The death of the follower

Since the beginning of social media, creators have measured their success against their follower count.

If I was to ask you your goal as a creator, you'd probably answer with a follower or subscriber count that you're aiming towards.

Is it 10,000? 100,000? 1 million followers?

This is your dream – with that fame comes a fun lifestyle, shiny plaques, fortune... or at least it used to.

We have reached the death of the follower.

In the old days, you used to have to select what you wanted to watch.

You would pick a video, and if you enjoyed it, you'd like and subscribe to that creator, and you'd be fed more and more of that specific creator.

That's now changed.

Jack Conte (founder of Patreon) explains it best:

"As a fan, I'm like signing up to vote for what I want to see more of in the future. And that's kind of like how the internet was sort of organised for many years. This concept of followers where you have a feed of people you follow... forget about that. You almost can't reach your followers anymore as a creator."

But why the sudden change?

One word: TikTok.

The app blew up with the "For You Page" – a new kind of algorithm designed to show you content based on what it thinks that you like.

And to be fair, it probably knows you better than you know yourself.

This platform, this algorithm works so well for TikTok that YouTube, Instagram, Twitter – everyone made their own version of the FYP.

Discoverability is now the game.

It's way easier than ever before to blow up a small channel and gain millions of followers and views, but it's harder for those followers to stick.

There's just so much good content now.

There's content everywhere, and there's so much content that's well worthy of a follow.

Here's an experiment: go on TikTok, see how many people you follow.

Or Instagram.

I bet it's in the hundreds, if not thousands.

And if you scroll through that list, how many of those people do you even see on a day-to-day basis?

I hazard a guess: not many.

If we think of social media engagement as a currency, the value of a follower or subscription is so much lower than it used to be.

There's just so much more readily available than ever before – there's content paralysis on another level.

More and more people have thousands or even millions of people following them, but the main problem here is, of course, connection.

If you have saturation of creators, there's so much to choose from – who can you really connect with?

People can enjoy your content, but do they really know who you are?

Have you really dwelled with them for enough time? Have they invested enough time in you?

That's where the problem lies – how are you supposed to build a sustainable content career from that?

Because even if they're following you, they might not have even seen your content, so how are you going to reach them?

Two core problems

There are two main reasons why the For You algorithm has made it so hard to monetise in the current social media landscape:

1/ Virality is a curse

It is easier than ever to go viral and gain millions of views on a video, but because of that, there's always a new shiny thing for people to go and watch instead.

Think about the endless list of creators who had their 15 minutes of fame but are now all but non-existent.

Virality is a curse because it is so short-lived, and ultimately now you're only as good as your last video.

2/ You don't own your audience anymore

Even if you manage to break through and keep consistently in the spotlight, even when people follow you, they are far from guaranteed to see each of your posts.

Views will fluctuate massively video to video, and you don't have access to your followers in the same way through these social platforms.

The solution

Most creators who blow up through content have slaved away at trying and trying to get that video that works, and then they get the video that works and do more of it, and it just becomes a flywheel from there.

Your real competition isn't other people - it's your own tendency to focus on the wrong metrics.

Most people don't take their ideas seriously enough to push through the uncomfortable middle part where it feels like nothing is working.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking "I need more followers," remember that most people don't even try, and of those who do, most quit quickly.

Your competition is much smaller than you think.

But maybe a more important realisation to make is: a smaller audience could actually mean more money.

Focus on creating content that satisfies, that provides genuine value, that makes people want to come back not because an algorithm served it to them, but because they actively seek you out.

That's how you build something sustainable in an age where the follower is dead.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

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