The perfect fumble
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 3 Jun 2012
- Messages
- 24,431
Here's the official site doing a fan channely kinda thing.....
Not a fan of @twosips then? :DYeah others are brilliant, how we laugh at Arsenal fan tv or good old Andy Tate etc, why make ourselves look like bell ends too? Hate them, that esteemed kompany seems a sound guy but I nearly throw up every time I watch a video of his zoomed in face telling me about football. No thanks
Just watched Ian's Vlog on YouTube - usual quality reporting in my opinion
This is an issue close to my heart and something I've been trying to get involved in changing for a number of years.
Here's the simple truth: City fans don't have enough media outlets because the club will attempt to invade the fan space with any good ideas then refuse to promote them, City fans are generationally lost in the age group whereby many of them are too young to have money to spare or too old to support the notion of crowdfunding, and there's a stigma in the City community that anybody who tries to make money out of their content is "selling out" or lesser or "cringeworthy".
I'm lucky in that I have had a good relationship with the owners of many of the major City fan projects out there as I'm always willing to throw them some help with the technical end and have a general chinwag. Me and Ste used to bounce ideas off each other regularly (and I'm proud to say I was one of his earliest Patreons), obviously me and Ric have worked closely on Bluemoon for a decade, I've contributed and had chance to speak to Stu on City Watch and I helped Ahsan set up and get his 93:20 project off the ground. All these guys are successful to a degree in market position because they understand how to run digital projects. Cheesy I don't know but he sort of skipped ahead a bit because he had a pre-existing audience from his BBC work.
I've contributed to more things that didn't work than did unfortunately but this is the nature of the beast. Many people see these projects as fiefdoms for them to run, that they are all in competition with each other and "the other guy" is trying to "steal their business" or whatever. They don't understand that Bluemoon and 93:20, to pick two examples, are not in competition which each other and don't have 100% of the same audience. As I'm pretty highly involved with both and think I probably have a good feel of their respective communities so I can tell you that their communities are different from each other, and I'd be surprised if they share 50% of their audience. This means that on Bluemoon there are 50% of people who are right in the target audience for 93:20, that being City fans who enjoy exchanging opinions about events in the City Universe, and 50% of people who could be big parts of this community who aren't and could bring fresh voices in. It makes much more sense to work with and help each other out as projects than it does to fight and bicker. Both Ric and Ahsan understand this, in fact it was Ric who taught me this about 10 years ago.
We as a large community are currently in the stage whereby we are starting to understand that digital projects are financially viable. You need to work you fucking bollocks off and have a unique perspective or selling point, but we're learning that the City fanbase will support things that they value and want to see continue to exist. You'd be shocked at how relatively new that concept is in our community - one or two years old, and the closure of BMRisingTV due to its funding being pulled really shook a lot of confidence and faith that content creators could exist and thrive by focusing on City.
There's a space in the City community for a BMRisingTV like channel but nobody has really grabbed the concept by the throat and gone for it. We need to create more employers in the City fanbase - more people who can chuck £20 at a young student looking to break into digital media or to support a partial living wage for somebody. And we can't get people to create employment so more young content creators see no financial future in this marketplace so move onto other stuff and we never get any new content creators. The ones we have at the moment are trailblazing like the old fanzine authors did, wondering if they could make this work out for them financially. It's much easier to start a new project when you have examples of successful ones in the same space that can cross promote you, that can be held as an example of funding models, that can show the viability of the medium. Getting more financially successful projects out there, especially in the crowd funding model, should be an extreme priority for anybody who loves this community and wants to see it prosper.