When is advocacy not marketing?

Sometimes I think that I must be in dire need of a communications course. Because I'll write something and someone will take it to be the most vile thing.

The basic problem I see though is that some people aren't familiar with economies of scale.  A website that gets less than 1,000 daily visitors is not a good target for "marketing". If someone from a company is participating on such a site, they're not doing it for business reasons.

Consider this exchange:

(original review of Avedesk on AquaXP.com begins)

No single application released this year has had as dramatic an impact on GUI modding as the release of AveDesk. Its version 1.0 release was a milestone in user-friendly desktop enhancement, gaining quick popularity among customizers the world over.

It then goes on for awhile and asserts that Stardock isn't worried because these freeware projects tend to fade off.  While I agree with the sentiment, until recently, I wasn't really following Avedesk.  I never made any comment on Avedesk in that manner. Avedesk is, in our mind, a program that lets ObjectDock plugins to run on the desktop (as well as other plugins).  It's definitely cool but I think the hyperbole above is a bit of a stretch.

Which is what I essentially wrote:

I can totally see how someone might see me "dissing" Avedesk. But I think that is more of a matter of willful interpretation. When the guy who makes the Avedesk tutorial then makes a review touting it as essentially the greatest thing this year in a year that has seen the release of things like DesktopX 2.x, Kapsules, ObjectDockPlus, and major Samurize updates along with of course all the other things, I think that invites a reality check.

Avedesk is largely dependent on Andreas to create new content because few people make plugins (how many third party DesktopX plugins have you seen lately?). Kapsules, Samurize, and DesktopX, by contrast, can have totally new things created relatively easily by third parties.

The author responded:

well, before avedesk, the only app people (typically) used to emulate OS X / Panther labels and folder content for dtop icons was samurize. i stand by the use of ‘dramatic’ in this context, despite other apps’ capabilities before or after avedesk’s release.

Icon labels? We're talking icon labels being the key thing here? Last night I whipped up icon labels on my own using VB Script for DesktopX objects that are even more flexible than what's on Avedesk. I don't consider that a big deal because icon labels are..well icon labels.  If we're going to get into fancy icons on the desktop, what about IconX then? What about the things Kapsules can do? Heck, what about the Expose program that's being made for Windows?

But still things were pretty reasonable then this stuff comes in:

and

My respond to Herd:

I admit to being annoyed when I wrote this.  I get so sick of people acting like I have no right to express my opinion. Oh, it's fine for other programs to throw up PayPal donations. They're still freeware.  But DesktopX, which has no time outs and isn't crippled and hence is totally free to use shouldn't have the same right to defend themselves as the others because it's made by a software company and it too has a way to support it by buying the enhanced version.

Just thinking about it makes me annoyed. Like yea, I'm hanging out on a Sunday on a website that probably gets less than 100 unique visitors per day writing a 2 paragraph response because I want to "advertise". Only in kid-land does that kind of logic make sense.   Let's see, AquaXP.com's Alexa traffic ranking last week:  1,236,898th.

I'm not trying to insult them but I really get tired of people who cry "advertising" on some site that doesn't get enough traffic to make a business case for hanging out on at all. I'm on there for the same reasons they are, because I'm into this stuff.

Anyway.. Steve shows up:

@Brad: I’ve stayed out of this argument until now but I must say, for someone who makes his living from communities such as the Aqua emulation community, you sure know how to ensure potential ill feeling towards yourself and your company from the community at large. I’m not saying your standpoint is right or wrong, but you could certainly act far more professionally than you have done thus far. Perhaps you were incited to act this way, but that’s still no good reason for you to act this way, especially as a public face for your company.

Apparently Steve buys into the fantasy too.   It's the same logic that lets people think "Well we talk about Avedesk because it's obviously the most popular - the same 10 people keep posting about it so it must be really popular."

I think the reason it bugs me is that people should know better than this.

Aqua-Soft, like most sites, track the number of views a thread gets. That is, the number of times an article has been read. So for instance, the Avedesk tutorial has a total of 841 views. That means it's been clicked on 841 times (that includes repeat viewings). So your best case scenario, assuming no duplicates that's 841 people. And the rule of thumb is to take views and  divide it by half the number of responses to figure out a ballpark number of unique people so it's really likely closer to 150 people.  In fact, the most popular thread about Avedesk on that page has only 6,000 views (a screenshot thread).

Anyway, the point is that marketing/commercialism isn't the driving force here. We are all a bunch of guys who are really into this stuff.  I don't think the sub 1000 people *actively* using Avedesk are goign to make or break anything.  Andrew, myself, Andreas, etc. are software developers who invest a lot of our energy into this stuff. We care about it. And it ticks me off when I'm treated like the only reason I'm posting is because of money. I don't get a royalty on DesktopX and if it was about money, I'd be posting about WindowBlinds or The Political Machine or Galactic Civilizations.

DesktopX doesn't even show up on our pie chart.  I post about it because I think it's totally cool and that others will find it totally cool if they ry it.

But in communities, a dozen or two vocal users can give the appearance of popularity. It's certainly more popular over there than DesktopX is.  But to put things in perspective,  the M12 WindowBlinds visual style has about a 1000 downloads so far today and it's only early afternoon here.

So these guys need to get a grip and realize that this whole widget stuff is very niche stuff.  If my posting was driven by commercialism, I would focus exclusivley on WindowBlinds which is by far the most popular.  But right now I'm into widgets so I like talking about them.

And I like to talk about ALL of them. I just don't like fanboys trying to trash or put down all the others to build themselves up. Don't go and post that Avedesk is incredibly popular or making a huge wave when the evidence shows that it is, at best, a distant third in the Windows widget programs.  And I'm not even including things like SysMetrix which are also quite popular.

It need not be an "us vs. them". It should be all of them working together. This whole mess reminds me of tribal squabbling. It's all very niche right now. If that's going to change, ALL the programs that do this must become a LOT more popular.