Build Audience Like A Media Company (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business team or a new product. Before we get started, I want to share a little update with you all: For the next little while, we are going to be republishing classic episodes of Founder’s Journal. Why? Well one, I think they’re really good, and with so many new listeners over the last few months, it’s very likely you haven’t heard some of these old episodes. And two, I am spending the month of May evolving Founder’s Journal so that we can make the show as good as humanly possible for the next generation of builders and entrepreneurs. With that, I would love your help as I dream up the future of this show. So once you’ve listened to this episode, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me what you’d like to see from me. What ideas do you have for future episodes, what sort of format do you want to see? I would love to hear from you. OK, that is the update. Now time for the episode. In today’s classic episode, originally released on August 13, 2021, I discuss how building an audience can accelerate your career or your business. Let’s hop into it. 

So one of my biggest fears that I always talk to people at the Brew about, with Founder's Journal specifically, is that I spend too much time talking about media. I worry that talking about media is my natural bias because that's the industry that I've grown up in over the last five years, and I'll end up isolating some of my listeners that don't care as much about media as I do.

But then, I'm periodically reminded that I would be doing a huge disservice to my listeners if I didn't talk about media from time to time. With how the world has evolved, we all need to understand how media works, because in some ways, we all work in media, whether we like it or not. Why is that? Well, because today you and I, as individuals, have as much power to build an audience as the employers that we work for.

Think about it this way. Why did NBC CBS, Fox, ESPN and Amazon pay $110 billion for media rights to the NFL for the next 11 years? It's the same exact reason why Peloton instructors like Allie Love, Alex Tucson, and Cody Rigsby have become celebrities in their own right. In both examples, there is a tight grip on massive distribution. And now on the other side of the coin, why is it that newspaper advertising revenue is down 77% in the last 13 years? Money flows where the audience goes, and we live in an age where individuals can build an audience, just like companies can. Which is why one of the most valuable things I can do for my listeners from time to time is to help you understand that to give yourself the best chance of building a business or a career, you need to understand how to build an audience.

Building an Audience 10 Years Ago

But why am I talking about this today, versus 10 years ago? Well, because today, you have an unprecedented number of tools and unprecedented opportunity to get people to listen to what you have to say. That opportunity didn't always exist. If it was 2000, it'd be a totally different story. There'd be no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Quora, or YouTube. There'd be no pipes that we all have access to to have the chance to get in front of billions of people who have smartphones, tablets and laptops. You'd either have to be a cable company that owned set top boxes in millions of homes, a network like CBS or Fox that gets access to the cable companies distribution households, a newspaper company who owns the paper route and the printers that print the paper, or a company that is big enough with a scaled enough product that it is able to get on TV, in newspapers ,or on radio because of their size.

Think about if you were to try and pitch a radio station for yourself to get on air in 2003. No shot. As an individual, there is no way for you to do that. And even as a top 1% celebrity, it was still hard. Celebrities didn't have 24/7 access to their fans, they just had access when they made appearances on late night television or radio. Think about why record labels were historically valuable for musicians. Whether you were Taylor Swift or Kanye West, you took advances in exchange for giving up the rights to your music and between 15-25% of your royalty dollars, because you depended on labels for help, especially help with promotion and distribution through radio, TV, retail stores, because you didn't own the distribution yourself.

Building an Audience Today

But now, things are different. Record labels, TV stations, radio stations, and corporations don't have the leverage they used to. Because as I mentioned, the pipes have been reconfigured to go from closed to open. Before distribution was institution only. And then social media changed everything. Facebook in 2004, Reddit in 2005, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Pinterest in 2009, Quora in 2009, and Instagram in 2010. For the first time ever, everyone had a microphone, not just the companies that could pay for it. And that's because for the first time, businesses had business models that were incentivized to hand out as many microphones to the masses as possible.

More microphones meant more audience, and more audience meant more eyeballs for these companies to make money off of. Individuals shifted from content consumers to content creators, and that content that was created became the new surface area for advertising revenue. Now to make it tangible, we're seeing examples of the power of individuals as media companies every single day, and the opportunities it creates for these individuals. 

Businesses Accelerated by an Audience

You have David Parell, who started by writing essays on the internet about everything from religion to media, that writing led him to amassing a 220,000 person following on Twitter, which led him to building a seven figure writing school. There's Kayla Itsines, who started creating content on Instagram in 2010 as a personal trainer, and now has 13 million followers and sold her company, Sweat, for $400 million. Web Smith created content on Twitter and sent out a newsletter that helped him grow to 72,000 followers on Twitter, which he's parlayed into lucrative consulting gigs and early stage investments. Mr. Beast has been you tubing for 10 years—he has 66 million subscribers and launched a burger brand this year, Mr. Beast Burger, which will do tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Now these are awesome stories, but it's just the tip of the iceberg of people using media to their advantage.

Careers Accelerated by an Audience

And by the way, you don't have to be an entrepreneur to care about building an audience. Sahil Bloom built a 250,000 follower audience on Twitter while working in private equity. This opened up a ton of new opportunities for him, both within his day job and outside of it. Morning Brew's own Toby Howell parlayed creating content on Twitter, which, at the time, he had a couple hundred followers, and he would engage constantly with the Morning Brew handle until he actually ended up turning that into a job at the company. 

TL;DR

Whether you're building a billion dollar company, creating a personal brand, or just trying to create options in your career, understanding the seismic shift that has happened in media so that you can use it to your advantage is wildly important.

I Want to Hear from You

So now I want to put it to you. Have you started creating content on any of the social platforms that you frequent? If so, what are you creating content around? If not, what's keeping you from starting to create content and build an audience? Send me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with your thoughts. Would love to hear how you think about it.

Credits

Founder's Journal is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Alan Haburchak is our executive producer, and I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. Thanks so much for listening to Founder's Journal. As always, if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.