I’ve been dabbling in different social media platforms the past year with the intention of becoming fully able to support myself with my creative work. Obviously I love this community and would spend all my online time here if I could but as I’ve stated many times before, spending some time on other platforms can potentially both help me reach a wider audience and allow me to introduce Hive to more people.
But wait a minute?
A wider audience? What’s the point of a wider audience? How wide are we talking about here? How many people should you have to reach in order to support your living? How much of an impact is enough value that you should be able to support yourself?
Well for YouTube, that might be around 20-25k to just barely get by somewhere cheap, and maybe twice that in a city. At tiktok it could be 200k or more. Twitter Instagram and Facebook would require you to sell something or advertise things on your channel even with millions of followers.
So according to these business models, you need a whole lot of eyes on your to earn a living. A whole lot! And you need to sell them shit. That means you really gotta please the algorithms, because that level of organic reach is nearly impossible without some kind of great big push from somewhere.
Basically most people rely on algorithms to reach any level of success in traditional platforms but since I already have hive and I’m working on multiple platforms, I would Only need about 10k on YouTube to supplement my current income.
Nice thumbnails and titles, decent content, should be ok right?
Well no. The algorithms are fickle and inconsistent and pick on you for having diverse interests. They require strategy around posting schedule, interaction and a lot of SEO,
What was the point of doing this instead of an office job again? Wasn’t it freedom and the ability to express myself and share things I think are meaningful? Why would I put all my energy into making creativity feel like an office job?
All for a bunch of followers who have never interacted with me beyond a comment? People who will forget me as soon as I take a break for a month because they only watch what the algorithms recommend it to them?
No thank you!
Most people put up with this because they think that’s all there is.
20k followers = $200 a month or less is par for the course, and 20k follows, that’s an impressive amount of people watching you already.
Why shouldn’t that be able to sustain you?
Soon it will. I’m certain of it. In fact even a fraction of that may be able to. Soon the social media giants are going to be fighting over us, throwing money at us left and right. They’ll have to because whichever ones offer the most money and the lowest barrier of entry for monetization will attract all the talent. Meanwhile while most people are still unaware of Hive and all it has to offer, the token valuation will only increase as more of a marketplace grows around it, as we are already starting to see in Ghana and Cuba.
More eyeballs is the way of the past. It’s past of that old scarcity mindset of “more is better” where you need to trick people into paying attention and pay money to compete with others for relevancy.
As we move into an era of greater authenticity, real meaning and connection will become more valuable. As AI starts to make it harder to tell what’s real, there will be more desire for something to touch and feel, and to connect as equals rather than to be just a number in someone’s massive collection of followers.
I’m already opting for quality over quantity and I think that is how success will be measured in the future. For those of us aiming to earn a living from our creative work, 20 views on blog might feel irrelevant. After all, we have been trained to think 20k followers is barely successful. But what if the 20 people who read your blog remember it all day long. What if they learned something from you that changed their perspective? What if you changed the entire course of their day or the course of their life?
So rather than counting the number of people who watch, I’m trying to offer whatever kind of profundity I can. Even if I can just muster a tiny bit. And then I’m going to rest each viewer or listener as an equal instead of a fan. If there’s a potential for friendship or mentorship or even just friendly interactions, I want to focus on THAT instead of just increasing numbers.
So if I had to choose between a million fair-whether followers or 100 followers to whom I actually matter…I’ll take the latter in a heartbeat.
In the future, attention will be decentralized to the point where the largest “influencers” will only be a fraction of the size they are now and the money will spread to those who have quality interactions rather than just a massive quantity of eyeballs.
Hive is just a glimpse into that future. Any old social media giants that want to survive are going to have to change things because if the barrier of entry is lower elsewhere (like it is here), people are going to leave their platforms, and a further monetization of content is already inevitable.
So don’t feel bad if your audience is less than 100 people. You are making a huge difference in the world because the 100 people you reach will reach another 2000 and those 2000 will reach 40,000 and those 40,000 will reach 800,000. Your ideas will spread and the mechanics are emerging to reward you for that.
You may never get to 1 million or 100,000 but if you have 1000 people who deeply appreciate what you do, there are ways to monetize that without compromising your vision. There is no need to cater to them if the things you want to share are valuable. All you need to do is make meaningful relationships with the people who you matter to.
So while I’m not going to close my instagram or twitter accounts just yet, I’m not too worried about whether or not they provide me with a massive audience. For me they are merely business cards for friends who don’t know about hive yet. I probably won’t benefit from the algorithms as much as someone who turns it into WORK, but who knows. Maybe I manage to find a single person who shares me with their audience of a million. Maybe I build a whole network of friends who I was able to reach one by one thanks to being on all thee different platforms (and merely putting 5 minutes a week into each of them…uhhh copy paste).
A handful here and a handful there, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the quality of the connection that matters.
If you’ve been at hive for a while you know that true human relationships are even more important than the quality of content you create. Sometimes our content is merely a way for people to looser deeper into the nice people they come across, or a means of finding us in a sea of information.
They say that it’s most natural for us to have circles of under 100 people, so I think that instead of seeking eyeballs, if you seek those 100 people who really deeply appreciate what you are contributing, things will work out. They’ll do the rest of the work for you. People who will stay with you and seek you out on other platforms, people who you can enjoy a true friendship with rather than just looking at them as a fan.
We often imagine our friends and our fans as separate people but if we push towards more vulnerability and do what we do for the love of it, eventually these two will overlap. Your future friends will be the ones who supported you in the beginning and helped you reach more people, or gave you the encouragement to keep going, a reciprocal relationship instead of just a one way street.
You may only reach a few thousand people in the end but you’ll be able to form a strong network that is far more sustainable than a million fickle fans who click on you for a dopamine kick.
And why not some AI generated vegetable friends for a pic?
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