The Eyeball Game Is Over

For the last decade, the creator economy has mostly been an eyeball game. Get more views, grow your follower count, reach more people, and then figure out how to turn all that attention into money.

For a lot of creators, that means advertising. You make a video, thousands of people watch it, the platform runs some ads, and you get a small piece of the revenue. Or, if your audience gets big enough, a brand might pay you to talk about their olive oil or cookware for 45 seconds.

There's nothing wrong with that. But it's a strange way to build a business around an audience that genuinely likes what you do.

A cooking creator might have 50,000 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of monthly views, but know almost nothing about the people watching. You don't have their email addresses. You can't easily reach them without publishing another video. And even then, you're relying on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok to decide who sees it.

We think that's starting to change.

Instead of trying to get another 100,000 people to watch something for a few minutes, what if 100 of your biggest fans paid $10 a month to be part of your community? That's $1,000 a month from a group small enough that you can actually get to know them.

And the $10 subscription is only part of what makes that interesting. These are the people who want the extra recipe, who will show up for a live cooking class, buy the cookbook, answer when you ask what you should make next, or spend an evening cooking along with you.

That's a very different relationship from a view.

We don't think public social media is going away. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are incredibly good at helping people discover creators, and that's probably what they should be used for.

But we think the more interesting part of social media is going private. Smaller communities built around people with a real shared interest, where creators actually know their members and members aren't just another number in a view counter.

For a food creator, we'd rather have 100 people who really care than another 100,000 anonymous views.

The eyeball game had a great run. We think the next game is about relationships.