Last week’s post here touched on the often-questionable value of Social Media. This week has seen some social media issues for me, so I’m providing an update and my final word on the value of it for Comedians and other performers.

First, here’s what happened to me. On Monday I got a notification telling me that my Facebook account has been restricted from advertising. This is apparenrtly due to my fraudulent behaviour with Facebook advertising.

This is obviously a mistake: I don’t do Facebook advertising and have never done Facebook advertising. What the fuck??? They tell me I’ve been banned from ever using Facebook advertising again, even though I never have, but I can challenge it by requesting a review.

My first instinct is to let it go, because Facebook constantly sending me emails and notifications urging me to advertise with them is bloody annoying. If being banned means they’ll stop spamming me, that could actually be pretty great.

After thinking about it for a bit I decided to request the review. I don’t like Facebook advertising, and I don’t think anyone using Facebook wishes they had more ads in their newsfeed (I sure fucking don’t), I might need to use it next year. And I don’t like unfair black marks against my account or name.

So I clicked the link and after verifying my identity, explained it’s clearly a mistake. I tell them I’m not advertising on Facebook and never have. I suggest that if they’re looking at my account, they might notice how I’ve never ever paid them for advertising. I tell them thaty there’s no way this can be anything other than their mistake. The auto-responder tells me someone will review it and deliver a verdict in the next 48 hours.

The next day Facebook gets back to me and tells me I’ve definitely done fraudulent advertising and am banned from Facebook ads for life. No explanation, no right to reply and no way to contact them about it.

Fucking idiots.

This isn’t uncommon. Friends tell me all the time that they’ve had their Facebook accounts temporarily suspended for innocent posts that the algorithm interpreted in weird ways, with no opportunity to actually respond to a real thinking human.

But at least they get reinstated after a few weeks. Lifetime ban with no explanation or correspondence? Ridiculous. What organisation of their scale doesn’t offer any human support? What organisation of their scale doesn’t put their contact details on their website?

So that’s where I’m currently at, but what I really want to talk about are the considerations behind using social media as a platform for your comedy career (or music career. Or anything, really).

What I’m experiencing now is just the latest example of reasons why you don’t want to lean on social media too heavily and why you need to promote from something you actually own. But first; Another example that (in my narcissistic fashion) I’m pulling from my own life. I’m going to take you back to the dawn of a new millenium.

In the year 2000 I was using mp3.com to host my electronic music. I just checked the website now, because it still exists, but it seems to be some kind of online music magazine now. Two decades ago mp3.com was a place you would go to stream, download or buy music.

I and many of my friends had our music there and were paid commisions for listens and CD purchases. My friend Andy was making incredible money, a year’s wages every month, for topping their Electronic charts. I made considerably less but only their top 0.05% of artists got paid at all, and I was definitely doing enough to make it worth my effort.

My effort, like everyone else’s, involved promoting my page there. This even included spending our own money advertising our pages. You can imagine that with 163,000 artists like me promoting their site with our own time and money, mp3.com became a massive website very quickly. Then, everything changed.

This was the era of the dotcom boom and bust. The internet’s biggest websites like AOL, Amazon, Geocities, eBay, Yahoo, MySpace and mp3,com had been running at losses and now had to monetize or implode. You might not recognize some of those sites… they’re the ones that imploded.

mp3.com announced to us that there were some new rules. From now on. we wouldn’t be paid our royalties and sales commisions unless we paying subscribers there. They changed the pay structure – What they paid us was going to shrink, and we’d have to get twice as many streams to qualify for it.

Those weren’t even the worst things. Now they owned the intellectual property to all our music (or so they claimed). They even owned our names for having an account with them.

If that’s not shitty enough, they also started banning and blocking members. If they decided that your music sounds vaguely like other music, or your title sounds vaguely like another title, they could say “plagiarism,” cancel your account and keep all your money and intellectual property. Alternatively, if you had a naughty word they could say “community standards!” and lock you out of your account, keep all the money you earned and all of the work and intellectual property you created.

Many left the mp3.com immediately. Some of us tried to hang on, paying them for shrinking returns, but we eventually all gave up and left (or got booted out without being paid what they owed us).

We all felt cheated and hate mp3.com. I can’t believe it still exists, though it looks like a ghost of it’s former self. I personally hope that the reason is a new owner who bought the domain for $1 after the original administrators were all supernaturally transported to an alternate dimension where they shall spend the remainder of eternity being violently tortured and having to constantly listen to the Wiggles’ catalogue. Seriously… fuck those guys.

About this time I learned about Sharecropping, a practice which forced people to farm on rented land and keeping people in a state of servitude even after they weren’t technically slaves anymore. This was a way of telling people they’re free while keeping them in debt slavery. It was a disgusting exploitative practice, but there’s still well-disguised versions of it in lots of workplaces today.

Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t farm on someone else’s land. Don’t renovate a rented house.

After spending your blood, sweat and tears building their house, the owner can still boot you out and leave you homeless with nothing. Farm on someone else’s land and you can end up in debt, You can work for your landlord for free and still end up owing them. Even if you do really well and make a huge profit they can still evict you, keeping your crops and your money.

All over the internet there’s horror stories about businesses who decided to base themselves on Facebook and lost everything when Facebook changed their interface or policies. These companies built their business on Facebook’s virtual land and ended up with nothing when Facebook decided to not host them or their product anymore.

Artists/performers/business-people who get suspended can’t access their fans/followers/customers. It’s devastating and it’s ruined livelihoods. This happens to comedians all the time; Facebook’s algorithm is famously tone-deaf and doesn’t have a nuanced sense of humour. As annoying as it is to be prohibited from using the platform, it’s so much worse to lose access to your customer base.

No comedian or business wants to try and rebuild a fanbase of 20,000 followers if Twitter/Instagram/Facebook suddenly decides to lock you out.

If you’re serious about building or growing your business and staying in contact with your fans, you’ll run your own mailing list. You own your own mailing list, even if Facebook deletes you. Mailchimp is very popular and powerful and there’s lots of alternatives and this page is a good place to start comparing prices and features.

Of course, you don’t have to run a mailing list, I don’t. I should, but I don’t because I’m not currently running my comedy “career” anything like a business. This could change in the future and I probably should set something up.

But you know what? I have this website. You can find me from this website and you can find this website from Google. I don’t have many videos, but I’m putting them on YouTube instead of Facebook these days so you can still find me if Facebook keep being stupid. My business model isn’t based on social media, and if I lost my social media I’ll still survive.

Facebook’s one of the bggest and richest companies in the world but they’ll tell you, as they tell their advertisers, that their value is 100% from the people who use it. All of the content and interaction you go there for is provided by other users, not by the App. Facebook got rich by inviting all of us to farm on their land. Facebook’s house only has value because we all renovated it.

Musically, I came up in the wake of punk and I’ve inherited much of the ethos. We knew that the product is the music. not the disc, and the creator was the artist, not the label. You go to comedy venues to see the comedians, not the building. You go to Facebook for your friends, not the uninspiring blue and white interface.

If you’re a comic and serious about communicating with your fans you’ll definitely consider social media…. but you also better make sure you have your own platform. Own your site or mailing list. Tending to crops on someone else’s property isn’t good for you or your fans.