Economics of Web Dev Are Changing
I love this essay from Baldur Bjarnason, maybe because his stream of consciousness style is so similar to my own. He compares the rapidly changing economics of web and software development to the film, TV, and publishing industries.
Before we get to web dev, let’s look at the film industry, as disrupted by streaming.
Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.
He’s not wrong.
Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared [from] streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.
I’ll quibble with him here. Shows and movies disappear from streamers because there’s a finite pot of money from subscriber revenue. So removing content will save them money. Blu-Ray is more sustainable because it’s an additional purchase.
OK, let’s get back to web dev.
He points out that similar to the film and other creative industries, developers fill their spare time with passion projects. But their day jobs are with tech companies and essentially subsidize their side projects.
And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.
Bjarnason ends with seven suggestions for those in the industry. I’ll just quote one:
Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.
In other words, whatever you do, own your audience. Don’t farm that out to a platform like X/Twitter, Threads, or TikTok.
Of course, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between what’s happening in the development and software engineering industries to what’s happening in design.
