The Container Problem
Why audiences don't move, no matter how nicely you ask
Billie Eilish has a very engaged 125 million followers on Instagram. Her book, which cost the publisher $1M bucks, sold 64,000 copies. That’s a conversion rate of 0.05%, which means only 1 in roughly every 2,000 followers purchased a book. To be clear, that’s worse than most click-through rates for spam emails about refinancing your student loans.
Piers Morgan has nearly 9 million followers on Twitter, 3 million on Instagram, and over 4 million YouTube subscribers with viewership that spans beyond a billion. His book sold 5,650 copies. This is not a typo, I didn’t forget a zero or two.
A Bachelorette contestant with 1.2 million followers showed up to her book signing and sold 10 copies. That’s two parents and a busy group chat.
You see where this is going?
The Kardashian-Jenner family has a combined 500 million followers across their accounts. If KIMK was a stock, it would probably uplift the S&P regularly. Her book of selfies however, sold fewer than 40,000 copies. Which means, statistically, more people probably accidentally liked a photo of her foot than consciously bought a book of her face.
The New York Times’ The Daily is one of the most successful daily podcasts and gets 2 million downloads per episode. On YouTube, with a static image, the same episode gets under 20,000 views.
These numbers shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it continues to shock the media industry every single time it happens, like a dog encountering its reflection.
News flash: Audiences don’t actually follow people. They follow people doing a specific thing, in a specific place, in a specific format, at a specific length. Change any one of these and you might as well make the company accountant the emcee of the talent show. No offense to accountants, but it would be weird. Change two and say adios to that relationship. Change three, and it’s “Harpo, who dis woman?”
Institutions assume the audience is liquid and followers are just some kind of content soup you can ladle from Instagram into a podcast, then strain through an app, then decant into a live-tour, and et voila, 10 million follower strong media empire.
If it sounds appetizing it’s because it sounds like the instructions for 5-minute grits. People love grits.
The audience, though, isn’t instant grits. The audience is ice. It’s frozen in the exact shape of the container it formed in. The audience doesn’t flow downhill toward strategy and they do not appreciate being treated like relocatable inventory.
I used to watch my grandmother watch the same local news channel every Sunday night. She trusted this woman and noticed even the smallest of changes in her hair cut or color, or style of dress. She had never met Andrea Roane in her life, never verified her journalism credentials, but trusted her, and paid so close attention, she noticed even the smallest of changes in her hair cut or color. And all Andrea had to do was show up. Every Sunday. Year after year.
That’s all a parasocial relationship really is; someone who shows up for you in a particular way.
My grandmother might not have followed that anchor to a podcast, or subscribed to her newsletter. She might have attended a brunch where she was speaking, but the trust was in that living room, at that hour, in that specific frame.
Most cross-platform conversion fails because of how little respect companies have when it comes to the intricacies of this relationship. Every format is a different relationship and every platform is a different contract. The moment you do something different, some place different, the deal ends. You’re lucky if they tell you why. Most people will just unsubscribe or unfollow and you’re left with the sound of silence where your CPM used to be.
If you’ve read all this and are saying to yourself, “harummph, what about Oprah and her book club?” For starters, your age is showing (no shade, I’m in that club with you). Second, that might as well have been the Bronze Age in internet years. Third, media was vertically integrated and the containers were extremely different. When Barbara Walters or Tom Brokaw appeared somewhere or wrote a book or launched a special or went on tour, they weren’t asking people to follow them somewhere else, they were offering the audience a deeper version of the thing the audience already trusted. Fourth, audiences were captive in a way they aren’t any more. There were what, five channels and one local paper back then? Facebook was for families and Twitter for Arab Spring updates. Weren’t those the days.
Welcome to the chaos economy, my friend, have you met? Every platform is practically its own country with its own language and its own customs. If you ever learned Klingon, you’d have some appreciation for the rabbithole of universes and the audiences they serve. Instagram followers aren’t YouTube subscribers aren’t podcast listeners aren’t newsletter readers.
So if you’re a journalist trying to figure out how to swim in independent creator waters, what no one’s going to tell you directly because it sounds discouraging, is that, your byline might get you the first thousand subscribers. Your existing audience is a warm lead at best because reputation transfers like credit card points, with ten times the dilution. Don’t tell yourself your followers will come with you because you’ll just be haunted by this little thing called open rates. Your next thousand followers, and ten thousand if you’re committed, comes from good old fashioned, day in and day out work. Learn the new container, respect the audience, and figure out what they want and in what format.
If you’re an institution, the move that actually works, and the move almost no one wants to make because it feels like surrender, is actually the simplest: go where the trust already is. Not where you wished it lived. Not where the org chart says it ought to live. Where it actually is. Bring money, bring access, bring research, bring the kinds of help institutions are uniquely positioned to provide. And then, this is the hard part, resist the urge to mark the work as yours. Resist the logo. Resist the branding. Resist the quiet belief that if you’re paying, you must therefore be seen. Let the work live where the audience already lives, because that is, actually what it means to ‘meet the audience where they are.’
My grandmother never “followed” Andrea Roane anchor anywhere. She didn’t need to. Andrea showed up every Sunday night, same time, same chair, same voice, same great haircut. That was the entire relationship. The loyalty was real. It just wasn’t portable.
Neither is yours.