Since a platform is in control of what content gets served to who and when, there’s no expectation that a creator’s social network is guaranteed to see their content. Therefore, platforms can also choose what not to program, and there’s little creators can do or say to counteract this. Long gone are the days where a creator can complain about being... See more
Talent will increasingly own their audience, with the rise of “channels of one” and community-as-a-service... Equivalents to Substack (where you build and monetize your own email list) will emerge in video, communities, branded products (like Borgo, still pre-launch) and other ways to build, manage, and monetize your audience. Some early breakouts... See more
Leaving the attention economy doesn’t mean vanishing. It means choosing to matter to fewer people, more deeply. It means owning the means of distribution. It means publishing like a human being instead of a content mill. It means you stop playing to the house odds and start building your own game.
find an offline way to engage with your community through events, conferences, local meetups, and other non-social media engagements because--despite how connected we are--word of mouth/personal referral is still the best way to get clients in any service industry.
The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk. Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they... See more
On one hand, we have a booming Creator Economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 surveyed Americans by Zine, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.
Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found... See more
Social media has also proven to simply not be that efficient in terms of matching high quality content with a relevant audience. Just because people can easily distribute content to their friends or friends of friends doesn’t mean that that content will be interesting or relevant to the consumer. This is why, over time, social networks have started... See more
According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. “There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,” Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok,... See more