Gary Vaynerchuk wrote something last week that I have not been able to put down, which is annoying, because I do not follow him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIf you have a business today, your job is to build that feeling on purpose for everyone around you, your customers, your employees, your vendors, whoever they are. Because pretty soon, the product and the price are going to be close to even across the board. What won’t be even is the experience you create and the emotion you generate. That’s the whole game.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
He is right about the convergence. In media it already happened. The same wire copy, the same monthly price, the same paywall in front of the same story. Product and price went even years ago, and the industry answered by buying more reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The part I want to argue with is what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The consensus answer is analog, and it is half right<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Vaynerchuk’s conclusion is physical. Run clubs, gyms, restaurants where the staff remembers your order. He is not alone in this. Read anyone writing about the experience economy this summer and you get the same turn: screens are done, rooms are back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The market data supports the premise. Tickets for the top 100 global tours averaged 136 dollars in 2024, up from 91 dollars in 2019. NBA Finals seats went from 900 dollars in 2015 to more than 5,000 today. People are paying extraordinary money to stand next to strangers who care about the same thing they do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that price tells you something is scarce. It does not tell you that only a stadium can supply it. Those are different claims, and the industry keeps treating them as one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which brings me to events<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Watch what media brands actually do when they accept the emotion argument. They launch a festival. A conference. A member evening, a live podcast recording, a subscriber breakfast with the editor in chief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to be careful here, because this is good work. Events build genuine attachment, they carry margin that display advertising has not carried in a decade, and the people who attend them are usually the readers a publisher can least afford to lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They also let everyone avoid the harder question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the event is a workaround. It says: our core product cannot produce feeling, so we will produce it in a rented room, twice a year, for the four hundred people who can travel and afford a ticket. Meanwhile the app that thousands of people open every morning stays exactly what it was. A vending machine with a paywall on it. Articles go in the top, the reader takes one out, nobody involved is changed by the transaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your experience strategy only works when everyone is in the same postcode, you do not have an experience strategy. You have an events business attached to a product that still has the original problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Digital did not fail at emotion, it optimised the wrong one<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The honest version of the last fifteen years is that digital products got very good at generating feeling. Just a specific, disposable kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The infinite scroll works. The streak works. The red badge works. These are emotional design, and they are effective enough that we now discuss them as a public health question rather than a growth tactic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What they produce is arousal without memory. You feel something, it lasts as long as the session, and it leaves nothing behind that would make tomorrow different from today. A dopamine loop can hold attention for months and never once make a person feel known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recognition is the other kind. It is slower, it barely shows up in a dashboard, and it accumulates. Someone remembers what you said last week. Your name appears in a place you did not put it. A question you asked in March turns into something the group still refers to in July. None of that spikes a chart on the day it happens, and all of it is why a person comes back without being pushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One product designer put it more cleanly than I have managed: retention is not a product metric, it is the outcome of emotional design done well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Belonging is the emotion that compounds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Every publisher I speak to has arrived at the same strategy, usually after their traffic collapsed. Small publishers lost around 60 percent of their search referrals over two years. Medium ones lost 47 percent. Executives expect to lose another 43 percent over the next three. The response, industry-wide, is the pivot to a smaller but more loyal audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I agree with the pivot. I just think most of the people making it have not noticed what it requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A smaller but more loyal audience is only achievable if someone gets recognised. Loyalty is not a smaller number of the same anonymous sessions. It is a relationship, and relationships require that the other party knows who you are. You cannot shrink your way into that. You have to build the thing that makes a person identifiable, addressable, and visible to other readers, and almost no editorial product does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is also why belonging is the version of emotion worth building for. A festival produces a memory. A community produces a place where the memory keeps getting added to. One of them ends when everyone goes home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the ground is moving in this direction anyway. Eli Pariser argues the attention economy is being replaced by a trust economy, where the scarce resource is confidence in the content and the person behind it. Yancey Strickler’s dark forest theory describes what people do in response: they leave the open, bot-heavy internet for smaller protected spaces where the other participants are real. More than half of internet traffic in 2024 was not human. Readers are already retreating. The only open question is whose space they retreat into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What designing for belonging actually looks like<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The word gets used as a value, which is how it ends up on a slide and nowhere else. Treated as a design principle it produces specific, unglamorous decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People need to be visible to each other, not only to you. A comment section where readers speak past each other into a moderation queue is not a community, it is a complaints desk. Readers should be able to recognise a name they have seen before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contribution has to leave a trace that lasts longer than the article. If everything a reader gives you disappears the moment the story rolls off the homepage, you have taught them their input is disposable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big audiences need small rooms inside them. Nobody belongs to two hundred thousand people. They belong to the forty who follow the same beat, the same club, the same trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your own people need to be human in the product. Named editors who answer, not a masthead. The publisher’s biggest untapped asset is that readers already have feelings about specific journalists, and most products carefully hide them behind a byline that does nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And someone has to own it. Belonging does not survive as everyone’s nice-to-have. It needs a person whose job is the shape of the room, not the volume of output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The two words that matter<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The line in Vaynerchuk’s quote that does the work is “on purpose.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Belonging does not happen by accident. It is not what remains after the roadmap is delivered, and it does not get retrofitted in sprint 14. It is decided early, in the boring choices: what the product remembers about a person, who they can see, what happens to something they contribute, whether the room has a door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the question is not whether your readers had a nice time at your festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where in your product does a person get recognised by name, and who decided that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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