what I learned from getting Fired as a NXNE Blogger
This just came up in my Facebook Memories - Do you remember Bite TV? I learned some Hard lessons writing for them. Bite TV was a specialty cable TV channel in Canada back in the day. They started out as a TV channel that let people upload their own content to their website, and the best of what was uploaded would be put on TV. Then they got bought and turned into a comedy channel airing re-runs of classic sitcoms. Along with their rebranding as a comedy channel they launched a blog. Through connections in the social media world, I got to be a writer for the blog, earning $10 per post. At that rate I thought I could make it up in volume to pay a modest rent and move back to Toronto. They had a little “top 5 posts” ticker in the sidebar - I frequently had all five. My whole thing was to become a personality on the blog and then crossover to TV and do a show on the channel.
OH my God, this is taking me back. This is almost making me emotional, remembering back to the period when I was doing a Daily Vlog project and living in my Auntie’s basement. I pitched the blog editor on doing a series of videos for my daily vlog that would get cross-posted to the Bite TV blog, like ‘Bite TV presents Sean Ward as NXNE’. She gave me the go-ahead and I applied for media credentials as a Bite TV blogger. I posted the above photo to my social media and almost immediately got a frantic email from this editor demanding that I take down my post, and basically telling me that I had crossed a line by applying for media credentials in the name of one of the conference’s headline sponsors (Bite tv’s sister channel Aux was that sponsor). I forwarded her the email where we talked through this content strategy. The next day I got an email from her boss, a woman I had never interacted with before, telling me that my credentials have been revoked and that I don’t have authorization to use that badge. But I already had the badge, and I was in the middle of my daily vlog project and nothing was going to interfere with that, so of course I wore the badge and completed my 4-video project.
I Kind of figured that they would come around and see how a man with the Hustle to get the badge and create the videos could be a tremendous asset to them. The following mOnday I got another email from the editor’s boss telling me that my services on the blog were no longer needed.
Womp Womp.
it was all very corporate and dry, I thought that they wanted to do something brash and attention-getting. I thought I could be the Hunter S. Thompson to their Rolling Stone Magazine. They were always on about how “We Want Controversy” - in Fact some time I’ll tell you about the post I wrote that I knew would get a certain person to throw a shit fit online, that a lot of people still hate me for all these years later.
I started out doing those blog posts for Bite TV, knowing that I was giving them a tremendously discounted rate. I thought I was building good will that would pay off when I had shown what I could do and made the move to the TV channel. Come to find out later that the guy who makes the creative decisions for the TV channel was the same guy who hosted the channel’s flagship show, and he didn’t like me very much. I realized from my whole experience getting fired as a Bite TV blogger that when you do give a client a discount rate, you’re not building a bank of Good will. On the contrary, you’re telling them that your product is low-value. And that there is no accounting for the factors that go into the decisions other people make that have nothing to do with Merit, talent, or how long you’ve been delivering the goods on the blog.
Getting Fired as the Bite TV NXNE blogger is when I realized that I needed to give 100% to my own creative content.
Now let me see if I can find those old Vlogs from NXNE that year. . .
