UP545 'Normal Idiots': Reddit, Discord and the Value of 1000 True Fans

0:00Hi there, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner. We talk a lot about TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. We talk about big numbers. You'll have heard us with Augustine Foo recently talking about the absurd claims of major sports teams and leagues for their fan bases, which are predicated on people watching stuff on digital channels. I was then watching Louis Theroux's documentary about the Manosphere on Netflix. And it was quite interesting because some of the people on there, the streamers, the creators, they were on things like Rumble, Discord, Kick, which I know much less about. So we thought, who does know about this stuff?

0:38We've got Dan Ayres. So Dan is vice president at IMG of Transformation Digital. And the question is, is the industry optimizing for the wrong platforms, which is, I think, probably overplaying it. There's still a canon, a large section of the fan base who are in the obvious places. But what follows is a conversation that starts with kick and ends somewhere much more interesting in the weeds of Reddit moderators and Discord, Quizknights, Iron Maiden's fan base and what Kevin Kelly called a thousand true fans. So Dan makes a strong case for the non-obvious channels that aren't really about reach at all.

1:14They're about community and how they ask different questions of sports organisations, and some of whom are ignoring them completely. And some of them are building really interesting relationships with people who are interested in their sport, which sounds like the right way forward. So I would put this into a group of podcasts that we've done recently. one with Dr Augustine Foo which is about the sort of outrageous claims for engagement numbers that populate the sports business conversation and more recently with Craig Hepburn last week about AI and how that's changing what we think about when we talk about the fan relationship and we talk about Substack and if you're interested in the business of sport or you work in sport I'd point you towards the unofficial partner Substack newsletter which goes out every Thursday been doing so for about seven years we've got a nice audience on there and I would we call it a community I think we probably call it a community at this point.

2:06I don't know what a community is. Someone who once clicked. That's one definition. But you'll find us on Substack. Find us on Notes or LinkedIn, Instagram, anywhere really. Just look out for the yellow badge. You'll find us. Here's Dan Ayres.

2:33we mentioned chatter my idiot savant actually just an idiot ai so this is what it said about you i'm just trying to find the bit that and i wondered what you thought of it says There's a description of you, and it says, Dan Ayres is the right guest for this. He is VP of Transformation Digital at IMG, with previous experience at Seven League, Valencia CF, and Sony Music Entertainment. That Sony Music background matters. It's where he built a genuinely broad digital skill set before anyone had a playbook to follow. He was at Seven League when it was still a 26-person company and has been inside every significant wave of platform change in sports digital, which I thought was quite a nice thing.

3:19I have no idea whether any of it's true. That is my problem. But I'm having to gloss over it.

3:24Dan Ayres:No, I mean, it feels reasonably, I take most of those things as reasonably flattering, I think. I mean, I was there when Seven League was a six-person company, never mind 26. Where has it got that from? I don't know why. I don't know why 26 would be the number. It just made that up, wasn't it? I mean, it was, there would have been a point in time where it was a 26 person company, no doubt. But that, I mean, this is, this feels very old man shouting at the clouds, but I was lucky in a lot of ways to kind of fall into a career in digital at a time when it was brand new. So there was no like, I'm doing everything you had to do by first principles.

3:59Dan Ayres:So I kind of rolled out of university. I wanted to be a journalist or something like that. but I've been the music editor for my student newspaper and I knew Hannah the girl who was a promotions who did promotions for BMG entertainment as it was at the time and they wanted someone and ended up doing a wonderful group interview for a position as new media assistant in what was the direct marketing department and the new media and direct marketing and I got that role and it was my first piece of copywriting was Kenny G postcard that I had to write the copy for to send out to that day to face and there was a phone on the desk that fans would ring and i'd answer it and say be like oh do you know westlife hardstown like oh yeah they're doing a signing at the traffic center in manchester and like really crm like crm was fill out your details on the insert card in the cd was very first principles putting a video on the internet meant you know edit it in adobe whatever it was in those days like run it through into a windows media player version a real player version do a 300k version 120k version a 56k version dos prompt ftp them all to a streaming server and then like code those links into your web page and i'm it is much better now that i can shoot a video on my mobile phone press one button and it's on youtube that is undeniably better but i think it helps to have been through that first principle stuff and to know how that how that bit works and i think that has benefited me over over my career and you're into it you're it's a bit like you know writing anything you know you sort of think it can bypass the hard bit which is sitting down actually doing it and getting through it and learning as you go and all of that stuff but it doesn't actually help if you haven't done it you don't you need something as i say i'm amazed that it takes stuff extrapolates and then you've got it takes as much time to go back in and then say no that's wrong that was not that's wrong that's wrong start again and whatever anyway that is another podcast so just let me bear with me so as you know i've shared with you a sort of ai generated document and i just want to put some context on that before we start talking about you know the subject that we're going to talk about which is sort of non-obvious or you know i don't know how you describe the minority channels or whatever but i'll set that up in a minute but one of the things that i've done is podcast wise we've done nearly 600 probably 500 and i can't remember how 50 odd and then we've also so that's about 900 a thousand guests maybe more from across the sports industry over seven years and I've been thinking okay well that's it's sort of that's an interesting data set to start with and you've got it's a messy data set you've got a lot of people talking chatting and we've said right okay well let's run that into Claude and we'll set up a sort of place for it and over the last few months I've thought well actually it's quite a useful way of generating prep materials for podcasts you know and i don't publish anything i don't write using claude so the output that comes out is me but i think there's a sort of you know it'd be daft to ignore the moment that we're in and it does some things incredibly useful so that's how i got that's the sort of context and then i run in i'll write i'll read you my prompt into claude what i wrote or what i call chat up you see so i've productized it already yeah you see i'm like you know always thinking of the next move always zigging and zagging god it's tiring but here's the prompt let's see if this okay so i'm this is a problem i'm planning a podcast on non-obvious media channels this was prompted by louis theroux's documentary on the Manosphere.

7:48It features several streaming channels, such as Kick, that I didn't know much about. Add in Reddit, Substack, and a few others. The premise of the podcast is that the sports business conversation focuses hugely on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, etc. And I want to ask whether the audience, mainly young people, are actually somewhere else. The guest is Dan Ayres of IMG, a digital media expert formerly of seven leagues so that's what i gave chat up and i like quite like the idea of chat up being a sort of third person in the in the is it like it's sort of idiot in the corner of the room a clever idiot who is then sort of supplying supplementary material and i'll sort of share on the unofficial partner blog what it came back with because again it's just trying to be as transparent as we can so the stuff that you got what did you think of it when you first of all because there's a there's inevitably with ai there's loads there and yeah

8:46Dan Ayres:so interesting i mean you can see i guess when you use ai tools for any questions like this so i mean as i do in a number of different areas it's maybe not today's topic but i do think that the we will undoubtedly talk about creators and the kind of creator ecosystem in the context of this And I have a theory that the next wave of creators, so we obviously have people who create content and distribute that content, and that is the stuff they create. The next wave, I think, will be people who build things with the AI coding tools because they make it so unbelievably easy to do things quickly. In a sense that I've, over 25, 26 years of my career, I've always been close to the building of websites or apps or things like that.

9:33Dan Ayres:I'm not a developer, but I have asked people to build things. I have briefed things. I have run RFPs for things. So is that rule broken down, do you think? The big caveat around this is security, obviously. So if I was building something business critical, I would not want to just, you know, vibe code that and launch it out into the world in that sense. But I think that your ability to build proof of concept, your ability to kind of just really compress the time in which it takes to build things into my brief insight into my personal use of these things because i have a mix of personal professional projects but um i've built my i've got a nine-year-old son i've built him a catalog site for his pokemon cards so you can imagine across pokemon cards you have a photo of the cards it has a number of data points on it a health value of various different types that a pokemon can be and in that i built a system to kind of log just collect all that stuff together and when you think about the type of things that you want to build for that kind of product even things like a login system so that i begin and be an admin and add content and edit content but somebody else can only be a viewer that you know that would traditionally be one one and a half days of dev time to do that sort of thing and it's 15 minutes here like your ability to go to sort of to roll out features at the drop of a hat in minutes and then if they're not right to fix them in a few more minutes it's just incredible i think it's that time compression is one of the big features of AI, just your ability to test hypotheses in other contexts.

11:04Dan Ayres:So for example, we have a YouTube CMS, which I am involved in administering. And a YouTube CMS is a bit like a parent account that other channels can be linked underneath and kind of it collates all the kind of ad revenue comes into one place and you pay it out to people. It gives you, unlocks some additional features like the ability to geoblock live streams or other content and run content ID and things like that. So one of the things it does is give you the ability to access YouTube's reporting APIs on a larger scale. So if you want to do analysis of data, then you can then sort of access in this method, you can then access kind of, you know, 20 ,000 videos worth of stats rather than the 500, which is your upper limit if you're just working in YouTube Studio and you want to export a bunch of videos.

11:53Dan Ayres:So, you know, my journey on this was, and a lot of this is kind of exploratory and I would not qualify myself as a competent Python coder or anything like that. But, you know, I have ChatGPT giving me the Python code to write to then run through a terminal on my desktop, a program that I never, ever open normally. But, you know, you can be guided through it. pulls all this data out you get this 20 000 record kind of csv at the end of it which is all the titles view counts watch time revenue but so on and so on throw that back into a chat gpt or anything like that and go right now find me now find me commonalities between terms that are used in titles and you know click through impression you know impression to click through rate and are the commonalities is there anything in the structure of the title and you still have to be careful you have to really quickly kind of you have to check it regularly to go you told me this are you certain about this what about this but but so long as you're robust in doing that you get very quickly into like some really solid and good insights of going okay when you're doing highlights lead with editorial hook then put the team names in then put the kind of round data or so on and so on and that's the thing and there is a statistically significantly better result from doing that than there is from you know doing it in a different way and i think one of the things i like about it particularly is that your its ability to you know run quote proper stats tests for you on this sort of stuff because i feel like an enormous amount of analysis in our industry is you know people will say well this number was bigger than this number so so this number was better and and you know not i mean it's a long time since i did proper stats that in as part of my degree but but you know there are things like confidence levels and there are things like random data that can affect that so i your ability to do things quickly is unbelievable i think with these tools and so when i saw what came back from what you've done i mean it it was it's funny how you can see where it's come from sometimes can't you because there's things that i've clearly put on my linkedin at some point you're like oh i haven't thought about that for some time yeah it seems so incredibly obsequious and you know it's like a sort of you know oh richard that's such a great idea you know and i can see how people fall in love with these things if you're sort of just chatting with it all the time it's it's much nicer to you than lots of other people but there is a so fed that in and then we've got a you know an output back and then we'll talk through what it is what i think is quite useful i was talking to alex balfour about this the other day and we would you know we're sort of throwing ideas around about what to do with the transcript archives and all of those things really interesting stuff and one of the bits was that you get to quite interesting premises if just purely from an editorial perspective without venturing into there's a whole world of selling intelligence as you know white papers and reports and you know all of that palaver which i can see this revolutionizing but actually just as a publisher a journalist podcaster writer of stuff it gets you into new areas quicker which then you can then say right okay is this interesting is this not interesting do i have a view on it do i not have a view on it and you then sort of do what you do on top of that but i found i do even in the sort of six but maybe three months that i've been doing this usefully i found it actually quite good at getting into sort of again places that either i would have taken a long time to get to just subject matter wise and or it's quite good at you know flagging bits that i wouldn't have got to So again, it's useful from that point of view, but you do see the flaws, don't you?

15:38And actually one of the worries that I have is that when you put stuff in, I'm the only person that can see the flaws quite often. You know, sometimes it picks up a newsletter that I wrote in 2022 and it makes a big thing of something that was either ironic, a joke or a mistake and blows it up and then builds on top of that and extrapolates on top of that. And then suddenly you're miles away from the initial premise, but the premise was wrong. Yeah.

16:03Dan Ayres:yeah and i think i mean in that data analysis example as well there was a point i'd done this over the course of a week and there's a point where i said oh i've asked it a new question and it said oh well i've lost i can't answer that because i've lost access to the original data file that you've uploaded i was like how come well it's caching and it's you know storage and blah blah and i said well hang on a minute but we've been talking about this for like an hour today already like can i trust anything that you told me today and it's like no you shouldn't okay you should never trust me well on the publishing piece I definitely agree I typically author kind of a couple of the trends that we do in the IMG digital trends report that comes out every year the one that came out at the end of 2025 was the first one that I've where I've written anything where it was aided by AI chat models and I agree the ability to put in some ideas and go look here's my hypothesis but like what's wrong with this is there supporting evidence for it and it quickly again it's that compression of time piece it very quickly gets you to a place where either your idea feels validated or it doesn't definitely doesn't feel validated and it changes and so on so yeah i think it's hugely helpful for those sorts of topics so let's go through let's sort of talk about what we're going to talk about which is channels so again lorry through talking to hs tiki toki or his bloody name is and it's just a view into a world that I probably should know more about than I do.

17:29I'm a very, you know, I've followed it, Andrew Tate type areas, and I've sort of looked at documentaries. So I'm not completely naive about it, but it was an interesting sort of little journey. Totally to the side of that was the platforms and Kik was one that sort of they appear to be on. And I guess the sort of question is why, how many there are, what, when you're looking at from a, you know because people listening to this a lot of them will be on the sports side or working on you know somewhere in the sports world and we tend always to go to the sort of hierarchy or canon of new platforms and new inverted commas but just give me your sense of what's out beyond i don't know what you would include in the canon but it would be obvious ones you know instagram

18:22Dan Ayres:and youtube yes well we do on our digital trends piece we do a platform power ranking so we have a whole list and we have a list of 20 of these but with youtube youtube and instagram at the top typically over the last couple of years but platforms like reddit have been moving up in that in in that sphere and discord as well and i guess kick is an interesting one i think it is a very different type of streaming to the type of streaming video publishing that most sports right holders would do like it is very much and not exclusively in all cases it's never it's never just one thing but it is more typically kind of streamers who have a sort of you know just follow me around for hours at a time in my life as I go to places and set up situations and talk to people and do pranks and kind of you know create content that is about following me around and there are fewer kind of moderating guidelines on platforms.

19:21Dan Ayres:I mean, again, I wouldn't allege that Kik has no moderation, for example, but like in general, a number of these kind of platforms tend to have less moderation, partly because moderation is expensive. And that's the reason that sort of, you know, Meta and Google are able to do that more to higher scale. But that kind of streaming and that kind of content publishing is really very different to what most sports organisations would be able to put out, even if they tried to do it in a good way, I think. So I do think that you have these community platforms that are smaller, and I'd like to come to the notion of numbers in this area later as well, because I think that's relevant.

20:05Well, let's do that now. So just give us a sort of sense of, so Kik, we just landed on Kik, but where does that sit

20:11Dan Ayres:in your top 20 list it hasn't done so far no hasn't done so far but i mean we discussed in the notes prior to this session that it was obviously king's nations league world cup was successfully done on that when was you know it was but it was part of their broadcasting my understanding is it certainly wasn't the sole channel and again i think where they i think the stat for their 2025 competition was that they had they broke kind of a million concurrent viewers right and that's a good big number like a genuinely for live i think there is a general sort of issue with numbers around digital which is that there are so many enormous numbers because we're measuring impressions and we're measuring views and those numbers are in the billions and the hundreds of millions once they're aggregated into lots of places that when someone comes out to you and says oh we got 15 000 people at this thing it doesn't sound like very many does it and but my argument would definitely be like that is way worthwhile if you can get even like a thousand people concurrently watching your live stream of something i genuinely think that's a good result so to get a million is excellent my understanding is that i've broken across a number of streamers cumulatively essentially so it wasn't one broadcast that had that but it was kind of multiple streams on the platform and i think that the biggest one had around 300 000 concurrence at one point and so on so it's a kind of an amalgamation of streamers who've been given access to content who then built up into that kind of concurrency figure but yeah I mean we one of the one of the partnerships that we have at IMG is with British Cycling and the Tour of Britain last year I was I was involved in kind of the digital work that we did around the Tour of Britain cycling last year and that involved streaming on YouTube in a number of territories had the job of pressing go on the streaming software and then when you press go on the streaming software on YouTube it's replaced by a really massive button that says end stream now and it's very nerve-wracking to just move your mouse in there but essentially obviously you track those numbers as you go through and these are six stage events around around the tour britain and you know you're looking at the race reached its climax and you know it might be a couple of and then it's 4 ,000, then it's 6 ,000.

22:24Dan Ayres:And the final of the men's events peaked at 15 ,000 live concurrent viewers as Geraint Thomas kind of finished his cycling career in coming into Wales, into Cardiff. And that was the peak of 15 ,000. And delighted, genuinely delighted by that. I'm very happy with 7 ,000 and pretty happy with 4 ,000 and delighted by 15 ,000 concurrence there. And I thought, well, I'll look at what else is live on YouTube at the moment in the sports area and see what the numbers for those are. And, you know, like I think Chelsea at the time were running a sort of 24 hour live stream of just archive games and that had a few hundred viewers.

22:59Dan Ayres:And then there was kind of things like badminton and from Malaysia and things like that, which was maybe six, seven thousand. I'm feeling pretty good about what we're comparing pretty well there. And then I was like, oh, what's this one? Who's this? It's got 45 ,000. And that was a content creator in the F1 world who was streaming. I mean, there was an F1 race going on at the same time that afternoon, and he was just streaming telemetry data from the race. So all the stream was just data from the cars in the race and him chatting with his audience about it and the 45 ,000 people on there. And you think, well, that really is quite a different broadcast experience and a different kind of content experience that the audience are looking for.

23:42It's interesting, you mentioned there, Kik is about streaming people walking around. And that completely bears out the sort of Theroux documentary where they're walking around Malaga, abusing women and just sort of meeting people and that whole shtick. so that's about all what is that about is that about audience expectation of why they go to this channel and is that who is framing that so if i want to heaven forbid want to get into live streaming and i want to i don't know what it would mean me walking around but that sort of just the idea of that makes me smile but that then would shape my choice of channel so there's a sort of form

24:27Dan Ayres:yeah i mean it definitely exists i mean look tiktok live and instagram live like a definitely prominent feature of those platforms and that's one of my points around these kind of more niche platforms i think would be like they have features which also exist on often exist on the major mainstream platforms and whilst you definitely get dedicated communities that are on these smaller platforms you know the right way to phrase this but most people in a distribution of any population most people fall somewhere around the middle of kind of being whatever you want to call it normal vanilla kind of and kind i don't think that there is a concern to me that oh actually the industry is really missing out on an audience here because you can only find that audience on these platforms that you're not really engaging with at the moment because i think that there may be some examples of that but in general most of the people that you want to reach i think We're typically on the mainstream platforms as well because they are mainstream platforms.

25:26And one of the points of it really is that it is exciting to be not on them. It is countercultural and just being on it feels like you're outside and no one wants to feel like they're in the mainstream. Everyone wants to feel like they're a sort of maverick playing the system from the outside. You know, so there's a sort of just the by dint of just being there that brings with it a certain expectation, I guess, of what the content is going to be. I guess it then leads to the question of sports place in this ecosystem. I think you've got, as you say, everything is whether people are in the middle or are dragged to the middle or, you know, whether the algorithm pushes everyone, flattens everything into the middle.

26:12and then the sort of opportunity for a kick, a sport coming out. And I'm using kick as a proxy into sort of, you know, channels that I don't understand. But I could sort of see, well, okay, if there was a map there, and always the temptation is, do you go where the audio, you know, you go to YouTube right at the centre of this map, but then what do we do around the outside? And then the question then becomes, is it worth doing the stuff around the outside?

26:41Dan Ayres:Well, so the is it worth it bit, It is a really interesting point, right? And I guess I'll lean more on, I'll probably lean more on platforms like Reddit and Discord here as the kind of community sort of platforms that are built for community essentially for talking to people. And I think that for all that you can talk about engagement on TikTok and on Instagram and channels like that, to me is often a kind of it's a one to many engagement. It's between you, the creator, and your audience. there is not a lot of audience to audience communication there like i don't feel like people really make friends in the comments of an instagram thread for example where whereas when you're in a discord channel or you're on a reddit community like you get to know the other people in there because there's posts regularly and friendships are made or at least affinities built and you can see people so i think that's it's a different type of engagement in that you're talking to quote normal people the way I generally sort of characterize Reddit and I should say it's my favorite platform for discussing things on the internet partly because it is one of those the ones that's left where it is mostly not exclusively but mostly talking to what I would call normal idiots who are funny and smart and kind of interesting and you can find useful of information and you can have fun and there's things that make you laugh and there are people that will come on and sort of defend people are very reasonable essentially there is a lot more yes one of the one of the sports that the img has a partnership with is rugby league in the in the uk and i've worked on that for two or three years now and that's probably one of the one of the ones where reddit has been a really interesting part of kind of growing out the digital activity around around rugby league so we work centrally with the league and super league and with rugby league commercial but there are obviously we work with the clubs as well as need be and rugby league is i mean i really like it as a sport now i've i live in the right place for it i'm both promoted teams at super league this season were either such york and bradford are both both brought the sport closer to me where i live so so i enjoy it but i think it's sports that are of that size where they're not the kind of absolute premium top global sports really have a lot of benefit from these platforms and from a lot of the sort of shortcuts to AI.

29:05It was interesting so I sort of dabble in Reddit I don't I'm not a big user I sort of end up there sometimes because again quite it's quite interesting how often chat up sends me there you know my idiot friend in the corner is quite often references Reddit you know and so you end up sort of going through and finding the source material sometimes and so i'm not a natural reddit user but the way you're describing it sounds a bit like twitter in sort of 2012 you know i agree and the second so the rugby league

29:36Dan Ayres:example i mean it's very straightforward the way you know because you're so what do you do and i think that clubs and leagues and have kind of shied away from getting involved in community platform community platforms over the years because it's messy right because you're dealing with people and people are messy and this topic of brand safety comes up where actually i think on on reddit there's pretty low risk of any brand safety issues but but it comes up when you're doing anything around community moderation and if you're running your own forum etc and so on but yeah there is r slash super league which is the you know the rugby league subreddit and actually the sport can sustain a really nice league subreddit with 60 000 members or so in it at the moment it probably can't sustain individual club subreddits as the same degree so actually this is a good melting pot of you know leeds rhinos fans warrington wolves fans whole kings and rovers fans all in one place and like the way you get involved is really simple like i sent a message to the moderators saying hey like we're like i'm representing the the league in this situation like do you even want us to get involved here because sometimes like they might not they might not right nobody you know people they might be unofficial partners well exactly people in the same way that people love clubs but maybe hate the business of the club and yeah and it's hard as a it's hard to be loved as a league i think ever or as a as a federation but actually the andrew in this case the guy who largely moderates that like nice guy was like oh no it would be great to have great to have more involvement and what that involvement means is clubs bringing players in and coaches in to do ask me anythings which is reddit's kind of main sort of talent vehicle where essentially the community gets to ask questions to to sports people but also like they're treated like media now so they're they get press releases they're invited to the lead to the season launch event where they get access to interview coaches and players and so on like that and there was a you know 100 we had for the grand final last year we had 100 people from that community at the grand final in a hospitality area for the reddit sub community what was that like were they what were they like as a sample of rugby league fans so i mean i'd say like like just a normal cross-section of rugby league fans but what was interesting was that ahead of this time so you know i guess the way the grand final works is obviously it goes on sale before you know who the exact two teams are going to be so you tend to get fans of lots of clubs that will be at the event anyway it's just an enjoyable and enjoyable event to go to so you had a mix of fans from different clubs there anyway But what was interesting to me was that you have all these people who are voices on the subreddit and chatting in the community and taking the mick out of each other and so on.

32:15Dan Ayres:And when it got to this point of like, you know, a hundred of us can go out and we'll do a ballot for tickets and so on. And the winners were drawn and you had a few people going, well, look, lads, you know, I'm looking forward to this, but I'm coming on my own and I don't know anyone. Like, is it going to, am I going to be okay? And it was quite interesting seeing people make that step over onto, and then they went and of course it was fine. and that they had a good time. And what I think this, and add like the overhead for the league or the club or whoever's involved in this is really low. Like you're not, like the community probably doesn't want you in there every day posting to stuff.

32:50One of the things you said, just to pick up on, you said that the league as a whole can sustain the channel, but individual teams probably can't. And I'm thinking of, so again, it's a really useful conversation because all the time it's, okay, the other day I was talking about to Fiona Harreld about netball and or you know or we talk about the WSL or we talk about the 100 or we talk about various you know sports and teams that are not the Premier League not Formula One not the NBA all of that so this is why this bit is really interesting and useful but talk to me why what is the line of sustainability and what teams need to do because it feels like okay the readout of this conversation is okay if i'm i need to be on this and i i need to be on reddit i need to build something there if i am in charge of a sports property on you know that is outside of the massive the top one so but talk to me about that sustainability question i don't quite understand

33:52Dan Ayres:what sustains it and what doesn't well look the first the first thing is that you probably don't need to build anything because if you have a sport like there there will be a subreddit out there for your sports or for your league i think clubs within like kind of the sort of the not massive sports like you you know you have somewhat smaller ones and when i say like can't sustain like if you're talking about something where you know any you know there's a couple of posts a day and they're getting two or three replies like that's kind of that's a bit low really but it needs a bit of energy for people to be drawn to it to be worth it doesn't but i mean but again when we talk about numbers like when you might look at the number of upvotes on a popular post and it might be like 142 or something with it and again in the context of like 500 million video views of this thing that doesn't feel like a lot i promise you it is like the kind of like with the community ones you sort of almost invert you invert the metrics of you know when you're thinking about when we measure impressions or measure video views and things like that there's been a real sort of race to the bottom if you like kind of pushed by a lot pushed by the the mainstream platforms really to kind of really reduce the length of what counts as one view right so in the end of the it's between zero and one seconds now in most cases and it wasn't always like that but you had sort of tiktok was kind of has always sort of been like that since it launched and then kind of you saw musk take x in that direction of really reducing it down and then kind of instagram follow meta followed and youtube with the kind of final holdouts but do now kind of particularly on shorts just have a zero effectively impression so some part of this video was served on some of a screen in front of a person for you know more than 0.0 seconds is counted there i think there is a huge difference between that and obviously a post in a place that is it might It might be upvoted by 142 people, but the actual scale of people that will see that is 10 times that comfortably.

35:56It's a bit of the conversation, sorry, but there's a bit of the conversation that we have with, I had with Augustine Foo recently about.

36:02Dan Ayres:One of my favourite ever. Brilliant. It's really, you know, and again, it's sort of jaw dropping how the, just the frame of what success is, has just been so distorted in terms of the numbers that are required to take get people's attention all the way through the supply chain and it's interesting the influence of TikTok and how that changed what a view is and therefore what a fan is you know and you get to well okay I don't I've lost all sense now of what a fandom is and where they are and you know how many is good and how many is poor and all of that and trying to get back to some reality we're going to have a problem where the claims, enormous claims of fandom that are made for sport in various places has to be recalibrated.

36:51But how you do that, I don't know, because you're going to get a moment where everything falls off a cliff because you go from this absurd numbers, you know, in completely absurd nonsense numbers to something closer to reality. And it's going to be a massive jump down and everyone and it will be a period of, oh, oh, okay, it will be like the sort of Barcelona when they found the email database of, you know, below the claimed international fandom.

37:20Dan Ayres:I love how apocryphal that story is now. I use it as well often. But in that sense, like for Spotify to go, oh, we found out it was only 3 million people. And you're like, well, 3 million is really big in most sort of fandom contexts. Like that is still really big because the reason that people, like I could follow Barcelona and be a really devoted fan of Barcelona without ever having to give them my email address. Like, unless they have to really work to do that, right? They have to build something that makes me really want to give them my email address. Whereas, like, it's just a fundamental part of using Netflix or Spotify or so on.

37:55Dan Ayres:Like, the reason they've got 500 million of these is because, like, it's just a, they have a good product and people want the product. And I think that's why you see in sport where that data collection piece comes in is it's almost always driven by good products fantasy is massively the driver and anyone that says like we've got a massive database of people whether it's premier league or any other sport fantasy is always a huge driver of that because it's a product that people want to play at that and nobody thinks well i'm exchanging my email address for something here at that point they just think i want to play fantasy and it's part of the process because of course it is because you need to do it and so i actually don't think that I definitely don't think three million is a small number of no and it's also that you know you're getting to the as you say the value exchange of the email as a proxy for my time and identity that I'm going to give to an organization varies from as you know okay it's fantasy or it's a Disney plus login all the way down to some crap that I've just got to have to click to get to something else and everything in between and so trying to sort of establish it's interesting the again what constitutes commitment and proper value at the other end i want to talk to you about discord because a few years ago i remember having a conversation being quite keen on discord because someone said told me and they were a sort of american digital type person i can't remember who they were that today's publishing business and this was in 2022 would have a is a podcast a newsletter and a discord community and i thought okay well i'll have a look at discord because again i didn't know much about it and then i sort of got a little bit of the way but it was so confusing and it felt like such another world that i just i probably gave up i tend to do that but tell me about discord because again my idiot friend says 40 of americans use discord with nearly one in five paying for access to at least one server discord is popular with younger generations 50 of gen z use it i have no idea of the veracity of those numbers this is me talking now so i mean again if you want mainstream adoption why call it a server because that's that's that sounds so discord's origins in my understanding was in in gaming certainly because people wanted it came from a desire to have a when you're playing multiplayer games on consoles on Xbox, PlayStation, and so on, and you have a headset on and you were talking to your teammates as you're playing, you needed something that would reliably give you kind of audio connection and chat connection without lag.

40:37Dan Ayres:And Skype was the original thing for that, but Skype was too laggy. And so Discord was built as to be really optimal kind of audio channel connection. It's still one of the nicest features of Discord, I think, is that you can just have, if you have a group of people in your server or in a channel on the server, you can just have the audio line open. And it's just like, you know, if you're doing remote working and you kind of just want to be able to say, oh, Ian, hang on, tell me about that thing. Like you can just talk into it and it's just an open channel for everybody. So anyway, audio is where it started and gaming is where it started, which I guess is why a lot of the terminology is kind of slightly more technical and people that are kind of comfortable with that.

41:15Dan Ayres:But you will see very commonly on football club subreddits, for example, they all have a match day threat, which is when a match is taking place. It's just people are watching the game on TV and they are typing their reactions into the Matchday thread and there's hundreds of comments and it is about as knee-jerky and reactive as you would imagine it to be. But they also will have a Discord, almost always will have a Discord server link for people to chat on there as well. It's another extension and I guess it's maybe a bit more suited to live chat. So our main experience of it as IMG's digital business is a project we've been doing for a number of years with Red Bull Racing and running the Discord community with them so that is you know having community managers who are kind of administering and moderating and running that community and you do you are absolutely talking to the most engaged part of the audience are the people that come into this like this is not a reach or a top of funnel kind of game at all like you are getting much like having a mobile app like is not you don't gain audience from having a mobile app but you do get more engagement from your most engaged fans so the fellow that's streaming telemetry yep data on formula one that sort of thing so i can imagine that sort of level of engagement so you're a proper nerd end of the sport yeah yeah very very passion driven stuff and look that when you go to going to your previous question of what you actually need to do to run these things reddit i would say is light touch you drop in occasionally answer questions just the fact that the community knows that you're there that they kind of feel some closer connection to the club you're not just kind of shouting into the wind we do we're talking on this as well and the coys subreddit you know what's that like these days is it a fun jolly place for you know again i would say that in match threads where things are you know when you're 3-0 down at home it's not in the forest like it's not it's not glorious at that point but but in general i would say the level of reasonableness of the audience is significantly higher than on other channels and it does it does still maintain and it's and you know spurs will do you know amas ask me anything with players and they had the kind of set piece coach on early in the season doing one as well in the our soccer the our soccer piece as well and it's just interesting i am the phrase bringing you closer to the whatever is not one of my favorite phrases just because it's i feel like hang on a minute i'm sure you told us 18 months ago you're bringing us closer than ever before but now we're even closer than that and now we're even closer than that but it does create that just knowing that i as a user if i want to get to the club will the moderators have a relationship with the club and i can get to those people and they get that so if there's something that needs to do it and like nice stuff does happen right so there was a guy that had turned a guy posting to say my grandfather's just turned 100 years old he's been a Tottenham fan his whole life like I wonder if there's anything the club could do to sort of turn this and you know we saw this and dm'd them and the club did something and like I think that as a I always think honestly that the perception of sports organizations as being somewhat untouchable or unreachable is very displaced and actually if you phone up if you try and phone up most football clubs as an example in the Premier League you've got a pretty good chance of getting through to talking to someone that can help you out with the thing that you want to get helped out with they're far from untouchable organizations really despite the huge money involved and how big they feel but but so so all you're doing is quite light touch observation on reddit when it comes to discord definitely more active hands-on stuff there you've got to run it and the red bull racing example there are you know there are quiz nights there are kind of you know it's like running a club runner it's like running a kind of club for people with interests we used to in the old days in music it was very much the way that we would build fan bases was you know it's a key part building fan bases was the old style web one forum yeah band forum and you would have artists and the way the hierarchy works is you know there'd be me in the record company and i would have a relationship with the three or four people that moderated the kasabian or westlife or jls or you know whoever forum and we would push down information that we'd like to be distributed and or we'd like questions back on or feedback on and things like that and any issues that were happening in the community because those things happen sometimes right you know someone's trying to scam someone about some westlife concert tickets on the forum like the police phone up and you've got to deal with that like when i say it's messy like it's messy because people are messy but you have these lines of communication i think just making people realize that they have that channel of communication to the club the league the sport whatever it is just makes you feel a bit more affinity there and it creates i don't think that soft power is exactly the right term because you know we're not talking about kind of foreign aid but i get it there's sort of analogous there isn't it and you i think it's the kind of thing that you really wish you had at the point where something has gone wrong in your sport and you're like oh we don't like nobody's sticking up for us at the moment there's no grassroots kind of groundswell of of defense for us and i think that's really noticeable when you don't have it and i think if you put the work into kind of building this community and people understand a little bit more about you know the people making these decisions at the club or the league or whatever like ultimately they are just normal people trying to do their best for the sport and the club there's a bit more appreciation of that it's what's interesting is the picture you're painting is sort of it feels like a world that i'd like to be a part of frankly and it's why it's and But it's quite counterintuitive because it sort of feels like that it's, I wonder what the map of the fan base is and how it relates to the platforms that they engage with.

47:13And again, there's an age thing which you would go to in terms of is it younger, older? Is there, you know, we always talk about the NBA as being very tech savvy. It's one of the cliches of our sort of industry. But it feels like the sort of this is where the audience is. There's a significant number of the fans there. I never see clubs promote it. I never, you know, are they pushing people towards that? Because it feels like a good place to have, as you say, there's a sort of baseline, which when things go wrong, they flare up and social media becomes a shit show on, you know, in terms of we've had people on who run football clubs who say, well, I wouldn't go anywhere near X or I wouldn't go anywhere.