Navigating

I understand that everyone wants to make money.

I also understand that the web changed the way a lot of things get done. Among other things, the web made it possible for us to bypass what I call "Gatekeepers." These were the people that stood between us as producers, consumers, creatives, investigators - and the goal we wanted to reach.

Now, if someone wanted to write a book, he simply wrote the book and self-published on Amazon or some other platform. Lately, if a company wanted a website, a platform like Wix or Homestead allowed a novice to turn out a nice-looking site without going through a marketing company or website shop. If an individual wanted to - heaven forbid! - sign up for health care, a few answers on a website profile and you had a price and service list.

Then came Obamacare, and the infamous "navigators." The people who literally helped you find your way through the morass of unintelligible questions, uninformative demands for information, and impossible choices.

Not too long ago, I realized that organization had caught on to the notion that there is money to be made in "navigating." If you make your process sufficiently complicated, you can charge people money to use it.

More and more I am finding that DIY operations, such as online promotion, has become so complicated that it's not worth a small business owner's time to try to pick his way through the jargon, the "strategies," the "analytics" of simply trying to promote a site, product, or special.

Once upon a time there was a relatively simple challenge in having a website show up well across different search engines and OS platforms. Each one handled the information it was being fed differently, so when you accessed your website on Firefox and a PC, it looked different than when you accessed it on Safari and a Mac. Time was, we told clients which platforms the majority of users were on, and said we'd optimize the website for those platforms and those alone, and not try to configure a site for each possible permutation, as it wasn't cost effective.

Now, to an extent, HTML5 has made that less of a problem, though it still exists.

But websites and online operations themselves have become so challenging that it takes a couple of weeks of study to understand how to use them - and of course they offer to help you for a simple monthly fee! And look what you'll get in reports and analysis of your promotion's performance! Wow!

SAAS has certainly come of age, though initially the idea was that you'd subscribe to use software (and I do, to quite a yearly fee, including even Google Drive - the cloud has certainly come of age!). Now the software has become so difficult to manage, at least in some cases,  you need help using it.

So it seems that, at least to a degree, we're right back where we started. Only the online companies have grabbed the business. Until enterprising individuals working in their basements or home offices offer to "navigate" for less than the complicated software companies' employees. And on it goes.

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