Why Does the Creator Showcase Exist?

After 100 conversations with women creators one thing came up every single time without exception: visibility and audience growth are the problem that everybody wanted to talk about. Not how to improve content quality. Not how to learn more technical skills. Not consistency. The very first thing that everybody mentioned was visibility.

The Creator Showcase is part of a solution to that. First. in order to understand why the visibility problem is so hard to solve for independent creators I think we need understand what has changed.

The Old Model of Media Visibility and Growth and What It Actually Did

For most of the twentieth century the path to an audience ran through a small number of powerful gatekeepers. This includes: television networks, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, Hollywood film studios.  These organizations controlled both production and distribution. If you wanted to reach an audience your project had to be selected by one of those forces. They either bought it or you sold it to them and then they put it in front of the people who were already watching, reading, and listening.

There literally was no way to reach an audience without them. That was the deal. The gatekeepers and the established distribution networks were the path.

That system has largely collapsed. Some of the companies are still standing but the stranglehold on distribution is gone. We now have what are called open platforms. Create a podcast and submit it to Apple. Film a video and post it to YouTube. There is almost nothing in the way. The barrier to entry that kept independent voices out for a century is essentially gone and that is genuinely worth celebrating.

There is something thatalmost nobody talks about honestly: open platforms gave us access but we lost something too.

In the old model a new show was introduced to an existing audience by the authority of an established channel. MGM releases a new film and runs the preview on every other film in their catalog for six weeks. NBC launches a new show and promotes it during their existing programming or does a crossover episode to introduce the characters to an audience that already trusts the network. A new book gets placed in the front window of every bookstore in the country because the publisher has the relationships to make that happen.

The gatekeepers were extractive and exclusionary and the system was deeply unfair in who got selected and who didn’t. All of that is true. But the distribution muscle they provided was real. When they introduced something new they introduced it to an audience that already existed and already trusted the source.

Independent creators have the open platform. What we don’t have is a system for introducing our show to a ready and willing audience.

This is not a content problem. This is a structural problem. The system that connected new work to existing audiences has collapsed and nothing has been built to replace it. Not yet, anyway.

Promoting podcasts, YouTube shows and Newsletters on Social Media

You can run an ad for your podcast on social media. You can post consistently and hope the algorithm notices. You can pitch yourself to newsletters and hope for a mention. But you already know how that goes because you’ve probably already tried it. It’s not that it never works. It’s that it doesn’t work reliably, it doesn’t work at scale, and it requires a volume of effort that has almost no relationship to the quality of what you’re making.

There is another layer to this that is worth talking about directly. Every major social media platform today is optimized for one thing: keeping people on the platform. They do not want to send their own audience somewhere else. This is not to badmouth social media it’s the reality of the landscape today. Part of the goal is to keeping us scrolling, watching, engaging. When you post on LinkedIn about your YouTube channel or mention your podcast on Instagram you are asking the platform to help you move its audience somewhere else. The platform has no interest in doing that. In fact it actively resists it. The visibility penalty for including an external link in a LinkedIn post is real and documented. The reach suppression for content that points people off platform is not paranoia it is policy, even if it is never stated as such.

The social media strategy that I see creator coaches recommend is straightforward: build your audience on social, drive them to your show, grow your email list. The problem is that this strategy runs directly into the economic interests of the platforms you are using to execute it. You are not imagining the resistance. You are not doing it wrong. You are fighting a structural headwind that exists because your goal and the platform’s goal are not the same goal.

Some people suggest getting off social media all together. You can do that but you’ll still have the same situation. How do I find the people who are the potential audience for my show.

I have been in hundreds of conversations about this. Some of these conversations (dozens) are with coaches and professionals who get paid to teach how to grow an audience. If you push the coaches they don’t have other secret options. I don’t think this is because they are keeping the real thing that works a secret. This is the world we are currently in and it doesn’t work very well. Which is why there’s a joke which is that if you ask on reddit how to build a successful podcast the Redditors will respond with the punchline: start by already being famous. 

You are working harder than you should have to for results that are smaller than you deserve. This is not a personal failing. This is a structural reality that I am not seeing anybody in the creator economy saying out loud.

The Modern Visibility Illusion for Independent Creators

Let’s talk about what the creator economy currently offers as a solution?

The standard advice goes something like this: collaborate with other creators. Be a guest on other shows. Get speaking opportunities at summits. Attend industry events. Network your way to growth.

None of this is bad advice exactly. I think that there are two problems that don’t get talked about honestly enough.

The first follow up question is access.

How are we supposed to find these people to collaborate with? The infrastructure for finding collaboration opportunities currently exists behind the paywalls of private companies. These are things like Podmatch, Matchmaker.fm, PodcastersDirectory.com. Skool communities, even facebook groups which are free but gated. These platforms exist and some of them are genuinely useful. But they have one fundamental limitation that undermines the whole premise: the only people inside them are the people paying to be there. Which is a tiny subset of the actual universe of creators. You are networking inside a private and walled garden with other people who are also looking for the same thing you are. The audience you are trying to reach really may not be there. 

I call this the phone book problem. In 1980 if you went into a town where you had never been and you needed to find a plumber you could just look them up in the phone book. In every town around the US the phone company created a listing for FREE of every phone number and every business. Then they delivered those phone books to every house in every town also for FREE, Today there is no phone book equivalent.

The second problem is bigger and less obvious and I don’t see anybody talking about it directly. Diluted or misdirected exposure.

Guest appearances and summit spots and collaborative episodes are indirect exposure. Diluted exposure. What you actually want to do is tell people about your show. But what you end up doing instead is giving a presentation about leadership and mentioning at the end that oh by the way you have a podcast. You spend hours preparing content for someone else’s platform, performing for someone else’s audience, creating value for someone else’s show — in the hope that some percentage of those people will follow you home afterward.

It works a little. Sometimes it works more than a little. It’s a good idea. But the ratio of effort to result is brutal and the exposure is never really about you. You are a guest in someone else’s house. You are one name on a summit lineup of twenty or 200. You are a ten minute segment in someone else’s hour.

For years I’ve heard people try to explain this under the umbrella of sales is yucky. NO it’s not. If you walk into Costco on sample day and they offer you a sample you are probably happy about it. People go on sample day on purpose. They love it. That sample…it’s an ad. If they offer you a coupon and you liked the sample you’re probably thrilled. 

People love ads and sales when it’s in a time and place that they are looking for that thing. If I walk into the produce section of a grocery store and you ask if I want to know hwat’s on special I’ll say yes, please. But if I walk into the grocery store and you try to sell me a new roof for my house that’s annoying. It’s a mismatch of intention, timing and location.

What independent creators have never had is something obvious and simple: a dedicated public spotlight that is entirely about you and your show, published somewhere that the right audience can actually find it, from a source that isn’t you promoting yourself. You’re great at that but your folks hopefully already know about you.

Podcaster Mixers and Pitchfests and Industry Networking Events

I attend three or four podcaster networking events every month and I genuinely value the friendships that come from being around other people who are building what I’m building. I just want to be honest about what these events are and aren’t.

The largest mixer I participate in regularly draws about 50 people. It’s roughly the same 50 people every month. Everyone in the room wants to be heard. That means nobody is there to listen. And if the event mixes hosts and potential guests, hosts are outnumbered at a ratio that would be funny if it weren’t so predictable.

The idea behind all of these groups is that we will all invite new people and then it will grow and expand and everything will be rainbows and unicorns. Except, it doesn’t really work for the people in the room. These work best for the person who builds the room. Often these rooms are created by producers and business coaches who are picking up business from those 50 people in the room. There’s nothing wrong with that but the room isn’t really built for the growth of the people in the room.

Pitchfests have the same scale problem with an additional layer. The premise is that guests pitch their topics to hosts in the room. They are supposed to be a visibility tool for potential guests, a discovery tool for hosts. In theory this makes sense. In practice I stopped attending as a host because I have never had a shortage of guests on any show I have produced. What pitchfests actually require is an hour of my time listening to pitches on a loosely organized theme in a room of maybe 30 people. The scale is too small to move the needle for anyone involved.

These events are not bad. The community is real and worth having. But community and visibility are different things and it’s worth being clear about which one you’re getting.

This is what the Creator Showcase is all about

It is not networking with other creators. We love that but it’s limited in what it does for us. It is not a cameo on someone else’s platform. It is not your name in a list. It is a public video conversation dedicated entirely to your show, published on a channel built specifically for people looking for shows made by women, with you listed as a collaborator so it lives on your channel too.

This is putting the algorithm to work for us. As the library of shows in the showcase grows the visibility grows. This is where we go to find information about shows created by women.

Third party credibility is different from self promotion. Most independent creators have almost none of the former and an exhausting amount of the latter.

The Creator Showcase exists to change that ratio.

Are you in? 

If you are already listed in the directory all you need to do is schedule your interview time to create your Showcase Video. If you aren’t in the directory begin there. https://www.imperfectadulting.com/creator-directory