The Great eCommerce Recession

Nobody else wants to call it. Calling it doesn’t solve anything. But it does help the millions (now) of individual freelance contractors understand what’s going on.

The inexperienced reader will glance at the title and suspect me of hyperbole. The veteran readers, who have been following my work since the turn of the century, will appreciate that this is 20+ years of exclusive work as an eCommerce contractor talking.

Freelancing, so that we suffer no crisis of clarity, is fucked.

 

And to be more clear: I speak of eCommerce as the vast majority of online-only businesses; websites and channels supported by ad revenue, referral links, subscriptions, etc. From 20 years back until just a few years ago, you could set up a web domain, plug in a CMS, plaster it with ads, and make money provided your content wasn’t just useless spam. None of this applies to brick-and-mortar commerce, nor to selling physical products or paid services. THOSE markets are all doing fine, albeit with their own hangups.

But – eCommerce as in BLOGS, and the blogging bloggers who write them, are dead and buried. Not only do I feel confident that eCommerce as a stand-alone industry is in recession, but it might be in depression or even killed entirely and only come back in some other form someday – perhaps subscription services will take hold in its place.

The eCommerce recession, as I’m calling it while summoning all my remaining optimism, was the result of a perfect storm of clashing catastrophes, and indeed, the global market isn’t looking that much better. Just rest assured, Work-From-Home / remote job seekers / freelancer veterans: You’re not going crazy. It isn’t just UpWork or Fiverr or Linked-In or Indeed or whatever. It’s EVERYTHING! Nobody is getting any work, no money to spend to hire, no work to do.

After the jump: The Perfect Storm that Recession’ed eCommerce:

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My Latest Multimedia Productions…

(*blowing dust off WordPress*)

Jesus holy mother of peasants and pumpkins hail Mary! HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN? March 2022, right when Putin invaded Ukraine. Since then, I’ve shifted gears a lot in my freelance livin’ work. It’s kept me THAT busy, so that is the excuse slip I have for not blogging on my own site for 5 months.

OTOH, I have always said that you should know me by my work, with my domain only functioning as a central hub. Judge me not by my poor stats at penguinpetes.com, but by my freelance work over on a YouTube channel with 3.5K subscribers.

Aw, what’s that, you say? You want to see some of Unca Pete’s video reviews for the $25 billion cannabis industry? Right this way, and be sure to stay tuned for more podcast news following…

69 views nice

nice…

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Spookwire: The Eerie Mystery Of Phantom Social Workers

Hold onto your prayer beads, late-night browsers, because I’ve got a new gig that’s destined to scare the wits out of you! I’ll be blogging for Spookwire, a new site dedicated to the creepy, unexplained, and paranormal. From horror movies to conspiracy theories and every real-life intrigue in between, if it’s spooky, we do it!

So to one of our opening posts: The Eerie Mystery Of Phantom Social Workers. This has been a real-life event in the UK and US, and was related to a media circus on both sides of the pond. I touch on the US Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, with the McMartin Preschool “trial,” and the gigantic Scotland Yard investigation over in the UK.

In brief, parents have reported home visits from people claiming to be social workers, who examine the home and threaten to take away the kids. But later calls to the government reveal no such persons worked there and no social welfare visits scheduled. So where do they come from, and what do they want? It’s a chilling question with some alarming theories to answer it.

 

I Reviewed a Fistful of Giallos at 366Weird

OK, if two Giallo movies count as “a fistful,” that’s how many I covered at 366Weird lately and haven’t had the time to blog-blab about it yet. Forgive me if I burrow under the icebergs once in awhile, I am a busy penguin. That’s reviews of The Fifth Cord (1971) and All the Colors of the Dark (1972).

I loves me some Giallo, so much so that the editors at 366Weird pretty much leave everything in that genre up to me now. Even though I’ll be the first to admit that Giallo movies are often hokey, derivative, and usually out of their mind, I can’t get enough of the atmosphere, arty filming, and pulp fiction vibe from this charming little corner of cinema.

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I’m back! Miss me yet?

Ha ha, and I thought I could do without a blog!

This time I have two purposes:

  1. After two decades of freelance writing for the web and social media, I have accumulated an archive of past works without a home. Clients come and go in this business for any number of reasons; they retire, get promoted, sell out, quit, or otherwise sever our professional relationship. Then the site goes down, and all my content is now offline. Thus, with the original publishers’ permissions where I can get it, I’ll be re-hosting my works here for a more permanent archive.
  2. There’s a huge public interest in freelancing itself that wasn’t there twenty years ago. New generations are coming along, with growing interest in a freelancing career but with no clue where to start. I see enough newbies floundering around in forums out there that I feel I can do them some good. So I’ll be playing freelancer guru here.

Well, of course, I’ll also be bragging about my latest gigs, career moves, and adventures in this space too. I might as well. And this time, everything’s going to run nice and smoothly, isn’t it?