Traffic is cheap to buy through ads and tricks, but a real audience is people who'd miss you if you disappeared. Industry Dive has an audience because it's woven into people's routines. Building that takes time and sustained effort, not platform hacks.
I've seen you say on Twitter that people underestimate the level of effort and time and strength it takes to build an audience. You're talking about the difference now between audience and traffic. What is the difference?
I think one is an affinity with a brand and a feeling of community that's a part of it, right? When you have a real audience, you have people who are choosing to spend time with you in a way that you become part of their routine. You become part of how they identify themselves as the source they go to when something happens. It's really easy to get traffic. It's really easy to game the Facebooks of the world and the social media platforms of the world or buy it, quite honestly, with an arbitrage of low-cost places. But those people aren't necessarily coming because of you. They're becoming— coming to you because of the platform, because of the tricks, because of the ads. And I think you can grow the traffic really quick, but you can't build the loyalty without time. Strong brands are built over time. They're not built over days and weeks.
So one of the things— then we'll talk about the work that we did together— but one of the things I know we, we asked in a survey, and I think I also asked when I interviewed folks, readers and your clients, was Let's just say Industry Dive went away tomorrow, would you miss it? When you have an audience, the answer to that is, yeah, I mean, I need it and I can't, I can't, that would be terrible. The other end of the spectrum with traffic is, yeah, the world would go on. I mean, if I lost that source of, of, you know, information, I think that's good, good explanation of the distinction between audience and traffic and the difficulty of building audience.
