Chapter 2: An Audience Does Not Make A Community
This is the second chapter of Choose Your Own Adventure: GawkBox Edition: a series of posts following our company, GawkBox, as we navigate our way to building a better platform for content creators. We’re a nimble startup and I look at our bank balance daily and ask myself if we have the funds to make it — this blog follows our journey.
We finished off chapter one laying down a challenge: figure out how to bring users back to the GawkBox platform better than we had in the past while we still have the cash and resources to get there. In this chapter, we talk about how the ‘social media world’ is evolving, the difference between an audience and a community (they are very different!) and what that led our amazing team to build most recently.
I’m going to start this chapter with a quote from Alexis Ohanian, co-founder at Reddit and managing partner at Initialized Capital:
“We’ve reached ‘peak social media’. I think platforms that are built around following individual persons sort of have reached their saturation point. We’re seeing more and more people retreat back to smaller communities or groups, whether it’s a group chat of all your college friends or whether it’s going to communities. We’re going to see more and more social platforms emerge that are built around these communities of interest as opposed to following individuals.”
There is a growing trend being observed with social media — people are recoiling from ‘follower based’ social platforms (Facebook usage down 18–30% YoY, Twitter lost 5M monthly users at the end of 2018) in search of platforms where smaller communities can connect in more meaningful, authentic ways. This has been acknowledged by Mark Zuckerberg himself, who said in his recent blog post that “small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication” and that Facebook is undergoing a strategic shift to focus on tools to “give people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally.”
What Ohanian and Zuckerberg are revealing is that while platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al have built incredibly successful businesses from their general purpose and public approach — there is a movement towards people wanting more authentic connections than these platforms currently provide. People want something more than just being in an audience, people want to be part of a community.
Community vs Audience
Aren’t community and audience one and the same? They are so often used interchangeably but are very different. Their basic characteristics can help us understand why the broader trend away from these platforms is being observed:
An audience:
- is generally built around one person, a small leading group (e.g. a band) or a brand.
- focuses on listening or watching, rather than communicating.
- often does not have a shared identity or common goal.
- does not feel a sense of belonging
On the other hand, a community:
- is all about the collective group, not any one individual.
- develops relationships with each other through constant communication between its members.
- has a shared identity or common goal.
- feels a sense of belonging
The principal difference is that in a community something is driving people to communicate, amongst each other and with the community leader. People are empowered and have the tools at their disposal to contribute ideas or content, and often do things together to support the community. As Seth Godin says in his book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, we (humans) have a survival mechanism that means we need to “contribute to, and take from, a group of like minded people”. Human beings have an innate need to belong (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) — being a member of a community satisfies that need. Just being a member of an audience does not.
Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter — and those where we at GawkBox have worked closest, YouTube and Twitch, have created an extremely effective way to build & engage with audiences on a 1-many basis but don’t necessarily provide the toolsets to create communities from those audiences. On YouTube for example, as a viewer there is no way for me to communicate with, or get to know, other viewers — I am limited to comments which are generally used to communicate with the creator (and oftentimes go unacknowledged).
On Twitch and Mixer, the same problem persists but in a live chat environment. As channels increase in audience size, the chat becomes an ever more ostracizing place to be — it can be toxic and moves at a million miles per minute, sometimes making it impossible to even read.
Across all three platforms, we hide behind usernames or avatars and our profiles are either non-existent or bare. If I want to communicate with another viewer and get to know them, I simply cannot do it on YouTube, Twitch or Mixer themselves.
What’s interesting is that we’ve observed (and heard first hand) that content creators are starting to prioritize building a community rather than just an audience. The rewards are clear. An engaged community member can be worth a lot to a creator — they make communities more vibrant, support other community members and oftentimes offer more financial support.
As creators try and find the tools to create a community environment, they’re spending more and more time on other platforms, exploring different ways to bring people together, away from their core content. It’s a lot to manage — many of the creators we talk to are spending as much time connecting their audience off broadcast as they are broadcasting or producing content. (When most spend up to 40 hours a week on their content alone..that’s a lot of time!) What we actually end up with is an audience fragmented across different platforms, making it even harder to foster a community.
Fitness Blender — YouTube audience to vibrant community
In spite of the challenges we laid out above, that’s not to say it is impossible to turn the audience into a community. Fitness Blender offers us a great example of a YouTube channel that has built a vibrant community away from where they originally built their core audience.
As a husband and wife team, Daniel and Kelli Segars, started their YouTube channel Fitness Blender from a garage just north of Seattle. They started out creating short fitness videos in 2008. As their YouTube audience grew they invested in creating an off platform hub for their community at fitnessblender.com — which now sees in excess of 3M visits per month. While their YouTube channel has continued to grow, they’ve leveraged their hub to provide extra content (workouts and meal plans) and create a place for their vibrant community to share and contribute on their forum. Their strength of community has enabled them to grow it into a multi million dollar per year content business. Ultimately, they built their own tools to create a community from the audience they’d developed on YouTube, but that isn’t something many content creators have the time, or money, to do.
What Fitness Blender does benefit from is an audience that not only shares an interest in fitness content, but also one that has a common goal or purpose — be it to lose weight, look better or get healthier. Having a shared interest alongside a common purpose creates the conditions that enabled them to turn the audience into a vibrant community. Add the right tools in front of them to communicate with each other and voilà — you start to have the building blocks of a community, rather than just an audience.
How can GawkBox help creators build a community?
Given many of the creators we work with at GawkBox are producing gaming content, we’ve been working to try and recreate those very conditions and help creators turn their audience into a community. The opportunity is a huge one — according to SuperData research there were 666M worldwide viewers of gaming content alone in 2017. That has only increased since then.
Knowing that gaming content viewers already enjoy a shared interest in gaming, we set about trying to create the conditions to give the audience a common goal or purpose. Our team designed a way for content creators to bring their audience together in a team and mobilize around a common goal: to play games against other creators’ teams, for bragging rights…and prizes.
We released this to some of our key creators and seen some impressive results — so far, we’ve seen an average of 80% of a creator’s audience play for over 30 minutes per day to help their creator’s team against the competition. Most importantly, it’s created a reason for people to communicate — validating that when audiences come together over a shared interest and common goal, the conditions are there for them to connect more deeply.
Building on these learnings, we cranked to get an update out this week in anticipation of opening things up more widely. Chase on our team managed to get chat integrated directly into our app so we can not only create a common goal for communities, but also a means to communicate, in one unified hub. We submitted the updates to the app stores late last week — once we get approval, we’ll be ready to expand our test group to all creators YouTube, Twitch and Mixer.
In chapter 3, we’ll update on how things are looking with our expanded test group and dive a bit deeper into some of the smart community building tools we’re pushing out next. Stay tuned!
P.S. This week is GDC week so we’re down in San Francisco — if there’s anyone reading this and is at GDC, feel free to give us a shout and we’d be happy to meet!
