YOUR JOB IS NOT TO FIND AN AUDIENCE FOR YOUR CONTENT. YOUR JOB IS TO FIND AN AUDIENCE TOMAKE CONTENT FOR
Supply and demand is the most basic economic principle. To say there’s a glut of content would be an understatement. It’s not a glut; it’s an ocean – it’s multiple oceans. On multiple planets. Trying to understand the amount of video out there is like comprehending how much money Jeff Bezos is worth. You can’t grasp those numbers. You think you can. But you can’t. Given the billions of hours of video out there, what is your content worth? YOUR CONTENT IS WORTHLESS It requires very little effort to create and distribute digital content. Getting your message out there isn’t just easy, it’s almost automatic. What this boils down to is the fact that moving-image content itself is no longer valuable. It’s no longer a spectacle, projected on a sheet in the town hall or a long-awaited treat available only at set times on a handful of TV networks. Moving images are our common language. They’re the way we exchange ideas, stories and events. As such, their value is on a par with the words we speak on a daily basis. You may have had some good conversations recently, but are you expecting someone to pay to hear them? Your content is virtually worthless. No one needs it. No one wants it. In fact, our lives are already being crushed beneath the weight of our watch lists. Don’t make the burden any heavier. Perhaps it’s best to just get that real-estate license: real estate is finite – unlike server space.
But if, like some of us, you’re obsessed with the moving image, storytelling and providing people with enriching experiences, well... you should probably go see a good therapist. If that doesn’t work, you’re stuck with it and had better read on. AUDIENCE OF BILLIONS There are 7.2 billion people on Earth. Nielsen’s 2020 report on US audiences estimated that Americans engage with media for almost 12 hours per day. That’s probably a bit more than the global average. But let’s say the average person globally takes eight hours a day to sleep and eight hours a day to work. That leaves eight hours a day they could be engaging with content, which totals 57.6 billion personal hours left over, spent consuming content. That’s about 6.5 million years. We have the global potential to be watching 6.5 million hours of content a day. That’s roughly 2.37 billion hours of potential watching, listening and engaging per year. So, while there’s plenty of content, there are also a lot of people with audience-hours to spend. Before you get your hopes up – we’ll get to the ‘hopes up’ bit in a second – most of those audience hours are already spent. There are multi-billionaires out there, deploying ever-more sophisticated AIs, whose sole function is to get viewers to stick
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