Probing the influence algorithm
Joe Rogan’s move to Spotify leads some to question his influence quotient. Duh?
A comment in Azeem Azhar’s EV Charts of the Week #41 caught my eye in which he said:
A big story about Joe Rogan’s waning influence since going exclusive with Spotify. The Verge found that guests who appear on Rogan’s show (the most popular podcast in the world) gain less influence in Twitter followers since he moved to Spotify.
Is it such a big story? The depends on your definition of influence. I’ll start this one with myself.
Prior to February 2021 I used to get a fair number of folk telling me that I was influential. It was a description that made me uncomfortable because in my eyes, someone who is influential helps to bring change in some way and I didn’t see myself that way. I still don’t except in a very limited way.
I have no objective way to measure the influence metric other than the handful of times when I discovered - often much later - that something I said or did led to a significant change, often for another person but on rare occasions at companies that I followed. Does that mean I had influence? Perhaps.
But as I always instinctively knew that the extent to which I made a dent in the proverbial universe was at best fleeting.
By the time I nuked my Twitter account the other month I’d amassed the princely sum of some 14,700-ish followers. In reality I knew that a tiny fraction of those viewed whatever I posted and an even tinier fraction engaged with my Twitter ‘content.’ Does that provide a benchmark for so called ‘influence?’
Viewed in terms that The Verge and, by extension, Azhar are positing the question of influence, I might as well be completely unknown at best and dead at worst. Why? Because after I closed my Twitter account I can count on the fingers of just over two hands the number of folk who bemoaned my decision and wanted me to continue doing what I was doing. There may be a silent majority out there who share that view but their silence is unknown. It gets more troubling.
The Verge story is really a commentary on the perceived difference between ‘free and open’ versus ‘exclusive,’ noting that exclusivity (usually meaning a paywall of some kind) is a dampener to audience growth and, by implication influence. This is an important topic for content creators of all stripes in a world that has been accustomed to ‘free’ for many years.
I still have the 1960’s idea that ‘information wants to be free’ rattling around in my mind. To which I always added the question, ‘sure, but who pays for the work that goes into creating useful, valuable content?’ The stock answer was always advertising but to me that is a zero sum game combined with a race to the bottom.
In my last life I found a vendor funded model that allowed for the payment issue but it came with clear caveats around editorial independence for those willing to sign cheques. Even so, there was always a potential problem with bias, either real or perceived.
In my case I had already established a decent reputation for offering an independent viewpoint that favoured the customer rather than the vendor. In short, those paying the bills knew what they were buying into. It didn’t prevent them endeavouring to influence my thinking as was their right and, from time to time, I changed or modified positions. There were plenty of times when what I said left them uneasy, even when they knew I was close to a reality they rather wasn’t made public.
As time went on, I started to question whether I was truly giving as much as I could. At one point I considered the potential for doing what many content creators are doing and erecting the proverbial paywall. That came out of an incident I’ll not repeat here except to say that a degree of pressure was put on me that I was not prepared to accept about a topic where I knew there was widespread interest. Needless to say, I didn’t bite the bullet because I also instinctively knew that in doing so, I would be running the risk of committing commercial suicide. Sure, I had a plan B in mind but it wasn’t something I could convincingly explain or demonstrate with any degree of certainty or confidence. To that extent, I sold my soul.
History is littered with examples of creators who lived meagre lives, only to be recognised long after there was any possibility for them to benefit from their creative talent. Today we seem to live in a world where entertainment matters above all and where youngsters want the instant celebrity that comes with being a TikTok or reality (sic) TV star. Joe Rogan fits that mould. He’s a comedian of sorts who has landed a sweetheart deal with his exclusive Spotify podcast.
You can argue that Rogan has put in the time since his JRE podcast has been going for some 12 years and is/was wildly popular as measured by its reach. But it’s still just entertainment. To use bumps in Twitter followers as a metric for influence is, in my mind, a grave error in thinking.
Twitter is the place people go to get their daily outrage fix from random corners of the world. Spotify is the place people go to discover and listen to the things they really like. And as with all things of this nature, tastes can and do change over time.
There can be no doubt that the network operators such as Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and Patreon act as great places where creators can be discovered. The move towards paying for that content delivery capability is only likely to accelerate.
In my current areas of interest, I often find that creators use multiple channels to reach an audience of people willing to pay for what they deliver. Where I find creators falling down is in failing to recognise the extent to which ploughing their own furrow places a strain on their sanity.
It is perhaps the ultimate irony that getting people to pay for content sounds great and for some it is terrific. But that puts them on a hamster wheel that is unsustainable in the long haul. It is the price of not being the product. What then the question of ‘influence?’