One thing that happens to me now that I am in my fifties is every once in a while, I stop and look around and realize that that something that was a fundamental building block to how I navigated the world is just gone now, and there are successful, functioning adults who have no idea that the world was once different. I saw one thread on Bluesky with people wondering how anyone ever used paper maps to navigate!
Now, at one level, this is just the natural progression of things. I’m sure that in 2000 there were people thinking the same things about my cohort, and in 2050 today’s 20somethings will be thinking them about a new generation. But there’s one aspect of this that I think deserves more attention. I think a lot of the things we’re losing are because in many cases the balance has gotten out of whack between what I’ll call the Fervent Followers and the Causal Audience.
(Note – I will freely admit that I have been thinking about this post for months and one of the things that has held me up is trying to come up with a name for what I’m talking about. I’m still not sure I have done a good job with that but darn it I am going to write this darn thing.)
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that for any popular thing, there is a larger group that thinks the thing is perfectly fine and a smaller group that is much more intense in its interest. I was writing about that years ago. But what I have started paying more attention to is that it’s not just the smaller group of Fervent Followers likes the thing more than the larger Casual Audience. Often, the Fervent Followers like the thing for completely different reasons – sometimes reasons that come into conflict with the Casual Audience!
I’m not nearly as invested in sports as I used to be, but baseball has probably been the sport I have paid the most attention to over the years. One frequent discussion is about the value of the regular season vs. the playoffs in Major League Baseball. The MLB season has 162 games, which provide teams with ample opportunity to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses. A playoff series contains between 3 and 7 games, which is a much smaller sample size, and allow for frequent fluky results.
A lot of diehard baseball fans hate this about the playoffs, and they hate that the playoffs have expanded to allow more teams to participate – thus increasing the chances that a team that was inferior through the full season will defeat a team that did better. But in part because of that possibility, and because the smaller sample creates less margin for error, much of the audience finds the playoffs much more dramatic. They pay much more attention to the playoffs than the regular season, and so Major League Baseball has tried to create more playoff baseball to satisfy this Casual Audience.
In the process, they have made the regular season less intense, because teams don’t put as much pressure on themselves to win their division because they are confident they will make the playoffs regardless. This makes the regular season that the Fervent Followers value less appealing to them, because they don’t see pennant races like 1993’s National League West, where a San Francisco Giants team that won over 100 games missed the playoffs because the Atlanta Braves won even more.
This tension always exists and creators have to figure out how to balance the interests of the Fervent Followers with those of the Casual Audience, because both are important. But I think that what’s accelerating today is that technology is making it easier to create products that are more narrowly tailored, so that they let the Casual Audience get what they care about without the parts that the Fervent Followers care about. And then the Fervent Followers aren’t a large enough market by themselves to support the thing that they appreciate, so producers stop creating or distributing the thing that satisfies them.
We can see this when we look at movie theaters. There are definitely still people who care about the unique and special experience of watching a movie in a theater. Over the last two weeks we’ve seen stories about the great lengths some people are going to in order to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX. Nicole Kidman has been congratulating us for spending money to enjoy having our heart broken for years now. The Fervent Followers are far from non-existent!
But even those stories point to the problem. There are only a couple of dozen places in the US to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX because all of the projectors are 50 years old and no one has figured out how to make it worthwhile to design and build new ones. AMC certainly doesn’t have the money to build hundreds of auditoriums to hold giant IMAX screens. They’re busy advertising to the audience that already bought a ticket so they’ll feel good enough about the purchase to maybe do it again!
The data shows the problem. In the 1930s people bought so many more tickets to movie theaters than they do today. I see a claim in the Los Angeles Times that people bought 80 million tickets a week – more than 4 billion a year! (That number seems absurd to me and I can’t see where the Times got it, but I haven’t been able to find a number I feel more confident in.) In North America we haven’t cracked one billion since the pandemic, according to Statista.
What’s happened? Well, over the 90 years, we have seen wave after wave of technological innovation that allowed parts of the Casual Audience to get what they like without having to go for the full-blown celluloid cathedral experience. Television. Cable. VCRs. Widescreen HDTVs. Tablets. Smartphones. People who just want to watch a story – or even half-watch a story while they think about something else – now have so many more options.
“The movies” as something distinct from streaming video programs and short-form social video content is becoming increasingly more niche, ever more dependent on a smaller group of Fervent Followers. And that group is large enough to sustain things like a handful of mega budget blockbusters and smaller niche independent projects like this summer’s Obsession and Backrooms. But it’s not able to sustain the quantity or diversity of films that the ticket-buying audience supported 25 or 50 or 100 years ago.
And that’s often not just a problem for the Fervent Followers. Yeah, the Casual Audience’s primary wants are satisfied by the alternatives they’ve chosen. But while I understand the economic logic of creating new, more specialized products to give people what they want without having to pay for things that they value less or may not even want, there is a downside. The Fervent Followers are likely to invest considerable time, money, and effort into evaluating and appreciating the product. Creators who are trying to balance appeal to both audiences will make an effort to include elements that satisfy the expectations of this group, and that will often create a richer product that brings benefits to the Casual Audience even if that audience wasn’t looking for those benefits.
Imagine that Major League Baseball completely eliminated the regular season and just made a tournament of short playoff series. Yes, every game would have the drama of high stakes. But you’d have a much lower chance of series between good teams that have been tested by the regular season, and the atmosphere of the games would probably be less exciting without fans who have invested months into following these players.
A more realistic example is what’s happened to local newspapers over the last 25 years. The Casual Audience wanted the classified ads, the sports scores, the TV listings, the stock prices, and so on. So they bought a product that had those things plus more extensive reporting, analysis, criticism, and so on that had a Fervent Following but wasn’t the primary appeal to most of the customers. And since the newspaper was already there, maybe the Casual Audience would look at the headlines or read a story or two, which was a nice extra benefit.
But now that technology means people can get the ads or the scores or whatever directly, they don’t buy the newspaper. Not only are they not getting the spillover benefits, the Fervent Followers aren’t getting what they care about either, because they can’t bear the full cost of generating all that reporting, analysis, criticism and so on. Almost everybody is worse off because the largest chunk of the audience is able to get exactly what they want and nothing more.
This kind of change is inevitable, and I’m not saying we should stifle progress or not create new products because it will make older ways of doing things outdated. But I think we need to pay more attention to interdependence so that we can be more ready for the consequences when one part of an interdependent system changes substantially. I think technology is increasing our ability to optimize, and we often rush into that optimization without thinking about the consequences and how we might want to mitigate them. As I was writing this piece I started thinking more and more about the importance of bundles, so much that rather than make it one part of this piece, I want to spend more time thinking about it as a topic in its own right.
But an important place to start is understanding that so many of the things we use and experience are in fact a bundle – not a single product, but a combination of things that appeal to different audiences. And it can be very helpful to take a minute from time to time to think about how the group that you are not part of is experiencing the thing in a very different way than you are. And that difference may be a vital feature, not a problem to be solved by more specialization.
