Four-Hour Fan Review of Star Wars Hotel
“Nicholson’s monologue, which runs longer than “Lawrence of Arabia,” has been viewed more than seven million times since it was uploaded last month and has been the talk of social media, yet I was still unprepared for how absolutely riveting it was. While it highlights a litany of problems with the hotel itself, the video can also be viewed as a diagnosis of the entertainment industry’s current ills writ large. In her frustration, Nicholson becomes a valiant truth teller, clearly articulating how corporate greed betrays loyal fans to sell a cheaper and less emotionally enriching product.”
NYT- June 7th, 2024
“Access to fandoms has never been easier. Modern technologies, increased access to the internet, and the proliferation of digital content across the globe allow fans to easily indulge in their needs for discovery, learning, and connection. Compared to years past, the opportunities for fans to get lost in content related to their fandoms and participate in the communal aspects of fan culture are nearly limitless today. This shift has given rise to a new dominant group that we call Fluid Fans.”
Amazon Ads and Twitch Research 2023
Cleaning Up NFL Toxicity
Respondology is a biz with the tech smarts to make it easy to clean up toxic sites like those belonging to NFL teams- as it explains.
“With the NFL teams’ online spaces plagued by hate, abuse, and illicit spam, the need for effective moderation to create safe spaces for fans, sponsors, and players is undeniable. Ten teams had a 6% or higher toxicity rating with the Dallas Cowboys, Buffalo Bills, and Pittsburgh Steelers ranking highest for the most toxic comments across categories like team and fan abuse, racism and homophobia, spam, scams, streaming links, and viral political events. With over half a million hateful, abusive, or spammy comments for the ten most toxic teams combined, we estimate it would take 23 dedicated full-time employees over 16,000 hours to moderate that volume of comments.”
Formula One and Fandoms
The sport’s low barrier to entry is also appealing to women. “With football, baseball, or other big sports in America, men have made it their thing. There are high walls to get in, traditions around how you watch these sports and how you behave,” Sievers explains. “With Formula 1, women don’t have to play into this culture that’s already very prevalent in America.” They don’t have to name the 1983 Super Bowl championship-title winners and their plays, for example, to participate.
The Formula 1 Channel is the latest development by F1 designed to further evolve and elevate our content experience for fans," said Ian Holmes, Director of Media Rights and Content Creation at Formula 1. "This service caters to the diverse viewing habits of our USA fanbase and serves as a great entry point for new fans into the sport, through strong curated programming which aims to showcase the drama of F1.”
From the Bloomberg interview with Reddit's CEO Steve Hoffman and his interview at the JP Morgan Global Technology and Media Conference in May 2024.
Over the past two decades, Reddit has evolved into a platform rich with a vast corpus of user-generated content, encompassing conversations on virtually every topic imaginable.
Enhanced User Experience and Growth: Reddit emphasizes top-notch user experience by focusing on search functionality and investing in backend technology to handle up to 1 billion queries a month. This approach, along with continuous product improvements, drives steady growth, adding about 1 million users a month primarily through word of mouth.
Advertising and Revenue: Advertising is a significant revenue driver for Reddit, with substantial growth in recent quarters. The platform continually improves its advertising products based on customer feedback and strategies, creating a clear and effective roadmap for sustained revenue generation through advertising, content licensing, commerce, and international expansion.
Community and AI Leveraging: Reddit's unique community structure and dedicated moderators foster vibrant discussions and consumer insights. The platform's vast content repository is a valuable asset for AI training, with deals from Google and OpenAI, and Reddit monetizes its user-generated content through social listening companies while safeguarding user identities and supporting open internet principles.
Here’s one example of a company providing access to the Reddit community for audience research.
Promoting and Releasing an Album in 2024
Grace Gordon’s guest post on Ana Andjelic’s “The Sociology of Business” substack dives into the minute details behind charli xcx’s latest album release.
“The latest charli xcx release and roll-out, “BRAT” highlights the success of packaging up a cultural product with its most committed community front-of-mind, being outside and touching people, offering exclusive artifacts and experiences to them, and letting them do the rest to interpret and build your brand energy for you.”
The Growth of Birding
“With their new book Birding for a Better World: A Guide to Finding Joy and Community in Nature, authors Molly Adams and Sydney Golden Anderson lay out a vision for how birding can be all of that and more. This new guide is presented by the Feminist Bird Club (FBC), a New York-based nonprofit organized around the principle that we can celebrate birds and champion social justice at the same time. “I don’t think that birding and conservation can move forward without an inclusive approach,” says Adams, who founded the club in 2016. Since then, FBC has expanded to more than 30 chapters worldwide as it strives to break down barriers that have traditionally harmed and excluded women, people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups.”
Audubon.org- November 2023
McGolrick Bird Club- Greenpoint, NY
“We get neighbors, artists, skaters, and weirdos birding”
Thriving birding tourism allows Ecuador’s farmers to turn their land into nature reserves.
Kickstarter and Metalabel’s Yancey Stricklet on the post-individual-May 2024
“In a message to users, Discord CEO Jason Citron says the company realized it needs to narrow its focus from “broadly being a community-centric chat app” to a service that “helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests.” The company wants to make it easier to connect before, during, or after playing a game. “
The Verge- May 29th- 2024
Misc.
An interview with Unity's Micaela Hays on how to manage toxicity in gaming- Gamesindustry.biz
Medallion- “Artists only have direct relationships with a fraction of their fanbase. This limits their ability to build tailored creative experiences and sustainable economic opportunities. Medallion is a white label technology platform empowering artists to launch digital worlds to expand fan participation, actionable insights, and economic potential.”
Why Starbucks Web3 experiment failed
A tool to map Reddit- 2023 data
Larry Towell’s remarkable photographs of Mennonite communities in Ontario and Mexico
Design for Netflix’s Tudum fan event in Brazil- Porto Rocha
If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandoms - Vox
The History of Comic-Con - A new documentary currently in production - Deadline