The network effect enhances the core value of a service to the customer by getting their peers to join. It means the thing you’re creating has a built-in crucial component that depends on a growing or large network to make it awesome.
If I tell my friend to watch this show, we can talk about this show and I’ll enjoy it more
If I take a friend to this theater, I’ll have more fun
If my friend plays this multiplayer game with me, it will be more enjoyable
If my friend attends this zoom, we can battle in the comments
Giving a gift or a discount is not the network effect, it’s a referral program incentive and it’s kinda expensive for you (managing the referrals, time and shipping and stuff). A gift like “tell a friend, get a free watch” does not enhance the core value of the service you’re offering.
Some different ways to get a customer to share what you’re doing… natural network effect (best) facebook : “you joined to connect with friends. tell your friends, get more connection”
artificial network effect (good) dropbox : “you joined to get storage. tell your friends, we’ll give you more storage”
referral program (not super) “you joined to get a funny show, tell your friends and we’ll give you a DVD”
asking (least effective, but free) “you joined for golfing tips. tell your friends who need golfing tips”
The opposite of the network effect
It’s possible to work against the network effect.
If you have an underground project that attracts people that love the underground, they might tell a few in the underground, but they will not proudly announce it because they want to preserve it.
If you do a show that asks for requests from the audience, you can have an unlimited audience size and you can only take one or two requests, I’m not gonna tell my friends because I want my request to be heard.
A lady is standing outside a grocery store handing out $50 bills. Your first question is, “Since these are easy to get, are they worth fifty bucks?”
Talk shows are easy to make because they’re not worth $50
Successful talk shows (like ones where there’s an audience) are not easy to make. In fact, the format is so rigid and boring in itself that it’s harder to grow than other entertainment platforms.
Here are 3 things for audience retention and growth.
It seems that the talk show format is democratized and open to anyone because all you need is a desk and a way to publish video, but the the three crucial parts of success are not democratized at all.
But, there are very successful talk shows! When we think about the most successful talk shows, we think of the big ones on the networks.
Network talk shows – especially before everyone had cable – had powerful network effect and lock in. Everyone would talk about it. If you hadn’t seen The Tonight Show the night before, you were a loser. The more of your social circles saw it, the better the show was because you had something to talk about. If you were a person that didn’t get to catch the news, you would at least pickup on the headlines and find out things that celebrities were up to. The entertainment value – and the thing that drew people in to watch was the celebrities. Once you picked which one of the two talk shows to watch, that was locked in as part of your identity.
Entertainment value is not that important.
A friend of mine who is one of the most charismatic entertainers in the world worked on doing a talk show. He did it live in a theater and recorded and he did it supremely from an entertainment value perspective — for his level. He had minor celebrities, he had writers, he had added in his personal style and extra entertainment.
I believe he didn’t sell his talk show to anyone because TV execs care about having an audience. They sell ads to an audience. Bringing his show to their network didn’t bring an audience. They could set up a desk. They could hire a more famous host. They could get the celebrities. The talk show – even though it was very entertaining and the live audiences loved it – didn’t have intrinsic value.
So, once you get into this game, part of it is about how big of celebrities can you get… unfortunately, it’s not as important at the real stuff.
It’s possible for an online talk show to be worth $50
Cable talk shows still have a very broad reach, but not as broad, so they get more specific. Sport Center focusses on the sports world. The Colbert report focused on news and current events. Tucker Carlson focusses on his audience.
Even though it feels like the internet gives you the broadest audience possible, you don’t really have the ability to reach out to everyone and say “give this a try” and you’re also probably not going to make something that gets lock-in from the general population. It’s unlikely you’ll get the whole world talking about you at school or around the water cooler. So, if you’re starting up a talk show online or trying to figure out why your talk show online isn’t doing too great, look at getting the most specific.
Can you serve everyone in one small town? I think my home town has 6k people. If you had 3,000 views every episode, wouldn’t that be nice?
How about a group of people with one shared interest who are already a community and already talking to each other? EG your show is just for the people who are interested in monster makeup.
There are other ways to setup lock-in and network effect beyond the social pressure way, also. Maybe you offer something every episode that people need bad and can’t get it anywhere else?
Obviously, this is only a starting point
You’re going to work hard to be specific, make a talk show that’s just for a specific kind of person. Then, you could grow that audience once those people adore it and can’t go without it.
Consider: is a talk show even something you want to do, or do you just want to be interesting and serve an audience? There are a million formats for that and many of them are more fun at their core than a person sitting and talking to a person.
What entertainment people create is ludicrous and nonsensical and amazingly life-giving. The genius of the absurd helps us release all of our self-importance, material-importance, and time-importance and observe our vulnerability as a connection to all of reality.
It can feel very wasteful to be drawn into a blog post by detecting a typo, for example… but maybe that was actually the best use of your time at that moment.
I did a big corporate show 1500 people in Vegas. They were there in this casino all week. The planner was hanging out with me beforehand casually. He said the casino wanted to charge $8 per can of soda they served.
He decided to innovate.
He said “We’re partners with Coke, so we’ll get them to sponsor our event and give us free soda.” The casino charged a corkage fee on every can of $3. He was not excited about it, but he saved the company over 60% in beverages.
How many cans of soda do you think they served to 1500 guzzling attendees in a week? That many cans times $3 is what they spent just for people to open cans of drink. It’s a shit-ton.
When you feel like companies or people don’t have money to spend on entertainment, just remember that they might be spending more on pkshhhhhh than on you.
When I consult / coach entertainment companies, I start with looking for the boundaries. How far are you willing to go to stick to your mission? If I can show you that you can have a bigger impact and a more profitable year by taking down your youtube channel and sending texts to people, would you do it? What if you would delight more people by setting up a rug factory?
The limitations are where the creativity starts
The greatest moves in sports happen only because of rules. That’s where the innovation and the excellence shows up. So, we definitely need limitations and the more deliberate and concrete the limitations are the more fun the game.
I am (we are) this
The trouble starts when we draw the limits for our companies apart from the clarity of our mission.
I was a vegan for ten years
I thought (and still mostly think) animal based food is inefficient and unecological. This wasn’t the popular way to be vegan. The popular mindset was “animals deserve rights.” When I told meat eaters my logic, they often were surprised and curious.
This difference stood out to me when I walked up to a pro-vegan kiosk at an outdoor event. Everything about it was pictures of tortured animals. So off-putting … and i believe bad marketing.
I told the dude “Hi! I’m vegan. I don’t care about animal rights. Do you have any brochures that aren’t covered in sad cows?” He 1. didn’t believe me 2. told me “of course not”
What a missed opportunity. If that organization’s mission was to save animals’ lives (which i don’t totally believe it is), they could get so many people on board to reduce meat consumption by giving more reasons and focusing on the positivity. What if 10% of the vegans they inspired didn’t believe in animal rights? It would serve their mission, but maybe it was more important to them to publicize their mission than to achieve their mission.
What if they taught the best cooking classes in town (and charged for them) with omnivorous chefs teaching how a small portion of meat can compliment a healthy vegetable-rich meal? If they reduced the meat portions by 50% for thousands of people, that could make a big difference for the farm friends. The non-profit’s biggest donors would probably be outraged!
Flexibility is generous
The best entertainment pros are care-givers. They’re generous and they want to share a spark. Being flexible in how one achieves that mission is generous. Being rigid is defensive and selfish. Make rules; have a voice for sure, but make them deliberately based on a mission that’s open to giving your audience what they really want.
Eli Broad was an accountant
He told his wife she would never be poor. He got the opportunity to start a home construction company. He revolutionized how houses were built based on the economics. Then, he researched recession-proof businesses. Discovered life insurance was the thing. He bought a life insurance company and changed that industry. Now, he has changed the landscape of Los Angeles art through the money he’s brought to downtown and beyond.
His mission wasn’t be an accountant. His mission was “don’t be poor.”
For some reason it’s easy for us to understand when someone will change their pursuit for money. It’s hard to understand when they’ll change to serve people better.
I spent the week leading over 100 entertainment pros through a branding challenge — the project of refining their brands.
I have worked with a bunch of companies and individuals directly figuring out their brands. I have simplified the process down to something really straightforward. It was a completely new challenge for me to convey this process generally for all to access.
It was really incredible to be able to help so many people and to be inspired by them joining in. I’m grateful that I’m in this position to take a week to share. I’m grateful that I get to share on this blog, too.
I think the best things get created when creators are thriving. Some magical creators have a very low thrive threshold. They can be in poverty and persecution and still make amazing stuff, but most can’t. My mission is to help badasses be in their own thriving situations so that they can release their need to survive and develop the next level of stuff.
It’s hard to seek help, to join a class, to ask for expertise and this group of people did that with me. Makes me hopeful that I will be able to make a big mark on entertainment!
I don’t believe intellectual property makes sense.
The way our intellectual property laws are set up are kinda crazy. I make money off IP from the movies and TV I’ve done, but I don’t think it’s an equitable setup. When napster came out it made me think, “Is it right to treat songs like commodities?” …and it had me questioning how do we draw the lines between creative works.
It’s all kinda slippery.
what’s stealing?
what’s inspiration?
how much does someone own an idea?
aren’t good ideas more valuable when shared?
I want entertainment to move at culinary pace
The culinary arts progress so fast. 20 years ago, it was hard to find a great restaurant. Now, most restaurants are pretty great for what they’re trying to do. Chefs share ideas with cookbooks, and doing someone else’s recipe is not called stealing. It’s called cooking.
There is some IP in the food world ( eg: Coke’s Secret Formula) but sharing and recreating are much less taboo.
When I started, I stole
Originally, I was doing magic shows as a kid. The routines and tricks i was doing where from all over the place. It didn’t make sense as a whole and I would do a very serious routine followed by a routine that sounded like a funny grandpa wrote it (because he did).
I stole a lot. I didn’t understand that there were rules against it. I went too far with it and finally got caught doing it for money. That, I felt, was too far – not because I was caught, but because I definitely could have made my own stuff work by then.
Stealing teaches from the shoes
There are a million decisions that go into to creating the tiniest pencil drawing, or writing a paragraph. When you copy, you inherit those decisions.
As you create your own stuff, you will be clad with more deliberate intention knowing that that’s the force that you need.
Stealing teaches complexity
When you copy, you also realize immediately how difficult it is to copy. Even when all the work is done for you, pulling it off isn’t a cake walk.
With standup, I listened to the same comedy albums over and over again until they were memorized. I tried reciting them, but immediately noticed I didn’t have the timing, or the energy, or the intonation. I had to listen more. I had to keep trying.
When it was time to create my own stuff, I knew that there were no limits to the ways I could improve.
Stealing teaches the importance of source
If a 70 year old man wrote Harry Potter, I don’t think it would be the same phenom. Stealing someone else’s work shows you how much it doesn’t quite work for you the same way. I wouldn’t call it authenticity, but there is an alignment with the identity of a creator that’s crucial to the product.
This knowledge can give you confidence to inject your identity in your work even when it’s not what you’ve seen before.
Stealing teaches the feeling of success
If you code a video game that’s an exact replica of Zelda, you will know what it feels like to code a successful video game. You didn’t make all the decisions that it took to make the original. Not even close, but there is something amazing about this feeling of completion and knowing that completion is in the right place.
Steal generously
It is generous to work hard training for the big time. It is not generous to steal for audience applause, money, accolades, or social media following. In fact, it’s not useful to yourself either.
Steal in secret for your education. Paint the Mona Lisa a thousand times and burn it. Then, go out and make something amazing.
Chris Ruggiero joins me to talk about the thing we often don’t want to talk about. Creators are often most comfortable tearing everything apart and starting over instead of being consistent. Repeating.
Being redundant may be the thing your audience is awaiting.
We know that experimenting is the way to create something great, but who has the time and money to run a million experiments on developing entertainment? You do. It’s the only way. This is especially true if you find yourself working on something that will never pay the bills.
Experiments don’t fail
If you complete an experiment, you learn something. Either it matches your hypothesis or it doesn’t. This is really helpful because as long as you’re experimenting and keeping track of what you’re doing, it’s never a waste of time.
Open Mics are very inefficient
It’s easy to feel like experiments are slow and not productive. If you’ve never done standup, imagine what great standups go thru to get good. After work, you immediately head to a bar to signup early for the open mic. You wait around for it to start. When you’re a beginner, often they won’t give you a good spot in the night, so you wait for up to 3 hours to go on stage for 4 minutes. You probably drink to be a good sport. You probably watch the other comics to be a good sport. You leave depleted for that short stage time. If you’re in a big city, you might try to hit a second one that night.
This system works. This system ends up turning out most of the great standups you’ve seen. It’s a grueling experiment process that’s somehow worth it.
There are Edisons and Deadisons
I have run into people too often in showbiz who are at the extremes. Some people don’t experiment at all and those who experiment endlessly. Experimenting endlessly is the way to go.
The experiments have got to get smaller as you go
If you start with a clear goal, your experiments will have purpose and as you continue to poke around, you’ll be taking smaller risks and refining instead of staying in this eternal not-goodness that some folks get hooked on. Don’t try ventriloquism, then a week later try writing a screen play, then try being a fountain pen. Try making a video game about purple zombies, then try making it a video game about green ghosts ghosts, then it becomes about yellow ghosts, then it’s about golden ghosts.
It can be hard to not get hooked on the freedom of experimenting and the excitement of luck.
People are the guinea pigs
It’s a big ask in just about every genre of entertainment to ask an audience to consume something… even something great. Hopefully the great thing is worth it.
Remember that the people you’re testing on gave you a chance. You will most likely not burn a bridge. This isn’t about that, it’s just about respecting people and their time.
It may be helpful to note also, while you’re not burning bridges, you’re also not building them. You’re not building your fanbase while experimenting most likely, so we gotta get thru the experimentation process sooner.
Make the experiments count
Having a solid goal is def going to help. For a standup, this goal is developing a tight 5 minute comedy chunk. And how do we make each experiment more valuable? I’ll stick with the comedy thing for the examples.
clarify the metrics: some standups count the laughs per minute
keep logs: standups often record their sets so they can dispassionately review the audience response
make it more clinical: take out things that can taint the experiments by not riffing in the middle of an open mic, or just constantly changing every part of what you do
work in pieces: start with jokes that work, then add in some experimental ones to see how they measure up
accept that it’s not clinical: I’m not saying blame the room, but it’s okay if data (audience response) is not consistent with previous findings
work in between experiments: some comedians don’t write or evaluate recordings between open mics. This is a pretty big waste.
Get to a working state as soon as possible
Get something that functions right away. In the standup comedy example, get to a place where you have 5 minutes that works okay. This isn’t the killer set yet, but it’s something that’s cohesive and can be predictably repeated. This means you’re ready to get on stage with it now and do something that’s not an experiment in case there’s an audience you don’t want to burn, or you want to get feedback from a role model, or you just want to know that you’re part of the way there. Having a prototype will have a lot of great aspects and uses. Most importantly, it might help you determine if it’s worth doing more experiments or changing your goal.
This is my position based on never attending a single “socially distanced performance” … and I’m 100% correct
Aren’t you excited!?
We still get to do live in-person shows during lockdown by being really crafty! There are all these newspaper articles about clowns performing half way across a yard from a kids birthday party. Drive-in festivals. Concerts performed for audiences on balconies.
It’s a dawning of a new age of entertainment that completely sucks and consistently emphasizes the fact that we are not allowed to be close to each other.
IRL Shows are a tribal experience
We are evolutionarily programmed to love live entertainment. Even an amphitheater show is just a modernized campfire that we sit around to share hunting stories.
While we’re rubbing elbows with audience members, we’re hearing them clap and laugh and gasp, but we’re also hearing them and seeing them breath, fidget, look around. We are getting primal herd clues about our place and safety in the world. We are getting status shift cues from those around us that help us determine where we fit in a pack of people.
Not only does the crowd set the context of the performance, it sets the context of our identities. I’m not saying you’re going to change your entire image of self from a puppet show, but these tribal reinforcements are soothing to our animal minds.
#STFAH
Besides the entertainment value of the shows, I think we have a responsibility to encourage people to stay at home for all non-essential activities. Creating public non-essential activities is antithetical to public health ideals.
Some people are saying they’re making socially distant performances to encourage more social distancing. This to me is like drunk driving to encourage sober driving.
Shows in yards
You’re hanging out with people outside of your pod.
You’ve missed them.
You want to connect.
You want to show them your mouth.
You don’t want to shout from 6 feet away.
You don’t know what 6 feet is.
You still have to go thru the house to get to the yard.
You still need to share a bathroom.
It doesn’t work
Drive-in concerts
People aren’t going to stay in their cars
The people who will get out of their cars will be the people that are the most likely vectors
You will be listening to the music through an FM station on your radio. Why not listen to well produced music through your car stereo?
You can’t hear anyone else clap
You’re super spaced out and far away from people
Either the capacity is really low, or you’re far from stage
It’s a sad constant reminder that you’re not at a real show
Either the ticket prices are really high, or there are not sustainable profit margins
What’s good about it?
You still need to use public restrooms
They’ll still try to sell you stuff. No profits without concessions.
No
It encourages more people to go out for non-essential activities
I told people their IRL entertainment services have no value during a lockdown. I encouraged people to quit. This is not because I hate showbiz folks, but because I want to get to the root cause of why we’re doing this stuff.
When people ask my friend Chris Ruggiero how to get into entertaining, he says “Don’t.” He knows that people that people that are determined will be fueled by that, and the others don’t need to suffer the slog.
Badasses Mobilize!
I heard someone say this pandemic is going to lead to some businesses shutting down, some businesses maintaining, and some businesses taking off! That can happen every single day of history. It’s true for every thing people create.
If you’re a great entertainer with something to share… If you’re helping the world… If you want to face humanity with a truely generous gift… speed up now! Give more. Increase your audience size. Increase the amount you serve your audience. Find the way to to more business success now.
Find the rules. Play the game to the edge of the rules
The toughest part of the pandemic is figuring out what the rules are.
What do audiences want now?
How do we serve the new needs of our people?
What tools are available?
How do our skills fit in?
None of those questions are “Does it matter?” or “Is it possible?” If your mission is important to you, those are easy “HULK YES!” answers.
Now the rules of the game are settling into place and the new realm is going to be different. You can’t approach it the same way, just like you can’t approach anything the way you did 10 years ago.
Consider what people will expect now.
Remote working leads to outsourcing. Outsourcing leads to cheaper labor. They call it gig economy, but mostly it’s turning the most straightforward work into commodities. This means entry level jobs lose value and complex creative jobs get more valuable.
Full-time staffs will be reduced in size
Centralized organizations will not be as popular
People are going to consider digital events even when geocentric events are possible for their different benefits.
As there’s more leaning on digital entertainment, customization and bespoke entertainment will be more desired and expected.
People will be more open to novel solutions to problems.
Organizations will be able to make quicker decisions because there have been a lot of holes poked in bureaucratic systems.
Even though they are more open and agile, people will also be wary of planning because the pandemic proved that anything can happen. Contracts might be a little more specific.
You’ll probably be expected to work with less overhead
Nobody’s going to do things well during a big change over, so the more practice you get, the more ahead you will leap
Entertainment can’t succeed if it can’t fail. The more we protect ourselves against mistakes, the more we protect ourselves against kismet. Basically, take risks.
The risks go beyond the primary story
There’s the story of an entertainment thing ( John McClane needs to save the Nakatomi Plaza and he’s putting his life on the line), but then there’s also the meta-story. The story of “This director took a risk” or “This composer is just doing the same thing as always” is just as much a part of the story for audiences.
There can be a lot of layers to the meta, also. Depending on the audience, they might notice all of them or only a few, but only a naive person would think the audience only sees a single narrative and is capable of being focused on only that.
There’s risk built in to all entertainment
Public speaking is believed to be Americans’ greatest fear. When someone stands out and asks for the spotlight, they’re taking a risk. That risk goes away when that person is crazy or is obviously driven by some crazy-making force (like a fame).
Sane charisma amplifies this risk because someone charismatic is showing a total commitment to deserving the attention.
Failing at goals is entertaining too
…So failing is succeeding, but going for the middle is not anything.
So, let’s find the risk. Let’s stuff our stuff full of it on every level. Let’s surround ourselves with bold people. Let’s make ourselves stories of risk and success.
