Many creator-led media businesses believe in “audience first” when in reality they are accumulating reach on infrastructure they don’t control.
Within any audience first strategy, the distinction between reach and ownership is not semantic. Reach into users rented from platforms, even as followers, is a very different thing compared to audiences that are owned and engaged on first-party terms.
Platform risk is a defining constraint on modern media business models. It is also why professional investors view audience ownership as a key strategic objective for today’s media companies. This makes platform dependency one of the most obvious, and least understood, risks in contemporary media strategy.
It’s taken a long time for the majority of our industry to realise it.
From Distribution Advantage to Platform Dependency
Legacy media organisations have traditionally derived much of their revenue from owning distribution. Distribution infrastructure was once expensive to build and operate, with regulatory compliance for broadcasting, vast cable networks and legal contracts protecting how radio, television and films were received by audiences.
Corporate organisation and capital expenditure have been designed within large, legacy media conglomerates to expand and protect that infrastructure, often at the expense of creative content production. Strategy, for much of the last century, has been to outsource the creative, upstream end of the Media & Entertainment industry to independent creatives. So long as the “Studios” protected distribution infrastructure, and downstream access to audiences, the supply of high-quality content could be controlled by making creatives fully dependent upon the decisions of Studio execs.
For a very long time, the financial return on that capital expenditure led to a “golden era” for “Hollywood” Studios, making them hugely lucrative for the Media Majors and for stock-market investors.
The internet, of course, changed everything.
For a while, anyone from anywhere could make content available to anyone, anywhere. The internet created an open, free market for distribution of content. For content creators, finally, the dream of reaching and connecting with an audience directly seemed so real. For legacy media conglomerates, the nightmare began.
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Naturally, that open, free market became crowded and noisy and saturated with low-quality content that most audiences would never pay for. Out of that chaos emerged the likes of Google and Facebook and Netflix. These content technology platforms allowed audiences to be more selective about where their attention might focus.
Patterns emerged. Data accumulated. Algorithms sorted information and soon directed users to content similar to what they had spent attention on earlier. Control emerged. Users accumulated. Executives sorted information and soon directed advertisers to where users could be concentrated.
Today, distribution is abundant and cheap, but it has also become channelled and controlled by the proprietary, corporate algorithms of search engines, social media platforms and video-on-demand streamers. So much so, that Google’s YouTube is now the most widely viewed content distribution channel in the most lucrative and competitive media market on the planet, the U.S.
YouTube, like all platforms, determines discoverability of content, monetisation rules and acceptable content posted by content creators. Creators, and the businesses they operate, function at the discretion of algorithms they don’t control, policy changes they can’t influence and commercial priorities that are not in their best interest.
Platforms, however, provide users that become audiences. Clever creatives can understand the commercial priorities of platforms and observe the effects of algorithmic coding. With the right determination, content can result in reach across ever larger populations of platform users and an opportunity to share in a platform’s monetisation. Content discovery results in followers and, potentially, revenue.
So much so, that strategies for cultivating followers on social media have given rise to an entirely new career path dubbed, the creator economy. For those who do reach a critical mass of influence over platform followers, there are deals and riches galore. The pursuit can become addictive.
This reach into users on social media platforms is often mistaken for scale. Large followings on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or podcast platforms can create the illusion of security. In reality, these audiences are contingent. Visibility can be reduced, monetisation altered and accounts removed with no notice and little recourse.
Fast-forward to today and platform risk has become the baseline condition for the era of digital-first media.
Just look at how easily Google’s YouTube could de-platform all Disney content properties, including ABC and ESPN, from YouTube TV on October 31st last year. That cost Disney an estimated US$4.3 million a day until Disney finally agreed terms for a new carriage deal announced on November 14th.
What the all-powerful Walt Disney Company was forced to endure was a 15-day blackout of over 20 Disney operated YouTube TV channels for audiences that Disney may have thought were theirs.
Audience Ownership
Can we own our audience? Maybe not in the literal sense? Figuratively, however? Absolutely.
The real question is, how?
An audience is attracted by content that resonates with those who experience it. This audience resonance is what forms a collection of consumers into a cohesive form of asset.
“Ownership” then becomes a function of control over the cohesive strength of that audience and the degree to which it will engage in two-way interaction. This gives rise to opportunity for that audience to follow the content from one medium to another. From another company’s platform, on which audiences are effectively rented as followers, to proprietary direct-to-consumer channels, such as websites, apps and the box office.
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Audience-First Media Strategy in a Digital-First Media Era
From acquisition to monetisation and scale, audience-first media strategies underpin today’s digital-first media enterprise.
Two-way interaction is critical to audience ownership. An audience that only consumes content is fragile. An audience that responds, contributes, shares and engages enters into a reciprocal relationship with the intellectual property that resonates within the audience.
Monetisation may follow from this, but is not the defining feature. The opportunity to monetise arises because a cohesive, engaged audience will act by subscribing, attending, purchasing, advocating or participating. What is being owned is not attention in the abstract, but the conditions under which attention becomes behaviour.
That behaviour can be demonstrated by shifting attention from content distributed on one medium, say YouTube, and onto another medium, such as your own website.
The New Media Battleground
One successful YouTuber has provided one of the first, and best, demonstrations of what audience ownership means.
Mark Fischbach, a.k.a. Markiplier, can boast of cir. thirty-eight million YouTube subscribers. His debut feature film will release on over 2,500 cinema screens across the U.S. and Canada on January 30th, 2026 without any help from any major studio, distributor or box office marketing firm.
Instead, Fischbach’s team went directly to theatre booking company, Centurion, owned by exhibition veteran Bill Herting. Markiplier’s audience did the rest. As IndieWire reports, “They called the theaters. And called and called. So much that theaters complained.”
Sam Herting, Bill’s son and partner in Centurion told IndieWire, “Friday night, [bookings] are really starting to roll in. Saturday, I’m just booking theaters all day until one or two in the morning. And then it kept up.”
According to IndieWire, “the final figure in North America could be 2,800 by opening day.”
Fischbach’s motion picture, Iron Lung is an adaptation of the video game of the same name, developed by David Szymanski and provides one of the clearest demonstrations yet of audience ownership as a core strategic asset for Indie producers.
According to Sam Herting, “It’s one thing to have a lot of followers. But loyalty of the followers is another thing. Mark’s fans are just so ride-or-die for him.”
Disney’s Bob Iger likely hopes the same can be said of Disney’s subscribers on YouTube as the legacy media giant seeks to migrate them over to Disney’s own apps and maximise revenue.
Audience ownership is now a concept that every media executive, entrepreneur and investor needs to take seriously. Many are doing just that. If YouTube’s power over Disney and Markiplier’s debut film are any demonstration at all, it’s that audience ownership will level the playing field for everyone.
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Thomas is our founder, acting Publisher and contributes an outsized proportion of our articles and editorial pieces.
He is an American lawyer & private equity specialist with 30+ years of international experience in investment strategy. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both adviser and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-investment companies. He is also founder of Coherent Media Group, a corporate holding company dedicated to media & entertainment businesses globally.
In his spare time, Thomas is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels.
