Audience or algorithm, which do you serve?
Social media algorithms can leave you gambling your attention, money, and time – distracting you from what actually matters.
…every labor-saving device is a new and larger form of work in disguise.
–Marshall and Eric McLuhan, from Laws of Media: The New Science
Back in 2008, editor and author Kevin Kelly suggested that successful creators didn’t need to chase millions of followers or millions of dollars. Rather, they could earn a decent living by cultivating 1,000 true fans – passionate super-fans who would buy whatever they make. His math was that $100 profit a year from 1,000 true fans would gross $100,000. And that’s enough to “make a living but not a fortune.” Kelly wrote:
I think there is something important and liberating in seeking a finite attainable number of passionate fans rather than hoping for a rare best-selling career backed by millions of folks who have just heard about you.
Kelly received lots of pushback on the reality and potential of this idea. But the essential choice for an artist or arts organization rang true – do you bet on a high-risk, high-stakes, high-volume strategy to share your work, or do you invest in a slow-growth community of loving and loyal super-fans?
Sixteen years later, that choice between chasing views and building community is even more confounding. Social media platforms have evolved from an early emphasis on followers to a relationship-consuming race to maximize watchtime.
As Patreon founder Jack Conte details in his recent SXSW keynote, the 2000s brought new opportunities for extending reach and building followers; the 2010s disrupted those communities with ranking and filtering algorithms; and the 2020s broke the connection altogether with the blazing success of TikTok and its “for you” code-generated feed.
As a result, says Conte, many creative entrepreneurs shifted focus from engaging and building followers to serving the whims of the algorithm. He says:
Instead of thinking: “What do I want to make what lights me up?”… Now in the back of my mind I’m thinking “What will the ranking algorithm favor?”
In response, Conte urges a return to finding, fostering, and feeding true fans, through channels that support rather than sabotage that work. He calls on creative entrepreneurs to:
Invest in your true fans - delivered through direct-to-fan platforms or channels you control
Make beautiful things - inspired by creative drive and community spark, rather than incentivized by algorithms
Know what you want - anchored by your own definition of success, not someone else’s
Even if (or especially if) you’re offering place-based and in-person artistic expression or experience, the tides have turned on social media and it’s time to chart a different course. It’s certainly appropriate to meet potential audiences where they are – through focused and strategic social media. But invest the bulk of your energy on cultivating deep connections and true fans in ways that serve the arts experience, not the casino.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Marketing
Marketing involves creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.
Framework of the Week: Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas encourages you and your team to explore and understand a set of customers, audience members, or constituents from their perspective: What jobs are they trying to do? What pains do they encounter in that effort? And what gains do they experience when they succeed?
Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash
Sources
Conte, Jack. “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web.” SXSW 2024. Austin, TX, 2024.
Kelly, Kevin. “1,000 True Fans.” Blog. The Technium. Accessed November 13, 2012.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Nice outlining of the problem, Andrew. At the heart of the issue is the competition for attention and the impossibility of sorting through it all. Choice fatigue is an affliction that exhausts us all. The average American spends 4.5 hours a day on their phones (teenagers about 8.5 hours) in front of an endless scroll of distraction from which it's difficult to break out. Curational algorithms have both addicted us to the screen equivalent of junk food and dulled our initiative to fight through the clutter to find nutrition.
In the process it's loosened the relationships between artists and their audiences. When the endless scroll eliminates friction of finding things to be distracted by, you swipe up the moment you're even slightly bored. You're not choosing things to watch or listen to, you're banishing the dancing monkey as soon as the antics grow tiresome. In such an environment, it gets more and more difficult for creators to break through if you don't speak to the algorithm, no matter how good what you do is. And the problem is getting exponentially worse with floods of new synthetic AI content flooding all the platforms, all of which are optimizing to the algorithms which are then optimized on the AI-Synths in some sort of doom loop.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Conte in being clear about motivations and expectations, and Patreon is a terrific idea and platform and model, getting your voice/content discovered is seriously broken right now as social media platforms (including even TikTok) are collapsing on themselves, overrun by bots, ads and fakes. And we're starting to see new attempts to make content discoverable -- like Substack and others.
Part of what led to the problem is the near monopolies of the giant platforms, which for many people is now what they think the internet is. Thankfully Lina Khan at the FTC is making some beginning moves to try to loosen their grip. But I also have some hope that AI - which is/will blow up the problem with the astonishing overwhelming quantity of stuff it can create (Spotify is currently taking down about 100K AI-Gen tracks every day), will also offer some interesting solutions to solve the sorting/distraction problems. Already seeing some cool stabs at that.
Anyway, thanks for the post -- it helps define the binary.
(BTW -I always loved the 1000 True Fans idea. Maybe it seems quaint now (though SubStack is clearly its spiritual progeny), but it speaks to that time-tested notion of fans who love an artist or organization choosing to invest in them).