Democratizing distribution
Reach is a right, not a commodity.
1. The celebrity culture
Since the inception of the press in the fifteenth century, the primary goal of mass media has been to reach the masses - either with information, or through content. By virtue of finite real estate - earlier in print media, and eventually in electronic media, competition set in, giving way to the idea of ‘celebrities’.
While there were people who may be popular within cities, featuring in mass media became the singular way to be publicly recognized across geographies. The restricted amount of content, and limited attention span thus gave way to celebrity culture - raking in big money and consequently, finer talent.
To date, media and content is primarily viewed as a distribution channel; and money and clout follows those who can grab the audience's attention.
2. Follow for following
Over time, publishers and production houses became gatekeepers, and social media resulted in a revolution of User Generated Content allowing everyone to create and publish freely without entry barriers. However, these platforms eventually have become gatekeepers themselves owing to their biased recommendation/feed algorithms optimizing for platform’s ad revenues.
In the process, the ‘successful’ creators today are mostly the ones who play along by creating frequently and following ‘best practices’ applicable to each social network. Consistency has reduced the frequency of creation, and is not necessarily dependent on the content or audience’s demand for it. Algorithms influence discovery or distribution to the extent that it almost depends solely on abiding by them. Essentially, one can gain substantial following today by following the ‘best practices’ of the platforms.
For instance, you may have not posted for a few months to work on your next piece of music. Maybe you’ve created the next Grammy winning music and uploaded a music video on YouTube. But the video might not reach a large enough audience because the algorithm doesn’t know for sure if your content is favorable for the platform.
On the other hand, certain content that the audience may not like as much would still hit eyeballs simply because the creator might be creating regularly.
3. Volatility of virality
Basically virality is constrained by platforms’ algorithms - which is far from democracy. The algorithms take into account the responses of initial viewers, but fail to understand that the initial viewers may have been the wrong target audience.
Imagine how a standing ovation works. A threshold number of the audience needs to stand up and clap and then the rest would stand up, almost forming a Mexican wave. Word of mouth hits a peak when a topic becomes part of the dinner table conversation.
Therefore, whether a piece of content becomes viral or not depends on who the first few audiences are. If they respond positively and share it with people who they think would like it, the trend continues and the content hits a virality loop.
Everyone has a certain following for whatever their content might be, just that their audience might not have discovered their content yet. Platforms are designed this way.
4. Democratizing digital distribution
The goal of democratic distribution should thus be to allow a piece of content to reach everyone who’d regret not coming across the content earlier.
Good things take time, and shouldn’t be penalized for. Frequency is thus the enemy of creativity. Our content feeds are loaded with seemingly ‘garbage’ content primarily because creators force themselves to create frequently to abide by the algorithms.
If a platform promised democratic reach even if one doesn’t post frequently, people would post ‘valuable’ content, or at least be thoughtful of what they’re creating and why. Imagine performance marketing became free of cost. Then all marketing efforts would carefully consider the consequences of their marketing on their brand ‘image’ without recklessly chasing the top of the funnel. Further, if everyone is guaranteed to reach their potential audience base, the number of followers wouldn’t matter as much.
The ‘value’ perceived by the followers, their propensity and willingness to pay, and the influence of the creator would become critical distinguishing factors. In marketing terms, driving the top of the funnel wouldn’t be a concern anymore - for both brands and creators. The competition would drift towards who can drive the bottom of the funnel.
To explain with an analogy, a few decades ago, the brightest students were those who could memorize and retain most knowledge, or had the best degrees. The definition has changed since information has become a commodity with the progress in the world of technology, computing and artificial intelligence. The students considered brightest today might be those who can leverage their knowledge, and apply their understanding and logic to exploit systems for survival, commercial or collective advantage.
Similarly, a large follower base and grabbing audience’s attention wouldn’t suffice. The success of a creator would depend on how effectively they can retain the audience’s attention and influence their thoughts and actions. From a monetization perspective, a creator’s success also depends on the propensity of their audience, and the fraction of their audience that is willing to pay for content/fan experiences.
5. Attention is abundant
Globally, the daily average screen time per user stands at ~7 hrs out of which 3 hrs 20 min is spent watching TV or streaming (primarily long form content) and 2 hrs 27 min is spent on social media (primarily short form content).
Further, globally, the average time spent on a smartphone per user is 3 hrs 43 mins. Indians spend on average ~4 hrs 45 mins on their phone. Reports [1, 2, 3, 4] suggest that on average, an individual checks their phone at least once in every fifteen minutes.
Taking the global average of 3 hrs 43 mins, an individual spends ~3.5 out of every 15 minutes on their phone. In India, this is roughly 4.5 out of every 15 minutes. At the current rate of growth of screen time, we’d soon be spending an average of 5 out of every 15 minutes on our smartphones.
Effectively, people spend and will continue to spend at least 3.5 hours everyday consuming content. This may be split as 1.5 hrs of long and 2 hrs of short form content daily. More realistically, ignoring the daily split up, this translates to 45 hrs of long and 60 hrs short form content monthly. It is also important to note that certain forms of content, such as music or podcasts require only passive participation.
6. Math behind the millions
According to our estimates, it is realistic for millions of creators to garner millions of views; some formats being more conducive than the rest. More importantly, the numbers demonstrate how creators do not have to fall prey to the trap of incumbent platforms to create with ridiculous frequency to remain relevant.
Creators deliver their best when they have the freedom to create at their pace. When creators create exceptional content, although at slower paces, their monetization potential grows exponentially - in terms of monetizing their audience, creating larger content projects with massive budgets and attracting bigger brand deals.
Further, every successful creator - success defined in terms of money which largely depends on the size of their audience and their propensity - would employ on average, at least five people. These could include video editors, script writers, DoP/videographers, social media managers, artists managers for their financial/collaboration matters, or more artists that might feature in the content itself.
Accordingly, given that there could be at least 275M unique creators that can frequently garner over 10k views, at least 1B people can make a living out of following their passion - by creating digital content and businesses backed by communities.