Audience ownership is a misnomer. Obviously, no one owns an audience, and the last time I checked, engaging with someone’s content was still an individual choice. What can be “owned” is information about who users are and how they engage with your content. This is highly coveted information and, at least on most platforms, is locked behind the iron curtain. But why is audience information so important?
There are a lot of reasons why knowing your audience is critical to business, but most boil down to relationships. Creators aren’t just creating content for clicks; they are creating it for people. A person who sits down in the evening and reads their ebook, or listens to their podcast on the way to work. It is a person who is going to fork out their hard-earned shillings for the next ebook that comes out or to keep accessing the content being created.
The challenge for most creators is that, on third-party platforms, they are essentially left in the dark about their audience. The primary way to get an email address or a name is through a mailing list sign-up, but there is still friction involved in moving your audience from your YouTube channel to an email list sign-up on your website. If a viewer is generally happy with the content they get for “free” on YouTube, why would they make the long trek over to your website just to sign up for a spam list?
There are a number of services now available that combine both content streaming and a direct relationship with subscribers. Patreon and Substack are both great examples. The hook for accessing content on these platforms is often “subscriber-only” content, with YouTube acting as a top-of-funnel platform. There are still limitations on these platforms when it comes to branding and content types. Technically, you are still a channel on a larger platform. Your images and logo come through, but every page looks the same. The content types are limited as well, giving you a video and audio platform with some article and text features.
Another option, and one that gives you plenty of flexibility, allows your brand to fully come through while still giving you the coveted audience “ownership”: launching your own app. At one time, a branded app was very expensive to build and maintain, but this is no longer true. Depending on the size of your audience, launching a branded app on Treefort is priced competitively with the platforms mentioned above. With more content types, audience ownership, loads of monetization options, and a true brand asset, it may be time to launch your own app.
