Portability
The second most important content metric
The most important audience metric is depth/trust.
The deeper your trust goes with a fan, the more durable their fandom and the more willing they are to support your new ideas, products, launches.
The second most important audience metric is portability. In other words, is that fan willing to travel across platforms/experiences to show up for you across the internet.
The healthiest audiences are comprised of extremely deep fandoms within each channel and actively traveled superhighways between them.
When you think of Mr. Beast, he has fans that follow him on Twitter, watch his YouTube videos, and even swarmed to Tiktok when he started making short-form content.
If Mr. Beast launched his own YouTube competitor tomorrow, he’d have millions of people jump to that new platform to watch his videos.
That’s high portability.
As a creator, if you have low portability, you have higher platform risk.
If your IG account gets compromised, and your audience won’t follow you somewhere else, the value of that audience is highly contingent on the IG platform.
I spend an ungodly amount of time thinking about the mechanics and psychology behind cult audiences…mostly because, there is no bigger unfair advantage.
So how does one increase the portability of their audience?
For one, the best way to increase portability is to lean into the cross-platform connections that have the lowest friction.
For example, I’m finding it much easier to get people that follow me on Instagram to sign up to my Blueprint email newsletter than to subscribe to YouTube.
This means that the friction of portability from IG → email is less than IG → YouTube.
Knowing that, I should lean into the IG → email opportunity and double down there.
Another way to think portability is based on the value of the channel.
Most creators would agree that high depth/trust in email is the most valuable channel…because you have zero platform risk and super high open rates/deliverability.
Knowing that, you should design your workflows and content priorities to maximize portability to email over other channels.
Another way to increase portability is to deliver on paid value.
If someone buys a $20 product from you, and gets $2,000 worth of value from it, they will have a higher likelihood to “travel with you” across the internet, because they know you will present more high ROI opportunities for them.
Conversely, if someone buys a $20 product from you and gets <$20 worth of value, they are less likely to travel.
So to increase portability, sell a product that is an obvious home run and dramatically underpriced.
Why? It’s possible that a highly portable fan is worth more than the revenue earned from a single product.
High ROI = superfans
Superfans are highly portable (following you on all platforms)
Portability leads to unconditional support
Unconditional support leads to internet echoes (loud support across many channels at the same time)
Internet echoes lead to high exposure of new fans
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