The Sovereignty and Ignorance of Our Audience

The biggest mantra for anybody in digital media business is “content is king”. Sit long enough in one of those lengthy meetings and you probably will hear it being repeated more frequently than you realise. Talk to anyone who is building digital marketing platform and somewhere along the line, that person will tell you how preciously royal content is.

I am not writing this to dispute the essential truth behind “content is king”, but it’s very easy to mistake that producing content is the end game for anyone in digital media landscape. Producing content is not the solution to your problems. Quite the contrary, producing content is the beginning of a series of problem that are not going to solve themselves, e.g: who will consume my content and how will they get it?

Last week I taped a casual discussion in response to the growing discourse ignited by the announcement of Jovial and Andovi that they’re leaving Youtube. I admire and respect them and I think what they’ve been doing on the platform is nothing short of greatness. People like them are at the vanguards of movement that turned Youtube from an alternative platform into a primary one - which I also personally benefit from.

Much of the things that I wanted to say on that matter are already said on that video. If there’s one thing that I learned in the past few years, it’s that I cant really fault my audience no matter how bad I want to shift the blame on them for not consuming my contents.

Why? Because all these years I have developed an understanding that the audience is sovereign and ignorant at the same time.

The audience is sovereign because it holds the supreme power to determine the success of your content. In many cases, the content is as good as the numbers of people who have seen it. I actually think that rather than the content itself, audience has the definitive right to proclaim as king.

The audience is ignorant because they dont take your intention behind particular content production as a consideration before consuming it. They dont really care about how well-meaning your intention is. They just consume content as they see fit. 

There’s a famous saying from Barthes about death of the author in which he argues that once a writing is published, it’s up to the audience to interpret the meaning and brushing the author’s intention aside.

Borrowing that concept, I believe that once a content is published on digital platform, the producer is at the mercy of the audience. I can argue about the quality of my content but the thing is quality is a very subjective matter.

For me, these circumstances highlight the paradox of interaction and power-relation between the content producer and the audience. 

On one side, by producing content that is consumed by the audience, the producer has the ability to shape and drive the audience as the producer’s wish. This puts the producer in a very powerful place.

But on the other side, the sovereignty of the audience and their ignorance to the producer’ intention puts the latter in a weak position that leaves them with no option but to find ways for the audience to consume the content. For the producer to assert power on the audience, it has to put the audience in stronger position first.

That’s why I believe that understanding the audience is the ultimate key for winning. This is easier said than done because it requires something that a lot of people (me included) finding it hard to do: relinquishing power temporarily and put the audience in power for a while.

Having said that, I must emphasize that putting the audience in temporary power doesn’t mean giving them carte blanche and let them dictate what you produce. I dont believe that either.

Putting the audience in temporary power is the first step to build the bridge of articulation between the producer and the audience. Like any politician, the successful are not the ones with the best ideas, but rather the ones with the best way to articulate the concerns of the electorate.

It’s less about forcing the audience to understand the producer and more about the producer learning deeper about its audience.

Of course when we talk about audience behaviour, we also have to take the content platform into account. It is true that platform algorithm drives the consumption behaviour of its audience, although platform could also argue that the algorithm doesnt create the behaviour, it just enhances them.

A few days ago I encountered a tweet that said that content creator shouldnt give too much care about platform algorithm and just focus on creating. I strongly disagree with this because if we believe that audience is sovereign and this sovereign behaviour is highly shaped by the platform, it’s imperative for the producer to also understand the platform. I’ve seen too many great contents didnt get the audience they deserved and that’s not because of the quality of the products.

I acknowledge that over-reaching arms of all these behemoth tech platforms have created painful discomfort to traditional media establishments. The impact is less severely felt by new media and content creator/producer whose very existence actually made possible by the existence of these tech platforms at the first place. 

But I’d also like to think that it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who creates content on any social media platform is actually in precarious situation. Precarious, because while the old media interaction is strictly between the producer and the audience, the internet media puts another variable in the equation: producer, audience, and the tech platform where the content is published.

You cant afford to not care about the house where your content is hosted. The arrangement of that house determines whether your content is consumed they way you like it or not. Precarious, because you have no option but to adhere to the way the platform works. Like I said at the beginning, once a content is produced, it starts posing a lot of problems that need to be solved for it to succeed.

And when I cant solve those problems, I cant really fault my audience no matter how bad I want to shift the blame on them.