If you've built an audience around your content, how do you know whether some of those people might be interested in becoming a community?
YouTube's new report about how mainstream culture is changing offers some interesting clues. It says:
"Success Is Increasingly a Collective Achievement"
"Younger audiences are much less likely to view success as a sign of selling out and more likely to celebrate it. As communities become active participants in those successes, they increasingly see the rise of creators and fandoms as something they have a personal stake in."
As a member of Generation X and a former alternative rock radio Program Director, this made me laugh.
When a band we supported early on crossed over into the mainstream, we didn't celebrate; we winced. Reel Big Fish captured the feeling in their 1996 hit, “Sell Out.”
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YouTube's research suggests that younger fans see things differently. 60% of fans say they feel proud when a person or thing they're a fan of succeeds because they believe they helped create that success.
For creators, this kind of participation is an important signal. It suggests that people in your audience want to do more than just consume your content.
Look at what people are already doing
One example in the report is The Backrooms, a fictional universe that started with a mysterious image posted online.
People didn't just consume it. They created art, developed theories, expanded the lore, and participated in discussions around it. YouTuber Kane Parsons eventually built a video series around the concept, and A24 turned it into a theatrical film.
The important part for you isn't whether your audience is about to inspire the next Hollywood movie. It's the behavior that came before it: People weren't just consuming. They were participating.
An audience isn't a community
An audience consumes what you create. In a community, people form meaningful relationships with each other.
Two people can watch the same YouTube channel, listen to the same podcast, or obsess over the same TV show without ever knowing each other. They're part of the same audience, but that doesn't make them a community.
So having 50,000 subscribers doesn't necessarily mean you should launch a community. Instead, look at how people in your audience are already behaving.
Look for signs of Community Readiness
Are people talking to each other in your comments? Are they answering each other's questions? Are they exchanging ideas, collaborating, or looking for opportunities to connect with other people who share their interests?
These are signals of Community Readiness: behaviors that suggest some people in your audience may be interested in developing relationships with each other.
They don't prove that your audience wants a community. But they give you a reason to investigate whether there's an opportunity to bring people together.
Audience size tells you how many people you can reach. Community Readiness looks for signs that some of those people want to interact with each other.
Community Readiness can point to a revenue opportunity
If you're seeing signs that people in your audience may want to connect with each other, there may be more than a community opportunity. There could also be a revenue opportunity.
Bringing people together can create value that content alone can't provide. And if that value is strong enough, people may be willing to pay for it.
The question is: What does that Community Revenue opportunity look like with the audience you've already built?
That's what we'll explore in Beyond Content: Find Your Community Revenue Opportunity. In this free workshop, you'll look at your existing audience and assets to identify where there may be an opportunity to bring people together and generate revenue.
Find Your Community Revenue Opportunity
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