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I think she's kinda cute. If I uploaded kittens playing with string people would feel safe admitting they're watching solely because they're cute, but we must pretend that young men watching a cute young woman must solely be watching for her amazing pair of literary values and production quality.

There is an obvious blind spot relating to narrowcasting in both your examples. Both hollywood action sequels and youtube videos have the hidden assumption that they're the dominant form of media, they are our culture, everyone participates, they're what makes us, us. The national pastime, or whatever. Insinuating that they're not would get a extremely harsh reaction from those socialized to respond that they are. Kinda like religion but I'm tryin to keep on topic.

In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free. You can be rejected by 99.75% of the US population yet get a youtube gold plaque for 1 million views. Given those real world facts, its no great surprise that the Venn diagram of a microscopic fraction of the US population who are Jenna fans does not have much coincidental overlap with the small and shrinking fraction of the US population who watch hollywood movies.

If your advertising message is you're the best individual example of the self described dominant form of modern media, admitting the truth that no one in the general population watches, even for free or near free, would really screw up the message.

Its a fun self awareness hack to evaluate someones worldview by asking them what percentage of the US population watches "Survivor" for example. Strongly bimodal, with the wrong answer being "almost everyone because it defines modern pop culture" and the right answer being "almost no one".

Another peculiar observation is I can walk down the street and notice that plenty of young men admire the young ladies with no hollywood production values at all




> In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free.

FWIW, Transformers 3 took about $350m in north America, which at $10/ticket (is that reasonable?) is 35 million viewers. Not all of those are in the US (but I think "north America" in context might just mean "US and canada", which is like 90% US), and some of them would be repeat viewers, but probably 5-15% of the US population paid to see that film.


That's what I mean. "fifth-highest-grossing film of all time" means ignored by over 90% of the population.

What we are told defines our culture, does not. Whatever the heck over 90% of the population did instead of watching Transformers 3 for two hours, defines our culture.




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