This is Part 2 of The Economics of Getting (and Paying) Attention. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, I highly recommend starting there!

In today’s episode, I explore the “right to publicity” and the value of celebrity as an economic condition. From there, we get into how audience-building businesses gain efficiency by vertically integrating media, ads, and offers and how micro-media creators often leverage monopoly power to charge exorbitant prices.

Footnotes:

• “New wellness price point just dropped” Conspiratuality Instagram post
• The World After Capital by Albert Wenger (available free)
• “The Audience Commodity and its Work” by Dallas Smythe
• “From Celebrity to Influencer” by Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff
• Good Mythical Morning on YouTube
• Sporked
• “How Audience-Building is Different from Finding Clients” by Tara McMullin
• Vertical integration

New episodes are published in essay form every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. Get them delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge, by subscribing to What Works Weekly: explorewhatworks.com/weekly

If you’d like to learn more about how we can approach life and work differently, check out my book, What Works. I explore the history and cultural context that’s led us to this success-obsessed, productivity-oriented moment. Then I guide you through deconstructing those messages and then rebuilding a structure for work-life that works.