The case of the disappearing plants
YouTube scams, viral magicians, Dark Brandon, cool fruit, space chorizo and Etsy shenanigans
Etsy grows more precarious
A couple weeks ago, Zoe Trejo got a message she didn’t understand. The Southern California woman had been selling rare houseplants on Etsy for years when a customer wrote to ask why a particular plant was suddenly unavailable for “shipment to her region.”
Trejo clicked through the listings herself. Sure enough, some kind of plant police had struck: Four types of philodendrons, selling for $53 to $140 apiece, were mysteriously unavailable. She contacted Etsy customer support and posted to a seller forum before making an announcement on her shop page.
“PLEASE BE AWARE,” it said. “Etsy has shut down plant product listings in random and unexplained ways.”
It turned out that Trejo was not the only plant-seller missing philodendrons (or hoyas, or monsteras, or marigold seeds). In seller forums on Etsy and Reddit, dozens of people complained that their plant listings were disappearing. For some, the disruption was merely aggravating; for others — the full-timers — it endangered their livelihoods. Some went so far as to contact the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if it had issued new houseplant rules.
Etsy, for its part, never officially commented. A week later, it reinstated the offending plants. Sellers grudgingly concluded that the issue must have sprung from some algorithmic mistake — much like the reported mass delisting of amber products before it.1 Among sellers, in fact, the over-zealousness of Etsy’s content algorithms are both well-hated and well-known: An April petition with 86,000 signatures claims that “AI-powered bots shut down legitimate seller accounts seemingly at random.”
Such complaints are hardly news on digital platforms — but they do carry a certain added weight on Etsy, where business grows more precarious all the time. Last spring, the marketplace hiked its seller fees from 5 to 6.5%, an increase so sudden and significant that tens of thousands of sellers went on strike.2
Etsy’s latest earnings report also shows the marketplace is getting much more competitive. While both sales and active customers have dropped off, the number of active sellers is up by almost 70,000 year-over-year … despite (a) all these well-publicized seller spats and (b) the company’s open struggle to maintain momentum post-pandemic.
Out of curiosity, I did try to figure out if Etsy sellers make more or less money on average now than they did, say, five years ago. This is basically impossible to do, I learned, because Etsy acquired three other marketplaces in the last three years and reports their sales figures together. But here’s one very rough back-of-the-envelope guesstimate: If you subtract Etsy’s revenue ($400 million) from the value of all four marketplace sales ($3 billion), and divide that by the number of active sellers (7.4 million) ... you end up with something like $120 in sales per month, across all four platforms, on average.
In other words, Etsy doesn’t exactly yield quit-your-day-job money for the average seller these days — if it ever did. And this month, Etsy’s plant sellers took an additional hit.
“Seems like a huge wake-up call for all of us or at least for me,” Trejo wrote in an Etsy forum one week after her initial post. It now seems critical, she added, for Etsy sellers to “diversify and have other platforms.”
P.S. Starting with the next edition, I’m going to start publishing every other week on a (temporary!) trial basis. It’s candidly *super* hard for me to keep up with the weekly schedule during the summer, and I don’t want this lil project to become a source of stress or consternation. As always, plz hit reply to share any thoughts/questions/feedback.
If you read anything this weekend
“Hocus Focus: How Magicians Made a Fortune on Facebook,” by Ashley Mears in 1843. So I missed this link when it first published in July, but it’s so thoroughly my shit that I’m still sharing it late: A sociologist embeds with a team of people who make illusion videos, then reports back on the tricks/hazards of the trade.
“A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?,” by Cade Metz in The New York Times. Even our best/largest language models have less sentience than worms, which is … comforting, I think! But they’re still able to persuade people of their intelligence (among other, more concerning things).
“How Did Two Unknown Latin Music Operators Make $23 Million From YouTube? The IRS Says They Stole It,” by Kristin Robinson in Billboard. This story has it all: a low-budget horror movie, Mexican pop stars, a wildly profitable YouTube scam … and many, many (dense, but intriguing!) details on the little-seen underworld of YouTube rights management.
“Tinder’s Fatphobia Problem,” by Kelsey Miller in The Cut. Society has made some progress toward body positivity and fat acceptance in the past 10 years. But dating apps are as toxic now as they’ve ever been.
“Comparing BeReal to Instagram Is Missing the Point,” by Ryan Broderick in Polygon. Sharing what I think is the smartest and most correct take (!) on BeReal, the newly trendy social app that gives its users a shared daily ritual.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from the last newsletter was on Gen Z and subtitles.
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Postscripts
Amazon + Roomba = worrying. Hulu - NBC = probable death. Viral space chorizo, #CakeYourResearch and the sudden prominence of Dark Brandon. An interview with the founder of GeoCities. The exploitative world of YouTube “automation.” The rise of: livestreamed shopping, cool internet fruit and millennial money content.
The chats that got two women charged with abortion. A truly incredible piece of shit. The worst kind of sponcon. The “millennial pause.” Charting TikTok’s in-app seasons. How your smartphone might actually help your memory. Inside the battle to ID deepfakes. Last/least: I’m actually really enjoying Meta’s (occasionally racist, Trumpy and self-critical) new chat bot, which lets you see how the proverbial sausage is made.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin
Oh man, I love footnotes. Now that I’ve discovered this feature I will likely overuse it. But the amber thing is pretty wild — Etsy did ban the sale of small amber beads in February, three years after the company was sued over teething necklaces. But a lot of other amber items (large beads, yellow things, etc.) got swept up, as well.
Per Etsy, “less than one percent of sellers” went on strike, and the marketplace has 5.3 million active sellers.