I look at fan capital in the wild so you don’t have to. This roundup gathers the stories that stood out to me and what they say about how fandom actually works.
Three of my most favorite fan features to date! I’m in San Francisco all week for Cookbook Week (hint for next week’s newsletter). If you’re in the area, check it out and I’ll see you there!
the internet we were promised
Perfectly Imperfect sends emails sharing what people genuinely love. The list can range from sunsets, to an emotion, to a generic product, to an obscure band, to something extremely mainstream. I love opening their emails. Their site has enough old internet that I feel good feelings as a millennial. Late last year, I researched and read about all of the early and current virtual communities. Reading this Creator Spotlight feature with Perfectly Imperfect’s co-founder was really fun. Here are my takeaways:
Their readers and fans would make “bootleg” graphics of their own favorite things because they wanted to be featured so badly. When fans start recreating your format, you’ve crossed from audience into fandom.
Fans don’t just want content. They want infrastructure for expressing who they are. You need to invest in the design and structure of your community spaces to allow for this. In PI’s case, they even let their users customize their online space which is what drove MySpace, Second Life, and other early virtual communities to flourish.
Fandom precedes monetization. Not the other way around.
If people become friends because of what you do, provide, offer, etc…you’re so much more likely to create something unbreakable.
The more the internet becomes optimized, simulated, and untrustworthy…
the more valuable weird, irrational, human fandom becomes.
number one fan
Watching Season 5, Episode 2 of Hacks was such a delight for me. Without getting into spoilers, it’s one of the clearest depictions of fandom I’ve seen on TV in a long time.
Deborah Vance, a longtime comedian, is at a fan convention after a stretch where her audience felt like she “went Hollywood.” She hadn’t been in the message boards. She hadn’t sent a newsletter in over two years. She discontinued products and offerings. She essentially stepped out of the fan to center relationship and left a vacuum behind.
Then she meets a fan who gives her a piece of fan art that took months to make. It brings Deborah to tears. I talk a lot about how the biggest indicator of a fan is how much time they spend in the fandom, and this was that idea, fully embodied.
She later encounters this blue-faced character on the roof and has a heart to heart. She’s reminded that fans love putting in the time and love showing up. And that “they want to feel like they’re in a relationship with you and that you need them more than anyone else.” And..that they want a t-shirt that only some people are allowed to get (incredible).
If you want to see how her fans ultimately rally for her (and she for them), I’d highly recommend the watch.
is it a fan page if it’s controlled?
Rachel Karten featured an agency who is creating “fan pages” on behalf of brands (like Spirit Airlines and Arby’s). I appreciate the quotation marks. The agency says calling these “fan pages” gives brands permission to be weird, low-fi, and funny.
As someone who gets fed real fandom content on social media, I think weirdness hits differently when it comes from obsession vs when it comes from a content strategy. Calling something a fan page doesn’t make it fandom. But it does make it adjacent to it!
Real fandom can turn on you, ignore you, misinterpret you, and take your work somewhere you didn’t intend. These “fan pages” are controlled, directed, measured, and optimized.
So they remove the most important part of fandom: loss of control. If you control the fans, they’re not fans.
