I work for a TikTok Style style short video platform and we noticed how these relationships are important for keeping the engagement numbers high. An interesting thing we saw was that investing in D-list creators could have a way higher ROI than A-list creators. An A-list creator could get a large number of followers but would not get the devotion that the D-list creators would get.
That makes sense to me. With a big influencer/creator it's a one-way relationship to the audience. With a smaller influencer/creator, it can be more two-way.
So, for example, I watch a variety of streamers on Twitch. On the larger streams, I almost never look at chat or chat myself. It's a sea of text and emotes already. No one in chat will read your message. The streamer certainly won't. So you're just listening or watching like to the radio or TV.
But a streamer with 200 viewers? You can often ask questions and get a response. It's a completely different dynamic.
Yes, it is. But you can't chat if the messages scroll by to quickly. Just watch an asmongold stream live if you want to see an extreme of what they were talking about.
100-200k people writing in the same chat is just too much for anyone to read it
Chat becomes highly memetic in large channels but that's part of the fun and highly engrossing. It's like being at a concert and becoming fully immersed with the rest of the hive mind. Many religions base their practices around this feeling of collective ecstasy, only on Twitch it's by using a sea of pogs and pepegas.
> It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship'
It's overly cynical to think that you need to be intimate and in the flesh to call it a 'relationship' (in scare quotes?). It is a relationship. There's a real exchange of ideas and emotions.
In regards to streaming and content creation platforms, i largely agree - it's more akin to improv theatre with one artist, but the kind where you could affect their act in subtle ways.
> It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship' with someone on the other end of a screen that you are never going to meet in real life.
With this, however, i disagree. It's old fashioned to think that friendships can only happen in meat space. Plenty of people actually prefer online and remote communication in many circumstances, since those can offer a way to meet people from wildly different cultures or with similar interests, whereas for others it's a great way to keep in touch with friends who are a long distance away.
For example, i currently live about 60 km from the nearest city in which I could find a significant amount of fellow developers, yet this very platform allows me to see what people all over the world keep themselves busy with. There is definitely a community aspect there.
In regards to personal relationships, some of my online friends are people with whom I can be more honest about my life circumstances than those that i face every day - since they could also have a larger impact on my life with their reactions and differing views.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted rather than being argued against.
I agree with you in spirit. To an individual with thousands of followers, no single follower is more important than the mass. Obviously one of these followers could become a true friend, but friends dedicate time to nurture their friendships, and realistically nobody has enough time to keep that many friendships.
Fascinating. I’ve observed this dynamic too and mentioned it in an earlier draft but cut it.
My guess is that smaller creators have a greater ability to respond to their smaller fan base, deepening these connections. Also, as some creators grow their content becomes more high-production, polished, and #sponsored which might feel less “organic” compared with smaller creators just starting out on a budget.
I bet that it's also that smaller creators are also more likely to actually interact with their fans because there's fewer people vying for their attention and they're still trying to build popularity.
Yea, this is one part of it. At least some followers look up to them because they think they could realistically jump to being them whereas A-listers are too distant.
> An interesting thing we saw was that investing in D-list creators could have a way higher ROI than A-list creators. An A-list creator could get a large number of followers but would not get the devotion that the D-list creators would get.
I would think that goes both ways, no?
Someone small is going to take good care of a $100/month donator, for example.
Anyone that small yet competent either has a lot going on and can't invest in their parasocial services career, or is capable of growing to not be small anymore, so it's a narrow window.
(For the real biggest streamers who still get giant donations, like Hololives, it seems like the chat is actually in a parasocial relationship with itself…)
That's not necessarily true. Someone small will not rely on Twitch for their income and while the $100 is nice, they won't get some crazy special treatment. It's still just $100.
For that you don't need to apply to the parent's company or niche specifically.
Any FAANG or media company would do.
If you also want to sell useless crap to people who don't really need it and destroy the environment in the process, almost any consumer products company will do too.
There's a very good chance you're already set for the same thing where you work now anyway!
Engagement is an easily-gamed metric that (in the absence of heavy gaming) usually vaguely reflects satisfaction, addiction and usefulness. Gaming for engagement is unethical in the general case, but I suspect this specific instance is leaning towards “satisfaction” / enjoyment, rather than addiction. (I'm not certain, though; I don't understand the (para)social dynamics well.)
> An interesting thing we saw was that investing in D-list creators could have a way higher ROI than A-list creators.
Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric, “marginal minutes of viewing content gained per marginal dollar given to personality.” If you meant real ROI (“dollars of revenue minus ad expense per attributed channel”) there’s no way this is true. This is how people observe that only the top 10 or so web destinations make any sense to advertise on but Google sends you traffic from 99,990 more trash websites that never convert, because in aggregate you might barely break even but the extra non converting traffic enabled Google to spend all your budget faster. D-Listers are definitely not ROI positive and anyone who measures that to be so is almost certainly making an attribution error or has a product that is already good enough to sell without targeted ads.
I'm not saying D-Listers are worthless. They aren't! They are ROI negative today. D-Listers are exclusively valuable for the potential of becoming A-Listers.
Anyway this parasocial relationship stuff is a huge red herring because people who aren't sick in the head and need followers for weird reasons are only doing this to become Hollywood stars.
>> I work for a TikTok Style style short video platform and we noticed how ... investing in D-list creators could have a way higher ROI than A-list creators.
> Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric...
Except that you're responding to an obvious counterexample to your boldly-stated claim
I'm not a Luddite, but everything about these "relationships" makes me sad and cringe. Reminds me of a favorite Oscar Wilde quote: "A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."
That is, people feel like they can experience the emotions of a real friend, but without any of the obligations or real benefits of actual friendship.
Before Industrialization, people used live in small communities, with relatives spanning generations. Now that sort of thing does not exist anymore.
Now people are abusing in the name of friendship: just use others, and don't reciprocate next time. This makes sense, if there are NO repetitive interactions, if looked from the perspective of Game theory.
I wonder if mental health “maintenance” could solve this. If medical professionals could point out the dysfunction involved in such relationships, people might be more resistant to falling in these patterns.
It’s arguable that Mental health practitioners end up cultivating parasocial relationships too. Particularly if they have to earn a living from selling their services and therefore “fixing” a person leads to a drop in income.
Another reason why healthcare should be socially provided. You want your mental health practitioner like your judges - free from money worries so they can exercise their judgement truly independently.
For me, this is one of the most important points that mental health literature and advocacy needs to reckon with before I trust it as much as physical medical science.
There are too many candidate examples in my own life for me to ignore the possibility that their is some truth to the first sentence of your post.
There are interesting edge cases to these sorts of relationships, like Deadmau5 finding a vocal from a fan on stream for a song that is now one of his most well known ones. [1] From what I've seen, a lot of Twitch streamers and YouTube creators also form these sorts of relationships with other influencers, with it ending up in them connecting with each other. That dynamic is completely different than one between a person who has no followers on a platform whatsoever, but I wouldn't say the divide is as clear cut as fans and influencers.
When we're talking about influencers with hundreds of thousands of fans, like the ones which this article focuses on, the divide is still more well defined. However, when we get to people with only thousands of active followers, everything starts getting a bit murkier. What about a lesser known influencer at first forming parasocial relationship with a superstar and then actually connecting? I've seen this happen dozens of times with less known influencers connecting with the likes of Casey Neistat or Jon Olsson. [2]
There have definitely been times when it has seemed to me like a streamer on Twitch has been as dependent on their fans socially as their fans have been on them. A lot of this can be completely manufactured and facetious, but I think there are times when the non-stop schedule of the profession can seriously inhibit relationships outside of the cyberscape. Could be seen as another side of the coin when it comes to unhealthy forms of parasocial relationships.
I think the core question the article prunes at is amazing and I agree with just about all of it, just adding in some thoughts it provoked.
This reminds me significantly of Ze Frank's The Show back around 2007. I remember at the time thinking that he had tapped into something absolutely powerful, a persona feeding off of a highly engaged viewership. It felt like being a part of a special club and more of a participant than a viewer. The earth sandwich was a good example of that with someone putting together an antipode web tool and a follower's race to complete the first sandwich. I'm not sure what his specific inspirations were, but he definitely got a several year head start on what became an absolutely enormous social phenomenon.
In the future, we'll probably have "Her" style chatbots that are trained on a given influencer's persona so these parasocial relationships can be cultivated and monetized at scale.
I think we're still just seeing the vanguard of this. Youtubers, maybe a few politicians. It's hard to predict, from this vantage point, where it will go.
IMO, we're this is about many-2-many communication figuring itself out, at scale. Many-2-many is our default mode, what we naturally do. A group of people talking shop over dinner, a bunch of kids deciding between soccer and tag.
Most "non-natural" modes are a diminutive version. Mass media, telephones, letter writing & most other technology enabled modes of communication cut down on the complexity. In journalism, one person writes, and the others read. In democracy, we have many-to-one communicates by voting... reducing communication to "yes/no."
The telephone works for one-to-one chats. Add more people, and problems crop up. Minor latencies are more noticeable. People talking over eachother becomes more grating. People zone out. Our innate abilities to handle many-to-many talking are subtle and hard to translate to technology. "Social media," from HN to Zoom to FB are all different ways of enabling many-to-many, an its unsurprising that this is fertile ground. Any difference to how the media, is designed yields major differences in form.
Anyway the social/psychological side of this is rapidly evolving. Hard to see where it ends up. I suspect CEOs/managers and such may eventually cultivate parasocial relationships. As this article implies, it's a phenomenon of the mode and medium of communication. They're already in the space, one-to-many relationships cultivated in a many-to-many medium.
> IMO, we're this is about many-2-many communication figuring itself out, at scale. Many-2-many is our default mode, what we naturally do. A group of people talking shop over dinner, a bunch of kids deciding between soccer and tag.
I think it would be more apt to refer to this as few-to-few. As the number of people increases in a party, people prefer to splinter into small groups where they have a greater speaking to listening ratio than all stand around listening to one person speak.
Sure, taxonomy is always debateable. It is approximate though. Beyond 4, other dynamics crop up. maybe we need more cultural tools to keep a conversation. Maybe the conversation starts to subdivide, some people dominate, other zone out...
The "parasocial" dynamic that the author describes is part of that complexity, emerging around central figures in a many-to-many scenario.
I think its pretty safe to say lockdown created a perfect environment for these kind of relationships to blossom at much faster rate and on a much larger scale than normal. Even still, I'd be surprised if the viewership numbers didn't dip drastically on live streams, even with IRL content being offered.
>Despite how blurred the parasocial lines may be and how hard platforms are working to erase them entirely, the reality is rather simple: the notion of a special bond with a creator is contrived, and what seems like unfettered access to their lives is curated. It’s the intimacy you’d get from any imaginary friend.
A very wise ending of a very thoughtful article.
And I think it's deeply unethical that some creators abuse this artificially created feeling of intimacy. In this case it's more like "parasitical relationships".
Before social media, back in the days of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses, Metallica...an artist going out of their way to create a relationship with fans was seen as "trying too hard" and immediately become uncool.
I think it's still true.
Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.
If you are a company looking for a face to the next marketing campaign you'll find yourself begging Di Caprio, not Johnson.
The problem with social media is that gives a raw number of followers, but it can't establish the "quality" of those followers.
If you have less followers than some other account it might be because your demographic maybe less impressionable, but for that exact reason they are bound to be more loaded then other demographics and if you try and sell them something the grand total in dollar terms will be higher even though the universe of followers is smaller.
I think this is true for entrepreneurs and businessmen as well...diluting the brand is something that affects everybody.
Musk tweeting daily and acting childish for example...compare him against a Jim Simons who keep his mouth shut, doesn't divulge his results and forces people to dig info on him and on the fact that his firm makes 10 M in profit for every employee
>Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.
Perhaps, but who really cares?
"Coolness" is a juvenile thing to aspire (or look up) to.
And Dwayne Johnson probably makes shitloads of money, has fun, and has tons of satisfied fans, whether dilluting his brand or not.
>What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:
Again: who cares? Audience-wise both movies were watched less than some The Rock vehicles. It would only matter if The Rock was insecure and wanted to prove his is a "real actor", which never seemed to be his thing.
The audience of Di Caprio is emotionally deep, and loaded with money and relevancy , plus they are great storytellers themselves among their respective social groups. People of culture, people who have cumulatively billions of hours of interesting conversations to produce.
Johnson's audience is shallow, not loaded with anything except desire for the quickest dopamine hit they can get.
Di Caprio is sitting on a gold mine, it's the opposite for Johnson
There's a reason why Steve Jobs and Paul Allen loved The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix instead of Cardi B, Kanye West and One Direction.
Same goes for Di Caprio audience vs. Johnson's audience.
This remark invited the comparison and I did reflect upon it.
Be careful what you wish for: a moral comparison of “gargantuan hedge fund profits” to “Twitter clown” comes out initially worse for Renaissance, since hedge funds, especially the very effective ones, are extracting wealth from the inefficiencies of markets; this creates no economic value, it merely reallocates it to entities with pre-existing wealth and knowledge capital, and in particular siphons wealth from less developed economies. This action has a high potential to reinforce global inequity, which degrades opportunity and thereby slows the rate of human progress.
Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which many lines can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for everyday consumers.
That is, simply, many (millions to billions) of people value electric cars, nation-scale grid batteries, underground transport systems, and the myriad of services they receive from orbital platforms.
Very, very few individuals experience the benefits of hedge fund returns, directly or otherwise.
The saving grace for Jim Simons is the subsequent philanthropy, which makes his hedge fund, in part, a private tax on inefficient market players that feeds forward into education and research, but without which the fund would be just another Gini multiplier.
>Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which a line can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for global consumers.
Do they? I see them more as "more of the same crap, but with a techy gloss", for people who don't really need any of it, and whose marginal life improvement bu buying them will be close to zero.
Not sure how low-cost orbital rocketry, power-grid stabilisation on a nation scale, and tunnel engineering, can be so wilfully dismissed as “same crap with gloss”, even if you don’t like the cars. In particular it seems to skip right past the work of the very many talented and brilliant people involved in those projects, in a hurry to be maximally glib.
(a) Does that impact you or anybody you know outside of a tiny amount with no difference in your life?
(b) What power-grid stabilization?
(c) What tunnel engineering? Where's the tunnel that makes any difference to people's lives (and a difference offseting the costs at that)? Or you mean the one in Las Vegas, a less than glorious 2 miles or so taking tourists around?
>In particular it seems to skip right past the work of the very many talented and brilliant people involved in those projects, in a hurry to be maximally glib.
The problem in the 21st century (as opposed to the 20th century technologists) is that "very many talented and brilliant people" work in crap, from selling ads, to the latest consumer BS.
Yes, these things make an enormous difference to lives on a grand scale and advance overall human capability both for the capabilities they provide directly and the research they enable. Orbital platforms are essential for modern standards of safety, logistics, utilities, communications, even healthcare. Tunnels are essential for mass transit. The civilisational value of infrastructure is incalculable, because it’s not linear, it’s a step change.
Complaining about ads seems wildly off topic.
As for “what power grid”, that’s just another display of wilful ignorance.
Dwayne Johnson has been the highest paid film actor for a couple years in a row now.
And I think claiming Leo is "cooler" and better as an actor is a bit silly. Dwayne is an action star and the best at what he does, Leo does an entirely different thing with more dramatic, serious roles.
It's like comparing and NBA athlete to an NFL athlete. They aren't even competing against each other, and who cares?
> Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.
DiCaprio also can't do anything to defend his brand, which would've been good since everyone noticed he only dates 18 year olds and serially gets rid of them when they get too old.
As for Musk, I always thought his kids actually tweet for him…
Parasocial relationships are a bug in your brain deriving from the fact that your social circuitry wasn’t designed to see people who are not literally in front of you.
Clout Chaser
/klout 'CHāsər/ noun: a person who strategically associates themselves with the success of a popular person or a currently contemporary trend to gain fame an attention. This personality disorder is often resembled as, "riding the wave" without concern for damage or integrity
Relationship? What relationship? Creators who can offer only "slice of personal life" to the audience have no value.
But wait? They are using Big Brother reality show model.
Everything for money and fame. And this is what? The future?
No thanks.
