As an entrepreneur in the "new media" (blast from the past word) space, I'm extremely curious in the creator middle class and monetization of small audiences.
I have convinced myself that niches and superfans is the way to go. So at Intercut, we are creating hyper-media (film, TV, and games, in parallell) franchises that we hope cater to niche audiences that has scale globally.
With tools that make our franchises fast to produce, we hope we get more swings at bat to test out new ideas, and see if those niches actually respond in a, potentially, scalable way.
The fun thing is you can go really deep. For instance, it's not just a genre like "Action Movies", but you can go down that rabbit hole and find audiences for niches/subgenres.
Globally there might be an engaged audience for "Hong Kong Action Movies" or "Assassins Action Movies".
The much longer response: I was reminded yesterday of a quote I recently heard from Strauss Zelnick: "If the content is valuable enough to consumers, they will generally pay for it. [When it's not] valuable enough to the consumer to be paid for, but valuable enough to be consumed...[t]hat's why we have advertising businesses."
The implication is that if you sell media, there is some optimization point in terms of ad-support vs. transactional/subscription, how to price your product and where to put paywalls, how to develop tiers, etc. But a lot of the current consumption of media is all ad-supported (YT, TT, FB, etc) not because anyone did this analysis, but because they needed to be free to overcome the cold start problem and it is a lot simpler to just sell eyeballs at scale. So, the Mr. Beast superfan "pays" the same as someone who stumbles on his content. There is clearly consumer surplus left on the table.
I think that niches and superfans are a potentially lucrative opportunity, especially if you have a low cost way of discovering them and ways to monetize that fandom...
Other sources on this are the Activate work on superfans and Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, which I'm sure you've read!
Well, I'm going to read it know as its been validated from a highly trusted source! And I'm a bit embarrassed I haven't read it so far.
I must say you have been quite instrumental, without you knowing it, as I founded Intercut. You know, I had this idea more than a year ago that felt like a cool product and I felt I had a feel for what changing market dynamics were at play in streaming and across creative business via genai, strikes, and whatnot. Your posts on medium was all the confirmation bias I needed, especially given your background. Happy I stumbled that way on the webs.
When I founded Signality there was a n=1 moment there as well: the offensive coordinator of Stanford said he wanted to have automated video breakdown via computer vision, and voilá we started building that, which is now part of Endeavor
Doug Shapiro and Ben Thompson, I'm you guys biggest fanboy,
Great insights, as usual.
As an entrepreneur in the "new media" (blast from the past word) space, I'm extremely curious in the creator middle class and monetization of small audiences.
I have convinced myself that niches and superfans is the way to go. So at Intercut, we are creating hyper-media (film, TV, and games, in parallell) franchises that we hope cater to niche audiences that has scale globally.
With tools that make our franchises fast to produce, we hope we get more swings at bat to test out new ideas, and see if those niches actually respond in a, potentially, scalable way.
The fun thing is you can go really deep. For instance, it's not just a genre like "Action Movies", but you can go down that rabbit hole and find audiences for niches/subgenres.
Globally there might be an engaged audience for "Hong Kong Action Movies" or "Assassins Action Movies".
Happy to get your thoughts, Doug.
/michael [at] intercut [dot] ai
Hi Michael and thanks for the comment.
My short response is: I like the premise.
The much longer response: I was reminded yesterday of a quote I recently heard from Strauss Zelnick: "If the content is valuable enough to consumers, they will generally pay for it. [When it's not] valuable enough to the consumer to be paid for, but valuable enough to be consumed...[t]hat's why we have advertising businesses."
The implication is that if you sell media, there is some optimization point in terms of ad-support vs. transactional/subscription, how to price your product and where to put paywalls, how to develop tiers, etc. But a lot of the current consumption of media is all ad-supported (YT, TT, FB, etc) not because anyone did this analysis, but because they needed to be free to overcome the cold start problem and it is a lot simpler to just sell eyeballs at scale. So, the Mr. Beast superfan "pays" the same as someone who stumbles on his content. There is clearly consumer surplus left on the table.
I think that niches and superfans are a potentially lucrative opportunity, especially if you have a low cost way of discovering them and ways to monetize that fandom...
Other sources on this are the Activate work on superfans and Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, which I'm sure you've read!
Well, I'm going to read it know as its been validated from a highly trusted source! And I'm a bit embarrassed I haven't read it so far.
I must say you have been quite instrumental, without you knowing it, as I founded Intercut. You know, I had this idea more than a year ago that felt like a cool product and I felt I had a feel for what changing market dynamics were at play in streaming and across creative business via genai, strikes, and whatnot. Your posts on medium was all the confirmation bias I needed, especially given your background. Happy I stumbled that way on the webs.
When I founded Signality there was a n=1 moment there as well: the offensive coordinator of Stanford said he wanted to have automated video breakdown via computer vision, and voilá we started building that, which is now part of Endeavor
Doug Shapiro and Ben Thompson, I'm you guys biggest fanboy,
Thanks for the detailed reply,
MIchael
one thing I wonder is the super sports app they have been talking about sense yesterday