above scenario with the process of going to withdraw money from an ATM. You may use a specific ATM each and every week like clockwork for one year, two years, even five years but the process will be just as transactional on day 400 as it was on day one. You won’t get any different an experience from the next person in the queue. In terms of transactions, you won’t be anything more than a statistic and neither will the next person.
Three recent events have had me contemplating the role we all play in today’s tech landscape as well as our relationship with the different products and services we use:
- In December 2023, Sony informed users that they would be unable to watch any Discovery content they had previously bought; this content would be removed from their libraries. The announcement listed 1,318 seasons (from my estimation) that would be deleted.
Sony later reversed this decision. - At the beginning of February 2024, Universal Music Group pulled all of its music from TikTok after failing to reach a licensing agreement with the video hosting service, leaving hundreds of thousands (millions?, I don’t know) of videos muted. The two sides are yet to reach an agreement.
- A couple of days ago, Funimation, an anime streaming service owned by Sony, announced that the service would be shutting down in April 2024, taking down with it libraries that were meant to last “forever.”
I wish I could say that these are rare cases but sadly, similar things have happened many, many, many times before.
I wish I could say that such cases will reduce in frequency and scale but I can’t. Not as long as we’re part of the user economy.
I don’t have a dictionary definition for what I’m calling the user economy but if I were to try and express the idea behind it, it would be this: An inordinate focus on the user metric (and other related engagement metrics) as a measure of success, the end result of which is viewing consumers not as distinct individuals but as a heterogenous mass whose volume only serves to determine profitability.
That’s not to say that there is a complete disregard for individual preferences and tastes. Services such as Netflix, Spotify and YouTube take great pride in their recommendation engines that “learn” about one’s preferences and suggest more content that might be of interest. But let’s stop and think about these recommendation engines briefly. While the companies behind these engines tout them as a boon for “discoverability” and “supporting creators,” what, really, is the motivation behind the continuous improvement of these engines? In a word, stickiness. Or, put differently, self interest.
Think about it. The more time you spend on Netflix, Spotify or YouTube, the more you contribute to the different engagement metrics these businesses measure as a determinant of success.
This may sound cynical, perhaps overly so. So, let’s do a bit of an exercise. I’d like you to think of some of your most-used apps, services or devices.
Next, let’s take a look at some self-reporting:
- Spotify: “9th Annual Spotify Wrapped Campaign draws more than 225 million MAU (monthly active users)”
- Slack: “Over 91,000 Paid Customers using Slack Connect, up from over 74,000 at the end of last quarter.”
- YouTube: “We have 2 billion+ logged-in users every month, and we’re averaging 70 billion in daily views.”
- Facebook: “DAUs (daily active users) were 2.11 billion on average for December 2023, an increase of 6% year-over-year.”
- Apple: “[O]ur installed base of active devices has now surpassed 2.2 billion.”
Let me be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with quantifying the uptake and success (or failure) of a product or service. In fact, it would be highly irresponsible for a business not to have figures related to its operations. Even that quaint restaurant mentioned at the outset needs to know how many patrons walk in through its doors on a daily basis.
The issue here is the recognition of users as a key metric in determining the success of a business while at the same time completely disregarding them. The issue is the disconnect between the real people who use a product and the faceless entity, the statistic simply identified as “users.”
There’s an idea that you shouldn’t name a stray animal, lest you get attached to it. As Mike Wazowski puts it, “You’re not supposed to name it. Once you name it, you start getting attached to it.”
Make no mistake, it is this detachment, this reductionist view of users that affects many business decisions made.
Let’s look at the Funimation wind-down, for example. As part of the shuttering of the service, Funimation users will be migrated to parent company Crunchyroll’s video streaming platform, with an attendant increase in subscription fees, of course. So far, you’re probably thinking that, while the increase in subscription fees is a bummer, at least the transition is being handled thoughtfully. And you’re right, but only up to a point.
In addition to digital video streaming, Funimation also sold physical media. Some of the DVDs sold would feature a digital code that could be redeemed on the streaming platform to allow you access “forever” to the digital version of whatever it is you bought. That feature, called Digital Copy, is not supported by Crunchyroll. If you had a collection of these digital copies but no longer have the DVDs, that’s it for your collection. It’s forever lost to the ether. Thus doth the cookie crumble.
So to summarise, despite the fact that Crunchyroll owns Funimation, despite the fact that most of Funimation’s catalogue is on Crunchyroll, despite the fact that integration between the two platforms has been shown to be possible, real users are potentially going to lose libraries that they had invested in.
Why? Why is a feature that would have real-world effects on users not included in such a major transition?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because every user of the platform is exactly that, a user.
The danger with the user economy is that, despite their importance to businesses, the human elements, the actual users aren’t always considered when making business decisions. Obviously, it would be impractical for a company with millions of platform users to consider the thoughts and input of each and every one of them.
This, however, doesn’t mean that they can’t try and do right by their users.
One example of a company trying to do so is Google, specifically with its handling of Stadia. For those out of the loop, Stadia was a game-streaming service developed by Google and launched in 2019. When the platform met its (somewhat predictable) demise in 2023, Google actually considered its users. As part of the wind-down process, Google issued refunds for hardware, game and DLC purchases, even extending the utility of the Stadia Controller beyond the service’s lifetime and unlocking Bluetooth functionality.
I imagine that not every ex-Stadia user is happy at how Google chose to handle the shuttering of the service. But at least there was evidence that the company looked at its users as more than just a number on a profit & loss statement.
This isn’t meant to be a rallying cry against Big Tech. Neither is it the bitter cry of a disgruntled user. It is simply an attempt to identify the situation in which we all find ourselves in the hope that recognising the problem will be the first step towards solving it.
As our lives become even more deeply entrenched in the digital platforms and services that have become so central to our lives, the more deeply we embed ourselves in the user economy.
So the next time you see a tech company doing something tone-deaf or user-hostile, remember: We’re all users.