The Psychology and Economics of Audience Capture
It’s hard to be vegan. It’s especially hard being a violin-playing vegan who’s hoping to get noticed on YouTube. Just ask Nicholas Perry, who, in 2014, began uploading videos of himself playing his instrument and talking to his audience about the value of foregoing animal products. The audience’s response to these videos? Crickets.
Despite this humble start, Nick didn’t quit. Fast forward a decade and Nick has over 8.6 million followers on YouTube, and has amassed over 2.5 billion views.
So what transpired in these intervening years? Is this the story of perseverance and dedication, and of steadfastly pursuing one’s true passions? Through sheer charisma and will, did the violin-playing vegan bend the market to his will and cultivate an engaged audience?
A glance at Nick’s YouTube channel and you’ll see the complete opposite. How can we make sense of Nicholas Perry’s evolution? Two words: Audience capture.
What Nikocado Avocado Teaches Us About Audience Capture
In response to an initially quiet reception, Nicholas Perry quit veganism and did a complete 180 with his content strategy. He swapped soft-spoken monologues on the merits of not eating animals for videos of himself eating untold amounts of food in one sitting - a trend in South Korea known as “mukbang”, and loosely translates to “eating” and “broadcast”.
And the followers began to flock. Audiences were captivated by the intensity of these videos in which Nick would often consume entire restaurant menus in a single sitting. As the onlookers grew, they implored him to ever-increasing heights of consumption. In one popular video from 2020, he consumes over twelve pounds of Panda Express in a little over half an hour.
And as his YouTube channels swelled with content, so too did his waistline. Fans became concerned with his weight, but not enough so to stop encouraging his videos. In 2021, he reported that he weighed 360 pounds, more than twice his weight in 2014.
Even with the dramatic changes to his appearance, the most shocking contrast is with his personality. Online he started going by “Nikocado Avocado”, which became a kind of alter ego. Whereas Perry in 2014 was thoughtful, polite, and reserved, Nikocado Avocado was abrasive and uncaring.
Nikocado has become ensnared in several controversies, as other mukbang stars, such as Stephanie Soo and Zach Choi, accused him of harassment. In a separate incident, a large group of YouTubers demanded his removal from the platform for appearing to disrespect the late Kobe Bryant by making light of his death.
The tragic story of Nikocado Avocado, which is covered beautifully in Gurwinder’s substack, provides a shocking testament to the dark powers of audience capture. But why did this transpire? We may be tempted to look at Nick’s evolution and see it as a personal failure. But assigning this to a character flaw would be overly dismissive, and would neglect the larger economic and psychological variables at play.
When we examine audience capture in more detail, we see that it isn’t reserved for specific individuals online chasing likes, but is instead a pervasive phenomenon with deep roots in market dynamics and human nature.
Let’s begin with the most obvious culprit: social media feedback
Audience Capture and The Feedback Loops of Social Media
There’s little doubt that the dynamics of social media landscape introduces new levels of encouragement for audience capture. With more data, analytics, and up-to-the-minute feedback from their audiences, creators get richer, and more sophisticated feedback about how to sculpt new content. Before social media, you could be a struggling painter for years before you got any actionable feedback about how to make your art more palatable for a general audience. Or in the case of Henry Darger, you never got feedback.
But now? By posting your paintings on Instagram, you get direct and immediate signals about what styles people like, and what they don’t. This feedback then shapes the new art you create, which you’ll also post, and get feedback on, and so on. In this way, it can become all too easy for creatives of all kinds to become ensnared in a feedback loop with their audiences. This is the very essence of audience capture, and is exactly what happened with Nikocado Avocado.
Given this dynamic, audience capture feels like a modern phenomenon, a byproduct of how creators, audiences, and social media algorithms interact with one another. It’s tempting to think that audience capture is what happens when the pace of feedback between creator and market becomes too quick, and too direct.
But while social media accelerates audience capture, it doesn't create it. Its foundations lie within a deeper layer of how humans perform within markets.
Keynes’ Beauty Contest and The Economics of Audience Capture
One of the best examples of audience capture comes from the famed economist John Meynard Keynes in the 1940s, a great theorist of market dynamics. He used the thought experiment of a beauty contest to illustrate how the phenomenon of audience capture plays out with individual investment choices.
The idea is to imagine that you’re looking over an array of pictures submitted to a beauty contest. Your task, in this scenario, is to try and predict the top six winners of the beauty contest. At first blush, it feels like there’s an easy way to orient yourself to this problem: simply pick the six prettiest faces.
However, as Keynes points out, this is not the optimal strategy. What you want to do is try and predict what other people are going to consider to be the six prettiest faces. But if we take this step to its behavioral terminus, and we imagine that this is also what other people are doing as well, then we take this up a level: rationally speaking, you should pick the faces that one thinks that others think that others find the prettiest.
And as Keynes goes on to argue, this could have a reverberating impact on an entire marketplace. In the investment world, for example, investors may make their decisions not on their predictions of how a stock will perform, but on their projections about how other people think other people will predict them to perform. In this way, much of the behavior in markets becomes less about first-order knowledge, and more about anticipating broader, collective responses.
Marketplace Dynamics and The Psychology of Social Cognition
Could this beauty contest dynamic help explain the behavior of other markets? In 2009, Robert Schiller, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, wrote a book with George Akerlof called Animal Spirits, in which he explored the influence of this dynamic in everyday life.
He concluded that the beauty contest is always with us, whether we realize it or not. Just as much as it impacts the financial markets, it impacts the marketplace of ideas. In everyday conversation, for example, we’re communicating a basic idea to another person, but implicitly, we’re adjusting ourselves to what we think they want to hear.
As Schiller summarizes, “When we choose to tell a story to others, we base that choice on our perceptions of how people will react to that story in their own minds.. even if we are spreading a narrative for no other reason than trying to amuse ourselves, we are likely to engineer our story to spread based on our model of others’ minds.”
As we’ve seen elsewhere, this process of building models of other minds is a huge component of our social nature. This is called social cognition: our ability to simulate the internal, conscious states of other people.
Importantly, social cognition, also known as metalization, is implicit and automatic: You can’t look across at someone and not have a hypothesis - however vague or incorrect, about their state of mind. In that same vein, the model for the mind of our audience comes instinctively. And once we have this model, it's only natural that we try to please it - even if it means sacrificing ourselves to do so.
Broader Extensions of Audience Capture
As social creatures, we’re naturally attuned to the preferences and norms of other people. This is just as true whether we’re at home with our family, or we’re at a party with strangers. But the minute we enter a marketplace, our natural sensitivity to others is taken into overdrive. Our behavior becomes especially sensitive to the perceived preferences of the market.
Audience capture is a force of nature. It turned Nicholas Perry into Nikocado Avocado; from humble vegan to meat-eating mukbanger.
However, audience capture may see its strongest expression in the music and the arts. In these fields, what’s valuable is almost completely subjective, and therefore almost entirely determined by the market’s response. So what happens to audience capture when elements like status, recognition, and ego are added to the mix? That’s where we’re headed next.
Photo by Alexandre Pellaes on Unsplash
This is the first of a multi-part series on the psychology of audience capture. You can find Part 2, on the psychology of market-driven music, here.
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Psychology and Marketplace Dynamics of Audience Capture
Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2010). Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism. Princeton university press.
Asarch, S., Mendez, M., Cheong, C. and Lloyd, A. (May, 2023) Inside the rise of Nikocado Avocado, the extreme-eating YouTuber whose dramatic meltdowns have led to years of controversy and feuds, Business Insider
Butos, W. Ν., & Koppl, R. (1999). Hayek and Kirzner at the Keynesian beauty contest. Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, 9(2-3), 257-276.
Gurwinder (June, 2022) The Perils of Audience Capture, The Prism (Substack)
Keynes, J. M., Moggridge, D. E., & Johnson, E. S. (1971). The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (Vol. 30, pp. 1971-89). London: Macmillan.
Lanteri, A., & Carabelli, A. (2011). Beauty contested: how much of Keynes' remains in behavioural economics' beauty contests?. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 18(2), 269-285.
