Deep vs Shallow Connections

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A few weeks back, the world's best-known YouTuber (MrBeast) wrote a book with one of the world's most successful authors (James Patterson).

The book is called "The Most Dangerous Games". It creates a fictionalised version of MrBeast's YouTube videos except with more death, romance, and other topics that publishers hope will keep people reading.

I'd have wagered a pretty large bet that this book would succeed.

James Patterson has sold 425 million books. MrBeast has over 515 million YouTube followers. So, you'd imagine many of their fans would pick up a copy.

And yet the sales were surprisingly low.

The book sold a reported 22,646 copies in the first week. It reached 3rd on the NYT bestseller list before falling to 14th. In the UK, it sold around 3,300 copies in its first week and debuted at 7th on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

For most successful authors, that's a good return. But for MrBeast and Patterson that's shockingly small.

You could make a strong argument that MrBeast hoovers up more of the world's attention than any other individual on the planet. Each second, 1,000 people view one of his videos.

MrBeast has sold his book to fewer people than the number of people who watched one of his videos in the last 35 seconds. And I think it's clear why.

Deep vs Shallow Connections

The reason why MrBeast's sales are shockingly small isn't a surprise.

The connection he's built with his followers is shallow. He creates engaging, clickbait content that, for a few minutes, distracts his viewers from the world. It's something to watch while catching the bus. Something to put on while doing the washing up.

The content isn't deep; it's formulaic, designed to appease the algorithms. It's not content built to make the viewer think, imagine or sympathise.

There's nothing wrong with this content, but, in my opinion, it's not particularly impressive. It's light-touch; it won't move people.

The problem is, social media (amongst other things) has convinced us that the metrics used to measure online engagement also measure human engagement. That online views are as important as offline views. That a 'like' really equals someone liking something.

It's not true.

MrBeast's views don't show how moved the viewer was. How memorable the video was. How hooked the viewer felt. Or how transported the viewer felt.

In other words, they don't reveal if the connection with the audience is shallow or deep.

In many ways, marketers and brands suffer from the same problem.

Marketers use metrics to prove a campaign's worth. We measure impressions, likes, clicks and so on as if all those metrics have equal weight.

But those metrics don't carry equal weight.

An impression from someone mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn is drastically different from an interested prospect.

MrBeast provides a pretty stark lesson for brands. Chasing shiny, yet shallow, metrics like views, likes, followers, and clicks will probably fail in the long term. Building something deeper is much harder but much more sustainable.

Cheers,

​Phill​