Nathan Barry on whether or not you actually have an audience, after all:
There’s a public narrative that you’ll hear where people are talking about how maybe it’s hard to earn a living as a creator or the creator economy has no middle class.
Right? People are just getting started making no money, or at the extreme, people are making incredible amounts of money and there’s no in-between.
And so, from our position of having the amount of data that we have and watching it, we’re like,
‘Actually, there’s a thriving middle class in the creator economy, and it’s actually people who take a different approach.’
So what we see is that those who are building — I guess I’d call it a crowd rather than an audience — who are trying to get anyone to pay attention, right? You’re chasing views on Instagram or TikTok.
Maybe you’re just providing entertainment without substance. That– people might get to hundreds of thousands of followers and not have a meaningful business of any kind.
But then there are those who are building an audience. And the way that we think about an audience is an audience is just the right people paying attention.
So an audience could be 10 people or 100 people. It’s usually a much more specific niche. It’s usually that I, as the creator, am providing value to that audience.
And so realizing, I guess, that distinction of an audience versus a crowd, and now I see everything through that lens. And I realize when someone’s talking about,
‘Oh man, I built this audience to this level, and the comments are kind of nasty, and I can’t earn a living off of it, and, you know, I feel like it’s just views without substance,’
…and I’m like,
‘Oh, you don’t have an audience. You have a crowd.’
And then you get these other people who are saying,
‘I can’t believe it. I have 500 people on a newsletter for this niche topic that I thought no one else cared about, and I opened up and said, ‘Hey, I’ll take on coaching clients to help you with this,’ and I had 25 people sign up, and it’s way more than I can handle. And the conversion rate is ridiculous. I thought it should be 2%, and, like, it’s 10%. What is even happening? This doesn’t make sense.’
It’s like,
‘Well, you built an audience. You have the right people paying attention.’
And when you view things through that lens, like, that’s something I just realized in probably the last year, and it makes the whole creator economy make sense to me.
— end of vid clip: @ minute 7:36
I like Nathan’s distinction (audience vs. crowd) enough to wish I’d thought of it first.
However, I’d push back a touch on the suggestion that substantive material might be required to assemble an audience (vs. a crowd).
You can absolutely entertain your way into the hearts of a raving group of people who qualify unquestionably as an audience.
The bar on how talented you have to be to pull that off, however, is fairly high. If you’re that level of entertainer, great. If you’re not, then, yah, you’d better optimize for substance, instead.
— Tang
Nathan Barry’s owned platforms include: Kit and NathanBarry.com.
Tiago Forte’s owned platforms include: Building a Second Brain and Forte Labs.
