Creator Economy
What Machinima, BuzzFeed, and the Try Guys reveal about creator ecosystems.
Audiences follow people, not logos. The pattern across every major creator ecosystem collapse, and what it means for anyone building a content brand.
There is a pattern. It runs through Machinima, through BuzzFeed, through the Vlog Squad, through Rooster Teeth, through the Try Guys. Different genres, different eras, different failure modes on the surface. The same structural problem underneath.
The problem is this: media organisations keep trying to build audience loyalty to a brand, when the audience's loyalty was always to the people inside it.
When Machinima signed its creators to restrictive contracts, the creators left, and the audience followed them, not the channel. When the Try Guys separated from BuzzFeed, viewership followed them to their independent channel, not back to BuzzFeed. When Rooster Teeth's key talent departed, the audience that had grown up with that talent had no particular reason to stay.
This is not a recent phenomenon and it is not a social media phenomenon. It is a fundamental property of how parasocial relationships work. Audiences form attachments to people. They tolerate platforms. They do not love logos.
The full essay is in progress. For the structural argument from the inside of one of these organisations, read What WatchMojo taught me about systems that don't scale emotionally.
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