The Wednesday Audio
The Wednesday Audio
Destroy your audience
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Destroy your audience

The Wednesday Audio #6
3

The episode where I try to convince you to destroy your audience.

The audience doesn’t exist.


The transcript

You know what? I start more of these podcasts with me sighing than I do with me being in a happy mood or anything. Happy Wednesday. That was me trying to be enthusiastic is Wednesday again, it's another Wednesday audio.

This is episode six of the only podcast in the world about Wednesdays. And today I want to actually talk not really about Wednesdays, but one of the reasons why I made the Wednesday audio, the Wednesday audio was made because I had this idea in my head and simply put, the idea is destroy your audience.

That's what I want to talk about today. Destroying your audience. What I actually mean by it, because there's been a lot of confusion with this. I keep tweeting it on Twitter. Not really explaining what I mean. This is what I mean by destroying your audience. Here we go.

I made the Wednesday audio because I wanted to continue destroying my audience. First of all, to say on this point, I hate the term audience. I don't even think of myself as having an audience, but there is 150 people at them in here. I've only just started this newsletter. There's 150 people already on this newsletter that I could con consider an audience by the way, why can't I say I consider.

So I don't even consider it as an audience. I consider it as people that have chosen to just listen to things that I've got to say, cool, that's fantastic. And on Twitter, I see it in the same way on Twitter. I've got where more than 150 people paying attention, but I don't consider them as an audience.

The second I think of them as being an audience of being some kinds. Collective that I'm standing in front of. I think that's the second that you lose. So really this idea of destroying your audience. First of all, is this simple is destroying the concept of having an audience. I don't make any of this foreign audience.

I'm not making this for you. I'm making this for me. I create things for me. The Wednesday audio was an attempt to make a podcast about Wednesdays and seeing how far I could string out this random, stupid idea. And also, secondly, because Thomas J Bevin said, it'd be a cool idea. I kind of agreed. And I thought, yeah, what have I got to lose?

Let's make a podcast about Wednesday. So I don't create for the people I don't create for an audience is really catharsis. Or sometimes it's thinking out loud. Sometimes it's purely for the art of creation to enjoy creating something, to be away from the day job, to be away from other things. And to just sit.

And enjoy the pure process of creation if other people enjoy that too well, that's awesome. But that, isn't the goal. The fact that somebody else enjoys it is obviously nice. It's a little bit of an ego boost when somebody else follows you, it means you had to grow a little bit, but it's nowhere near the primary reason, not even the secondary reason, the third, the fourth, whatever the audience doesn't exist.

There's the big, big, big idea of being audience driven. And if you was to see me saying that, I put it in quotation marks. If I was audience driven, well, this thing that I'm recording now wouldn't even exist. There's such a tiny audience for the things that we're talking about now, Wednesdays, but it just, it wouldn't even exist.

There'd be no point in it. No audience is asking for a podcast about Wednesday. And even my men podcast, the men podcast, I record every week, get doing things usually over an hour long and I don't split it down. It's not split into nice little nature songs. If I was audience driven, if I was making the content foreign audience to please an audience, well, I've been making neat little chunks of three to five minutes and uploading them to YouTube.

And I'd probably have a secondary podcast that was just the shot clips. I'm not making things easy for people to consume because I don't have an audience. I want to raise. People that consume the things that I create. I want to make people think when they consume the things that I create, my email newsletter, wouldn't be about Wednesdays and primarily watches.

If I was bothered in any way about having an audience and even this, this whole idea of audience with discussing the word. The audience thing kind of thing makes you think something like I'm stood in front of a group of people, and we all want to, when we get sucked into this idea of making an audience, we all want a bigger and better audience.

And the truth is a bigger audience. Isn't necessarily a better audience. 500,000 Tik TOK followers is about equivalent to probably 10 followers. And 10 followers on Twitter is probably equivalent to about 200 followers on Instagram. This idea of audience and these numbers and all this kind of stupid stuff like this.

Then not equivalent. There is a bigger audience. Isn't a better audience. A better audience only comes from challenging people from making content that you truly want to create. The comes from somewhere deeper, artistic dare. I use that word. I never even considered myself to be any form of artistic in my entire life, but really it's having an artist mind.

You are creating this thing because you want to create this thing. And then obviously when you create challenging things, when you create things that aren't easy to consume, that takes time for somebody to consume you raise everybody's shit. You raise everybody's ships by producing difficult things that make people think is destroying this idea of audience, destroying the idea that somebody is coming to you to listen to your opinions, to automatically accept the things that you said, because you are the expert and you are Lord God, you are, the guru is destroying this idea of having an audience.

I think in the long run, nobody at all wins. When we sit around all day consuming cheap and easy content we've been well, I know some people in the culture that I'm part of call this as content brand. We've become content brand. We'd like cheap and easy content. We like going on YouTube and watching things for five minutes.

We like going on tour. And read in one tweet, there's 380 characters, but none of us have sat there and read in long form blog posts. And none of us are sat there, reading books. None of us are consuming hard content that makes you think we're all consuming cheap and easy content. So in the long run. If you're obsessed with building an audience, and if you're obsessed with the idea of engagement and growing, whatever that even means by necessity, you need to produce cheap and easy content.

And when you produce cheap and easy content, you aren't raising all the ships around you. You sink in the mall, you're making everybody drink. Destroy your idea of having an audience of creating an audience of engaging an audience of keeping an audience happy, the whole idea of audience and the word is quite frankly, bullshit thinking in terms of an audience is a slow trip to the wrong side of the tracks.

All you'll get from it is cheap and easy content. That's what I mean, when I said destroy your audience.

I like how the bell goes off at the end. That makes it sound like I've just delivered a sermon. Doesn't it?

Thank you as always for listening to my Wednesday audio podcast, there is next to no purpose to this podcast is a place for me to be honest and open with my podcast in to fulfill no audience obligations at all, to actually talk about these topics like destroying audiences and making things that I want to make.

This was episode six. I'll be over again, recorded another one next Wednesday, where the Ari. Well, that's up to you, but anyway, hope I'll see you next week. See you soon. Maybe .

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The Wednesday Audio
The Wednesday Audio
A satirical and often maniacal look at internet hustle culture through the dark eyes of Wednesday evenings. If you’re looking for self-improvement, this isn’t it.
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Craig Burgess