Keep your audience small

1. Viewers are imperfect and have too many cognitive biases

Viewers rarely consume a piece of content in isolation. They compress the creator’s past reputation and interpret the content in that context. This creates a divide between the creator's intention and what the viewer perceives.

This is why we see large creators start to post Straussian, generic, and indirect content. Large creators use generic content to empower the viewer to interpret it through whatever assumptions they have in their context window. They rely more on the viewer's past assumptions than the content itself. Early creators can't afford to dilute their content since their audience does not know who they are yet.

Great early content attracts an audience -> reputation is built-> creator can delegate interpretation of new content to the viewer’s past assumptions -> creator can post vague content for a broad audience

Early creators lean on the content to speak for itself. Large creators offload effort to the viewers' cognitive biases.

Possible Impact: Medium

2. Current arrangement of platforms limits capturing economic value, funneling top talent to other industries

It is very hard to have a monopoly as a content creator. Vertical integration is hard since incumbent platforms have network effects and economies of scale (storage, streaming, distribution). Horizontal expansion is hard because each platform requires a different medium of content and has a different viewer base (tiktok/reels, youtube, twitch, netflix, twitter, substack).

Top talent realizes they cannot have a monopoly and can only capture a small percent of economic value they create. This talent is funneled into other domains, ones where there is more financial and/or social capital. We are left with subpar talent who don't have the skill set and rationality to truly innovate the content system.

Possible Impact: Low

3. Content markets are not efficient. They maximize advertiser dollar over viewer satisfaction

In theory, content markets are efficient. You have a viewer (buyer), a creator (seller), and a platform (exchange). The job of the platform is to provide quality microstructure (cloud storage, creator rev, distribution, etc.) and liquidity (algorithm) to match the viewer and creator. The incentives of the viewer, creator, and exchange are aligned.

However, one could argue the opposite. Let’s add advertisements into this system. Now, the algorithm has 2 jobs: matching viewer <> content and content <> ads.

The platforms claim to maximize long term value by balancing short term advertising profit with long viewer retention. This makes sense on paper, but in reality, these companies have quarterly earnings and the decision makers have short term revenue numbers. Ad revenue is a concrete number on your performance packet while longer term viewer satisfaction is an abstract concept.

If platforms are truly maximizing ad rev, then large creators will optimize their content for clicks and purchases rather than long term viewer satisfaction. Early creators avoid this since small accounts are usually not eligible for ads.

Possible Impact: Very Small. I believe that content markets are very efficient, even with ads.

4. Creator risk profile changes with size

Every video from a beginning creator has an uncapped upside and limited downside. You can't get a negative number of views. This incentivizes new creators to take risks with their content.

Large creators have an average view count as their baseline. A risky video has real relative downside. This causes them to post repetitive and boring videos until they retire.

Possible Impact: Medium

5. Platforms have lossy feedback loops

Creators do not have a good way to get feedback from their audience. The creator dashboard condenses the audience into a metric and displays it on a noisy dashboard. Large creators cannot get any signal from their dashboard. Also, an established audience will watch your trash videos, further blurring quality feedback.

MrBeast realized this gap exists and created an analytics app.

Possible Impact: Medium

6. There are embedded costs to being a creator

Doxxing, stalking, and privacy concerns are the tip of the iceberg. There are many hidden costs that are not visible to non creators.

Impact: Small. Depends on the creator and how parasocial your content is

7. Content does not change post or pre audience fit. I am just blinded by nostalgia

Impact: Small

Pilot

This is my first blog post. I plan on posting regularly on various platforms. Maybe one day a future audience member will wonder why my content fell off and come back to this post.

Thanks for reading.