Your 10K follower goal might be pointless

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.

A subscriber, a follower – it simply doesn't matter anymore.

And that is making it harder than ever to get consistent views and especially hard to make any money out of content.

But the good news is there is a solution – a strategy that you can use starting today to turn your content into a sustainable, profitable career.

What Changed?

Back in the day, 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.

The Problem For Creators

Discoverability is now the game.

It's now 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.

While it's amazing from a creativity standpoint – lowering the barrier to entry – it saturates the market and only makes it harder for creators to actually sustain and build something long-term.

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.

The Currency of Engagement

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?

Okay, I realise I just asked about 47 questions in a row.

But that's because this topic can lead to a lot more questions than answers!

If your head is spinning and you're thinking "thanks for all the problems, Jordan, but what about some SOLUTIONS?" – I've got you covered.

I dropped a YouTube video that breaks down how to make money as a creator, taking lessons from my experience building businesses with the Sidemen.

Basically, I answer the question: can you make more money with a smaller audience?

Watch it below 👇

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

Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here to get the next one straight to your inbox.

If this email landed in your spam or promotions folder, move it to your primary inbox so you never miss an update from me.