Community is Currency
Community is no longer where you live but where you spend your time, in many ways at least. Monoculture is declining and fragmentation is the norm. That fragmentation has put a massive value on consolidation or anything that resembles it.
Cultural cornerstones where people come together around a shared interest or passion matter, and those places are more often than not happening online. Most Americans don’t know their neighbors and if they do, they rarely interact. That stat can be a sobering one for some, but the point is that’s the reality. Our deepest connections have moved online, and that’s something businesses should be taking notice of.
Penn National Gaming just took a $163 million stake in Barstool Sports. They did this because gambling is on the rise, but they chose Barstool Sports for one reason—its community. Barstool has built a massive fan base who have bought into its ethos and values entirely. Penn National Gaming sees Barstool as its way to move a massive group of users to start gambling. That’s the power of an online community.
Spotify just bought The Ringer podcast network, another community built around the The Ringer brand, its hosts and its content. The Ringer gives Spotify the makings of what looks like potentially exclusive podcast content for its audio streaming platform. Right now Spotify-owned podcasts can be listened to pretty much anywhere, but when you have a community as passionate as that of The Ringer’s, putting that content within a Spotify walled garden could motivate that community to become Spotify customers and users. The acquisition of The Ringer community may very well be the precursor to podcast wars, resembling the battle for content we have with the video streaming wars.
Then there’s Facebook. Facebook’s latest ad campaign isn’t designed to improve its image or build adoption for a new app, it’s all about Facebook Groups. The News Feed has created context collapse—when every social context collides and users share everything with everyone. That’s led people to disengage on Facebook. Groups are (one of) Facebook’s solutions to that. In this case, community isn’t the currency, it’s the solution.
Social media is following an interesting trajectory. What started out as everyone opening up to everyone else at once is reverting to people closing themselves off to connect with just those they share a connection to. We’re finding our tribes, but what’s unique about the moment we’re in is those tribes are online. And for better or worse, those communities have power we’re only starting to understand.