Hey! I’m in Orlando today hanging out with all of the great Moody Radio morning show hosts and their related teams. But here are some links I’ve come across recently that I wanted to pass along.
Have a great Thursday!
1) When YouTubers Ask for Money
Colin and Samir cover the creator economy and regularly do a wonderful job explaining trends within it. They cover the Watcher situation (which I wrote about last week) with their usual effectiveness here. They talk about how video ad rates have been changing significantly, and how creators need to adapt. Super interesting.
2) The Most Impressive VR-Adjacent Accessory I’ve Seen
I am very, very much a VR skeptic. I definitely think that at some point, probably in my lifetime, we’ll all have VR headsets as commonly as we have laptop computers. However, I don’t think that’s within the next decade so much as the next few decades.
All of that said, when I first saw the Disney Holotile demo’d a number of months ago, I was super impressed. Here, we have Marques Brownlee demonstrating this VR floor(?) experience at Imagineering HQ. Very cool.
3) Another YouTube Couch Apology
Great article exploring the WatcherTV situation and what is going on with subscription-based media today. Ryan is insightful as usual.
A subscription-based business requires an active fandom. And an ad-supported business requires a much bigger, and thus, usually more passive fandom. Due to the mechanics of the scale required to make money from digital advertising, you have to go broad. MrBeast would be the best example of what this looks like. And Watcher isn’t the first media company to think their more passive, parasocial fandom could be flipped into an active one. The most disastrous version of this was CNN+, which similarly attempted to leverage people you kinda know and like from your various screens to launch a Netflix-like streaming service. It ended up with less than 10,000 users in its first couple weeks.