PARASOCIALIZE

5 stories

BRAND

The one that learned your name. Platforms, sports clubs, telecoms, the anniversary counter. They know you. They know ten million people the same way.

A shop window. A shop, which is also a version.
A shop window. A shop, which is also a version. · nobody@flickr.com ("Minso Rune (SL)") · CC 2.0

YouTube just put your spending on the scoreboard

Nine separate parasocial stories came out of one event. The throughline is worse than any of them.

Here is what nobody said out loud at Made on YouTube: the relationship is now a fixture with a sponsorship category. Live Showdown decides the score by what viewers spend. Creator posts and comments go on the television. Shopping GMV is up thirteen times and they finally put a number on it. You are not watching a person any more, you are watching a venue that has learned exactly how much a feeling costs, and it is asking you to settle up in public.

Read the full thing
BRANDLAW 3

The living room is now a comment section

YouTube's creator posts and remote comments are built for the TV. Your sofa is a forum now.

The single weirdest thing about this is how small the change is and how complete. A person used to sit on a couch and watch something. Now they sit on a couch and are in a room where the person can see them. Nothing was added except a comment box, and everything changed, because the comment box is the whole architecture of a parasocial relationship and we finally put it on the big screen where it belongs.

Parasocial MagazineRead →
BRANDLAW 5

YouTube added paid membership spaces and is fighting Patreon for them

The platform that built the parasocial relationship is now selling a room inside it.

Watch the sequence and it is the whole story of the last ten years. First the relationship was accidental. Then it was a feature. Now the relationship is a product with a paywall around the parts where it gets intimate. Somebody in an office decided that the feeling people have is worth recurring revenue, and honestly? They are usually right about the thing and wrong about everything else.

Parasocial MagazineRead →
BRANDLAW 2

The business press has started writing about parasocial attachment and calling it customer obsession

TechTarget, on the four components of a customer obsession model. Read it twice and then read this site instead.

I want to be fair here: companies genuinely are trying to know their customers, and most of them are bad at it in boring ways. But watch the vocabulary migrate. It went from a psychological observation to a sales framework in about fifteen years, and the moment a feeling becomes a component in a model, nobody in the room is talking about the person anymore. The Insight Company is what that looks like from inside.

TechTargetRead →
BRANDLAW 3

Everyone is renting everybody's audience now

Twitch reopens a ban, Netflix finds 1 in 6 YouTube users subscribes, and everyone admitted it in the same week.

Nobody is going it alone any more, which means the room you have a feeling in is leased, sublet and cross-promoted, and the person who built it does not live there. This is Company Dreamer with the good parts removed. The industry does not steal your dream, it holds it kindly, at a price, on somebody else's floor, and it renews monthly.

Parasocial MagazineRead →

Other aisles

IDOLCREATORCHARACTERCOMPANIONWORLDCROSSOVERCONTESTGRIEFDANGER

See everything, searchable →