On Media Survivorship Bias

Success and failure in the attention economy tend to be much more chaotic and less controllable than we'd like to believe.

I spend a fair bit of time thinking about how to expand my audience, how to reach more people with my writing. I think most people who make things in the age of the internet do. Artists and writers especially—”content creators,” in the parlance of our times—are participants, whether we want to be or not, in a constant hustle for eyeballs and attention and occasionally dollars, a hustle with both online and IRL components. My own sense of which parts of that hustle are actually worth it has changed over the years. Twitter, I realized some time ago, was of at-best dubious value, with real negatives for my mental health and active presence in the rest of my life. I half-cheer, half-mourn its demise. Substack—or any of a handful of platforms currently vying to replace Twitter—may be better.

But at this moment of change in the platforms and ecosystems that make up the attention economy, I want to introduce an idea that I believe is under-discussed in our assessment of the actual value of these platforms to creators: namely, media survivorship bias.

“Survivorship bias” is an error in thinking in which survival of a given process, or success in a given process, is taken to be the most important part of the story, while failure is minimized or not considered at all. It persists as a logical fallacy in part because success is more pleasant to contemplate than failure, and in part because failure is simply hard to see and incorporate into the data. In the business world, for instance, we love “how I built this” stories of entrepreneurs creating successful businesses from scratch, and might be tempted to think that what they did is a repeatable formula that will always lead to success. But for every business success there are dozens and perhaps hundreds or thousands of failures, some of which most likely failed while using the same tactics and methods that the successes used, with the same skill and savvy—to opposite results.

The leap to the attention economy isn’t so hard to make. Every digital platform, every sector and subcategory of the media business, has its success stories, its “how I built this” tales of nobodies cultivating huge audiences for their content, and huge revenue streams. But each platform also has a much larger number of creators hustling for small audience, small dollars, or no dollars at all.

What’s the significance of this? Well, I think that an understanding of media survivorship bias leads to a few conclusions.

First, I think it’s important to take advice on how to build audience in the digital age with a major grain of salt. I’ve been as much of a consumer of the “build your platform” and “find your audience” genre of online discourse as anyone, but the promise of this kind of content tends to be over-inflated. Whether it’s about building a successful subscription newsletter or authoring a surefire bestseller, the tactics presented are simply not guaranteed to lead to success. Success in the content business is far more chaotic, more random, and more contingent on factors outside the creator’s control than we’d like to admit.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth trying to build an online audience, if that’s something that matters to you. Media survivorship bias is real, but there’s an opposite—failure bias—that can sometimes rear its head as well. In certain parts of book publishing, for instance, overblown stats about the low sales of most books can lead to an lol nothing matters attitude in which the whole business is viewed as a big game of roulette. It’s not. The two most inaccurate things you can say about success or failure in publishing are “It’s guaranteed if you just do these three things” and “It’s all random so don’t even try.” The truth is far more annoying: “Doing these things can increase your chances of success, which given the amount of content out there will still never be especially high.”

Next, it’s worth remembering the hard facts about any particular digital platform. These platforms, by their design, are essentially machines for the creation of survivorship bias: they amplify the visibility of the creators with large audiences, but don’t widely show the hosts of users hustling for little or no meaningful audience growth. In fact, most of these platforms require small-audience users to outnumber large-audience users by orders of magnitude—they need all these eyeballs to generate engagement and revenue for the marquee names, and for themselves.

In short, any profit-based media system requires more people to consume content than to create content. This isn’t new. But digital media platforms cultivate users for themselves and audiences for their biggest creators, crucially, by implying that we can all have big audiences if we only try hard enough—by pitching the hustle as a form of self-actualization. Look at this! they say, pointing to their marquee talent. They’re having fun and making money! That can be you!

Take those claims with a grain of salt, too. The dynamics of the attention economy simply don’t support it happening in a handful of cases. The real stats of every social media platform you know show that the vast majority of users have fewer followers than accounts they are following—in other words, that they are more content consumer than producer, more audience than author. And as we’ve seen with Twitter, even that big audience and almost-living wage the lucky few hustled hard enough to get is highly revocable, one disastrous sale to a dipshit billionaire away from disappearing overnight.

Lastly, given all the above, you’ve got to think about the actual value of a particular platform—which, while not as huge as the “five steps to grow your audience!” crowd and certain startup CEOs might claim, might still be real. For me, the hard-eyed questions I’m asking of any questions, the expectations I have for it, are pretty low. Does it seem fun? Can it support the work I find to be most fulfilling (writing books) rather than taking me away from that work? Can I do this without becoming miserable? That might be enough.

---

Miscellaneous and Sundry

• The Minnesota Book Awards are coming up, and I’m a nominee in the Genre Fiction category for The Temps. Unfortunately I’m going to miss the ceremony on May 2 because I’ll be flying to Hawaii with my wife. I’m guessing I’m going to be congratulating one of my fellow nominees once I land in the wee hours of Minnesota morning (which I will be very happy to do; they’re all lovely and talented folks!).

• Those of you who follow me know that I landed a 2-book deal with Sourcebooks recently. I’m not ready to share the exact pub date yet on the first book, The Long Con, but Summer 2024 is looking like the season. I’ve also started work on the second book, which will also be in the domestic thriller space. Top secret for now, but I’m having fun with it at this early stage.