Don't Wait For Applause: Be Your Own Audience

Written by Lady T

Most of us want to be loved, noticed and at times the center of everyone's attention; especially people who seek fame in the entertainment industry or in public positions, such as in politics. For every 1 elite world-renowned singer, actor, poet or other famous talent, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are equally talented but didn't have the right management or weren't at the right place at the right time to be discovered.

On social media platforms, ordinary people create pages and channels hoping to go viral and attract massive numbers of followers and subscribers. Popular genres, such as blogs, cooking and lifestyle, have become oversaturated, and new unknown creators have little chance of being heavily promoted. Even if a creator acquires a large number of subscribers, it doesn't guarantee that the followers will actually watch the content and engage with it.

Several YouTube creators have channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers yet each of their videos only average a couple thousand viewers with a handful of comments. Critics have accused Facebook of heavily promoting paid advertisement programs (using bots) to their creators who want to boost their numbers of members and engagement.

In my opinion it takes a vain person who would pay for AI-generated bots to make his or her platforms appear more popular than they are. Or perhaps that person is doing it with the intention for financial gain. Regardless, before people start a social media platform, I suggest they should be crystal clear and honest with themselves about their reason for starting it. For people with no financial motive who truly only want to entertain people with their content, they should consider how they would feel if they get very few followers, viewers, comments and reactions after several months or years. They should ask themselves would they be likely to continue creating content regardless, or would they consider themselves a failure and give up.

Before starting a social media platform, people should also figure out what their measure of success would be. For example, how many followers would they need to consider themselves successful? And how long would they allow themselves to reach that target number of followers before they consider their venture a failure? What model are they using for comparison? Some newcomers go for the gusto and compare themselves to the most popular content creators in their genre.

As of late December 2025, a YouTuber using the pseudonym MrBeast had over 456 million subscribers to his main channel and was considered the most-subscribed channel. Any new unknown YouTuber would be delusional in setting a goal of surpassing MrBeast's success within a year. James Stephen "Jimmy" Donaldson, aka MrBeast, created his first YouTube channel at the age of 13 in February 2012. It's been through dedicated hard work, with help from friends and producers, that he's been able to achieve and maintain that level of success throughout the years.

Regardless of how dedicated and hard anyone works to build a social media platform, its success depends on people subscribing to it and supporting it. Platforms go viral and grow by members commenting, sharing the content and recommending them to others who subscribe. If a platform doesn't grow, it doesn't necessarily mean the content is not good; it could mean there hasn't been enough activity for it to be promoted to others. Additionally the name of the platform could be so unique that the keywords wouldn't result in any search, meaning potential subscribers wouldn't be able to locate it.

I think people would do best with the mindset that if their platform grows, that's wonderful; and if it doesn't grow as much or as quickly as they had intended, that's okay. They should stay dedicated and only give up on their platform if and when they decide to, perhaps because their personal life has become too busy, or it has become too expensive to create and edit the content, or they simply lost interest. People should not give up because their audience has not grown as large as they had hoped. They should be their own audience and cheer themselves on for the great job they're doing--and that should be enough. That's the healthy mindset for content creators in the social media industry, and most likely for anyone in the entertainment industry.

If you're a content creator, fall in love with seeing yourself on camera and hearing your own voice. Always look for the latest technology to improve the quality of your video and audio recording equipment. Change up the props in your background and change the location sometimes rather than always recording sitting behind the same desk. Change up your wardrobe, hairstyles and jewelry. The idea is to make the quality of your content so pleasing and entertaining to yourself that you would subscribe to it and anxiously await more if it were someone else's platform.

If you don't find your content interesting and useful and you have no desire to see any more of it, why would anyone else find it interesting and want to subscribe? Sometimes you may need to go back to the drawing board and consider changing your genre and direction of your content, and put together a plan to reinvent your platform, perhaps using a new name to draw a different type of audience. Always keep in mind, you are your best audience member.