Podcast: The New Economics of Building an Audience (with Danny Frankel)

On this week’s episode of the podcast, I am joined by Danny Frankel, the founder of Punchup Live, a digital platform and ticketing ecosystem built for stand-up comedians. We explore how the economics of content distribution and audience building are being fundamentally rewritten. Danny provides a unique perspective on the shifting landscape of social media, the rise of clipping farms, and the digitization of live entertainment markets. Among other things, we discuss:

• How clipping farms and Discord communities are distorting organic distribution algorithms for independent creators across social media platforms
• Whether the extreme efficiency of AI-driven content recommendation engines is leading to user burnout and eventual platform rejection
• Why the traditional touring model is inverted for comedians compared to musicians and how that affects audience building strategies
• What the phenomenon of blue dot fever reveals about shifting consumer behavior and transparency in the secondary ticketing market
• If the current fragmentation of the live entertainment ecosystem prevents artists from accurately predicting and capturing true market demand
• How the lack of audience portability across major social platforms forces creators to adopt direct-to-fan communication tools like email
• When the innovator’s dilemma will force legacy platforms to choose between advertiser needs and the long-term health of creators

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Transcript

Eric Seufert: Welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo podcast. I am your host, Eric Seufert, and I am joined today by Danny Frankel. Danny, welcome back.

Danny Frankel: Thank you so much, Eric.

ES: You were last on the podcast more than a year ago. It is probably worth reintroducing yourself.

DF: I am Danny Frankel. I worked at Facebook for 13 years, up until May of 2023. I left and started a company called Punch Up Live that leverages a lot of what I learned at Facebook in terms of e-commerce and helping independent businesses sell things online, but operating much more in the live entertainment space. You were also my first investor and the first person who really believed in this.

ES: That is right. Do not you forget it. It would be interesting to hear your perspective on the company with the passage of three years and how they have changed. How do you perceive their place in the digital landscape now? How do you perceive the decisions they have made with respect to fully leaning into AI? It sounds like AI on the ads platform is one thing, but they have embraced the application of AI across the entire company and all aspects of the workflow. Talk to me about your perspective on Meta.

DF: I was there for so long that it still feels like I know a lot about the company, but everybody I talk to mentions that it has changed dramatically. From the outside, it is an interesting time. They just did massive layoffs, which is incredibly disruptive. It went from a place where there was a nurturing culture to one that feels much more ruthless now. Having run a company, I have a degree of empathy for what the leadership team must be looking at, but I also feel bad for the people who continue to be impacted by job losses. Facebook was a place where, as an employee, there felt like a ton of stability, and now it seems like the opposite.

On the AI side, they are clearly leaning in. They have many advantages from training data, but the interesting thing for me is they keep struggling on the application of what exactly to do with it. They keep touting how much better targeting is getting as a result of AI, but I wonder when there are diminishing returns on both the content side and the ads side. How much more targeted can you get on figuring out who to show which advertising to? We have been talking about how amazing they are at it for ten years, so I do not know the incremental gains you can see there.

On the content side, I deleted Instagram off my phone probably two or three weeks ago and I have not had any desire to put it back on. The reason is the videos were too good. I think they were so good at recommending content that I was feeling myself sucked in and wasting too much time on it. When my kid started screaming at me and I realized I came out of this trance, I was like, “What the hell did I just do for 30 minutes?” I think there is some negative impact from getting that good at content delivery as well. I am unclear exactly what their AI strategy is at this moment.

ES: That is an interesting observation. Is there just some kind of asymptote that you reach not as a function of performance, but as a result of users revolting because they can observe that they are spending too much time and there are no guardrails there? You remember when they did the time well spent initiative a couple of years ago. I feel like that was probably not driven by any sort of ethical impetus; that was just seen as a business decision. Maybe they just need another round of that.

DF: The way that I look at that whole time was Instagram and Facebook were the clear leaders, and that all went away purely by coincidence when TikTok started gaining on them. Really, what it was was you can dial back focusing exclusively on time spent and more on familial connections because that works well from a PR perspective and it does not really have huge damages to the business. Once you are feeling threatened on the business side, you have to crank it back towards time spent because that is how you get ad impressions.

The point I always think about is we have rudimentary measurement opportunities for figuring out what people like or do not like. Time spent is the best proxy for that, unfortunately. But it is not really the best measure of how much I am actually enjoying something; it is just how much time I am spending on something, as exemplified by my no longer wanting to spend as much time on Instagram despite my actual time spent going up. If you could actually read my mental state and figure out the amount of time that I want to be spending that makes me happy and triggers the right amount of dopamine, that would be the real answer. But from a privacy perspective, there is no way I am giving Meta deep brainwave access. So we are stuck in this thing where they do not actually want what happened to me to be the outcome; you do not want me feeling so sucked in that I actually stop using it. But also, what else are they supposed to be looking at? There is no other real signal for it.

ES: That is the best they have got. I imagine there has to be some kind of unobservable sweet spot, and maybe they just edge closer to that all the time through experimentation. This actually dovetails really nicely into what we are going to talk about because one thing I have been writing a lot about lately is the power of AI to ultimately reduce ad load. If they get so good that essentially you are going to click on everything, you have got limited disposable income. What is the right ad load at that theoretical limit? It is probably much lower than we are today. Also, if you fill out the supply side of the consumer economy, you are enabling people to make more stuff. That could be creator content, but I think that could ultimately be just local services and stuff.

We have got way better matching. This whole matching mechanism is vastly more efficient in that world because you have got way better targeting and ad retrieval. You have also just got the supply side of the consumer economy being filled out with a much more diverse set of products. That certainly is relevant to what we are going to talk about today on the creator side.

DF: When do you reach the Minority Report scenario where it is not even ads anymore? It is just you get the access to your bank account and whatever you were magically going to want just kind of appears. If they are that good at predicting exactly what you are going to buy, why even show you the ad?

ES: I think there is a chasm that you have to cross with the act of doing. Your personality is defined by doing, not by wanting. The acting on it is what defines who you are. I think that invisible asymptote does exist. If you start fulfilling those things, it just does not work. When I talk about agentic commerce and why I do not think it is going to work, my argument is not that this gets executed against really well and we all end up in a dystopian situation. I just do not think it would get traction. People would revolt against it. I think it is a bad outcome because it is dysfunctional. You should not build that because you are going to waste your money. All this CAPEX will be wasted. We are not in a bubble if you build stuff that works and people embrace.

Let me move into the topic here. The last time we spoke, we discussed the rise of social media subscriptions and the internet’s grand bargain. The idea was we are going to give you access, but you have got to earn attention. If you make good content, you are going to get attention. We are not going to put our thumb on the scale or penalize you because you do not pay us, because we are going to distribute the best stuff and everyone has equal access to distribution. Subscriptions broke that. Snap has moved ahead with subscriptions and they have been fairly successful there. I think Meta has pulled back a little bit on the subscription side. How has distribution for independent creators changed since we last spoke?

DF: I actually consider subscriptions and ads to be somewhat the same. You are paying to disrupt whatever the organic algorithmic delivery would be. The biggest change to me was a great article in The Verge about these clipping services. This to me is the biggest problem that exists right now. If there is a world where the tradeoff you described actually exists, where you make really good content and we are going to do a really good job of making sure that the people who like that content end up seeing it, that feels like a meritocratic outcome I can get behind.

I do not think we are anywhere close to that anymore, and the result is all these clipping farms. You can go join these Discord chats that every single big viral artist on the internet right now is using. Justin Bieber even did it; he performed at Coachella with a set designed to go viral and still had to pay these clipping services to promote his videos all over the internet. The way it works is you post a video in this Discord chat. It is much cheaper than advertising. The CPMs are like a dollar versus twenty dollars on Meta. These people will then post whatever versions of the video they think are going to do best on all of these phantom accounts that exist all over these social media companies, and then they get compensated per thousand views that the videos end up accumulating.

This is distorting everybody’s feed. Clavicular was not the most compelling content; that guy just paid a shit ton of people to boost his content for him. Comedians are having to pay a lot more in managed advertising to reach the audiences because their organic reach is going down so much. We always talk about this as a fraction where you have the number of users on a platform divided by the number of creators making content. Now it is not just individual creators; it is individual creators plus all of these accounts pushing videos, all divided by user growth which is not growing significantly year over year anymore. Everybody is drying up in terms of views, so they are having to pay for it. This increases the overall costs, which they have to recoup on the back end from a ticket price perspective. This causes ticket prices to go up, which eventually leads to a new thing called blue dot fever.

ES: What is that?

DF: This is all over the ticketing world. People are essentially just looking at Ticketmaster seat maps and seeing how many seats are left. Post Malone just had to cancel a whole bunch of dates. My favorite artist, Sturgill Simpson, just announced his first arena tour, and there are a shit ton of tickets left. It is because they made bad bets, but also people are just able to see that there is a ton of seats left. There is no reason to go pay $80 or $90 for a seat when you can wait until closer to the date and probably get something cheaper on the secondary market or when they adjust ticket prices down. It is a bad cycle where the cost of awareness and distribution has gone up, but it is causing an increase in prices of the final product, which is the tickets, and getting everything out of equilibrium because the consumer can no longer afford to pay the increased prices.

ES: That is fascinating. This is just transparency distorting the actual market. If you do not come out of the gate right away with selling half of the tickets, then people understand that if they wait, they can get the tickets for cheaper than what they are listed at.

DF: Nothing is simple these days. There is also the aspect of the secondary market, with scalpers and bots who buy up all these different tickets. A lot of times when you see a tour sell out immediately, it is because scalpers are just buying them all up so they can then resell them. Once their confidence threshold in that goes down, and if artists are pricing tickets higher, there is less of an upside for the scalpers. Ultimately, what matters is you need real people to show up to watch a show, and a lot of people are not buying when they typically would.

ES: That has a lot of parallels in the digital economy, especially in games. One trap that companies would fall into is they would get on a predictable discounting schedule. It was predictable in the way that the users could time it, saying they will wait until the inevitable discount in a week. They time their purchases in that way, so you have to increase the base price, which further discourages buying it at face value. I knew about clipping, but I did not know about this blue dot phenomenon.

DF: We are all living in our own little algorithm, but that is very large in mine. The interesting thing about live entertainment is there is not a lot of good data out there. There are marketing costs, judging artificial and real demand—bots were a component of demand—and you also have to make sure those tickets end up in real people’s hands at some point. If you are Post Malone’s agency or promoter, what data do you really have to go off of to figure out what demand is for his next tour? You can look at Spotify streams and YouTube views. But as you know from advertising, there is a very big difference between people who click on ads and people who end up buying a good. That is why bidding CPC never really made sense.

In the entertainment world, there are a lot of people who watch videos or listen to music and do not buy tickets. These two data sets are completely separate. Ticketmaster knows a lot about who bought in the past; they do not know who is going to buy in the future. The whole premise of Punch Up is combining these two data sets where we are getting historical ticketing data, primary ticketing data, and we have a content component where we are able to tie all these variables together to make accurate predictions on where someone should tour, how much they should charge, and what capacity they should be playing. That big gap has never really been exposed until now because coming out of COVID, the demand for live entertainment outpaced whatever the supply could be. Now for the first time, we are seeing that supply is outpacing demand.

ES: I appreciate you not being promotional, but take a second and explain what Punch Up is and the genesis of it. You came from Meta and this crucible of analytical rigor. Then you built Punch Up, and there is a bit of overlap in the advertising layer, but my sense is you are taking that analytical rigor and that economics-centric view of marketplaces and applying that to a domain where that has not really been applied.

DF: Advertising is a core component of e-commerce. The general observation that we had is e-commerce has become very efficient on the internet. You have people who are marketing a good and then they own the place where people are transacting for that good. They can run all kinds of experiments. They can try different ad platforms and marketing techniques to understand if increasing or decreasing the price by five dollars, or making the product blue or yellow, increases or decreases sales. That is how you run an efficient business online.

Live entertainment is very unique because the people who are now marketing the goods—you used to go to the venue’s website to figure out who was coming and buy a ticket. That is no longer how anybody goes to decide which shows to find. Now, it is all following these people on social media and ideally you see their posts when they are mentioning where they are going to tour. The artist is essentially marketing their good. They are marketing goods where the inventory is managed by a venue they do not control and the transaction takes place on a ticketing platform they have no visibility into. It is an extremely fragmented ecosystem. The hypothesis was if we can bring all these things under one umbrella where you have the venues, the artists, and the ticketing all under the same data set, we can implement the same efficiencies and help people understand where they are charging too much or too little, where they should be performing, or where there is more demand than they suspect.

We started with comedy for a range of reasons. Comedy is a wildly overlooked vertical within live entertainment. We now do ticketing for a couple of theaters and comedy clubs. A comedy club is running shows seven days a week, many times two to three shows a night, versus theaters that are doing shows two to three days a week. The volume of tickets is significantly larger at comedy clubs than in theaters. Live Nation does not generally operate in venues that are under a thousand seats, so we did not have to compete with them. The last piece is the Peter Thiel notion of starting with a smaller market, dominating that, and then moving out.

ES: It was shocking just how unsophisticated this whole market was in terms of optimization and allocation. Comedians were in charge of their own marketing without knowing what they were doing, dropping a large percentage of what they thought they were going to gross on a tour in Facebook ads without any idea of how to do that efficiently. How low-fi was it, and where are the biggest opportunities for optimization?

DF: A comedian who I am now really close with did not even know to prioritize making sure that the dates on their website were up to date or removing old dates. That was just not part of the workflow because pre-COVID, there were very few artists that were really playing theaters or above. The assumption was you are going to go play comedy clubs and they are going to do all the marketing for you. So what difference does it really make if your website is that up to date? Kevin Hart was famous for leaving a pen and paper out at the door in comedy clubs and collecting email addresses. We will obviously talk about Louis C.K. and where his innovations came in here. But for the most part, that was the deal. In terms of low-fi, I do not know how much lower it can get than that. One of the key things that we really did start talking to people about was you have to keep your dates up to date.

In terms of where we are today, we have had a massive change in the marketplace. Everybody keeps their dates up to date at this point. We have done some cool stuff where we do nearby shows at the very top of artist pages, and now there are a bunch of people that are copying us on that. Really focusing on mailing lists and collecting as much consumer data as you possibly can is now a big focus for everybody. It is just also still very messy. We just asked an industry that has not changed much since the 90s to transform overnight into an e-commerce business. It is not realistic to ask people who have been training their whole lives for a given role to now be responsible for making sure websites are updated, making sure the conversion flow is efficient, and making sure that when running ads, they understand how much they should increase or decrease spend.

There is still a bit of a gap in terms of what the right support structure is for a modern touring artist to be able to make the most of all of this. But there are some really good signs. We are now doing the ticketing for Stern Grove Festival in San Francisco. They had previously worked with Eventbrite, which had massive problems when they were doing ticketing because they just could not handle the demand. It was a pretty simple fix. I am a big Phish and Grateful Dead fan, and they always did their ticketing through a lottery where you would put in ahead of time for the number of tickets you wanted, and then they would distribute them. We adopted that for Stern Grove Festival and it has worked awesome. Now I saw Aziz Ansari is doing something for his show in London. So we are starting to see a lot of the stuff that we have been pushing on people really get adopted even outside of our solutions. It is fun to see everybody starting to progress towards a modern strategy, which ultimately is good for fans. We have all been there where your favorite artist comes to town and you do not realize it until afterwards, which is frustrating.

ES: You acquired a ticket company. Stand-up is a unique live experience because when you go to see a band, you want to hear the greatest hits. But with a comedian, you do not really want to see stuff you have seen before. Talk to me about that creator-audience relationship and how transcending the digital realm into these real-world interactions impacts it. How do comedians walk that line where they need to be familiar, but they cannot be familiar with the work you are going to see?

DF: One really interesting observation is that touring in comedy is the opposite of touring in music. In music, you create a new album and then you go tour that album. In comedy, you tour the hour, then you put out that hour, and then you have to start a whole new one. It is literally reversed. Comedians are talking to you and it is largely personal subject matter. The parasocial relationships are a lot stronger because you really feel like you get to know them, especially if they do a lot of podcasting. I am now good friends with Mark Normand. Mark Normand does every single podcast available, and I feel like I still know him better from the podcast than from when we hang out because I will be like, “You went to your wife’s family this weekend,” and I did not know that from having talked to him.

We are in this weird world where to promote, you have to get distribution, which comes from content. To make that content, you have to have material. You cannot burn the material that you are working towards for that hour because that is the big capstone of all of your work. So you kind of have to do this crowd work stuff, which is starting to burn out a little bit. Everybody is kind of just trying to figure out exactly what works. Whether it is just super topical stuff, which we had an idea about trying to create a series of just strictly topical humor, some of that hits and some of it does not. If you mention Trump’s name, weirdly, it does not seem to do that well on social media. It is this weird place we are in right now where I do not think anybody feels like they have it figured out.

Hollywood is in a really rough spot because there is not a great model for making content these days. YouTube views are down. There are just more people making content and the YouTube growth is not doubling year over year. As a result, views are going down so they are not getting paid as much. Netflix is one of the few buyers out there. There is not a model for making this stuff and it is hard to know exactly what people are going to want to see. Maybe the biggest problem is now these clippers are creating this distorted sense of what would ordinarily get distributed, and you just have to be paying for these people to distribute your clips, otherwise you are not getting the distribution that you need to be able to sell your tickets.

ES: YouTube and search were basically in lockstep from Q2 24 to Q3 25, and then they diverged. YouTube growth is down, while search was 19% on a much larger baseline. So maybe that partly is that fractured nature, maybe it is also just this slop that is getting distributed out there and it is much less compelling.

DF: And there is more competition. Every major streamer is now going to come out with a Shorts-like solution. I have seen this movie before and I know exactly how this goes. There is a whole bunch of user growth and time spent increases, which means people are going to be able to get that positive reinforcement of more views and more distribution. All the creators flock to it. Then there are so many creators competing for views that the overall distribution of any one creator goes down and then everybody is looking for whatever that next platform is. It is inevitable. If YouTube revenue is down, they are going to start squeezing the creators more. Right now they have a very generous rev share; that is going to inevitably get squeezed at some point, as will increasing ad load. That is how these publicly traded companies have to operate; they have a fiduciary responsibility to return investment for their investors.

ES: The AI slop is one thing, but I am talking more about the clipping slop. You are just getting different cuts from all these different sources of the same underlying material and that is all getting pushed into Shorts. My podcast, I built a tool that uploads it to an LLM, gets the five most clickbaity segments, cuts that up, then builds the video and auto-uploads to Shorts. The Shorts can take off in a matter of minutes and get thousands of views, and then the longer-form stuff just stagnates. I have to drive traffic to that. It will not get distribution, but the Shorts get all the distribution from the algorithm.

DF: That is where people are spending their time, just scrolling. If you have the clips dominating there, which is all the same source material, you are just diluting all of that revenue opportunity. The creator has to pay for that if it is a service, and that is ultimately hurting their margin. It might just be as simple as YouTube gets to keep more money from Shorts than they do from the long-form stuff. If their revenue is down and this is higher margin for them, they are pushing more of those videos. The purity of the algorithm notion just does not really exist in reality, and so it is this weird game constantly of trying to figure out where you can get distribution before your incentives are essentially aligned with the platforms. But the platforms never really explain where their incentives are exactly other than just looking at their quarterly revenues.

ES: Search was the last refuge of non-AI enablement, but now they have actually expanded search to be like as I am typing, I get AI-enabled feedback. So they are closing the loop there. They are wrapping their arms around the experience and they want to keep you engaged there. There is going to be less outflow of clicks. How is that impacting the creator experience? If we do get Google Zero, how do you launch your creator career? Do you just find platforms like Punch Up that are probably more domain-specific and then get the aggregation there?

DF: Right now the market is rewarding Google for having an AI plan. The question is as that starts to really cannibalize their business, how Google will then change their product strategy. The key thing that I really firmly believe in is we are missing regulation, not by the government, but by the creators themselves. The real problem that exists with platforms on the internet is a lack of audience portability. Because there is no audience portability, nobody has a voice. Google can do whatever they want, same thing with Meta.

So you are seeing a new generation of platforms coming out that are all treating this very differently. I would include Substack in this, I would include Patreon, and Beehiiv is trying to allow you to have more direct relationships with your fans. My fundamental belief is that there will eventually be a new platform that can compete with these legacy platforms that has this core tenet: we are going to provide you with opportunities to make the most of your business. We will give you distribution, we will allow you to sell tickets, sell content, sell newsletters, and we are going to allow you to have direct access to your fans. Should we ever do anything particularly predatory towards you, you can get up and leave and go to a competing platform. That is how you actually have a long-term durable business in this space rather than everybody just getting up in arms and then reaching some sort of a boiling point.

It does not work right now for a new artist. If a new artist were to come out and join Punch Up as a comedian who has never performed before, we have 1.6 million monthly active users, which is not enough to break a new comedian. So they still have to go to these larger platforms. But the game as I see it is performing on these larger platforms to then get as many of those people as possible to come join you in one of these new-age platforms. Over time, that will continue to grow and I think there will be some consolidation among these new-age platforms as well to make them larger and more competitive towards the more legacy ones. Ideally, the goal is to exclusively be able to use these places where we allow you to have more direct relationships with your fans.

ES: That direct relationship would be the core innovation here. It is me having that line of communication, with email being the primary key, I guess.

DF: Email and text. There will be problems here as well. If you start getting emails from every single creator that you interact with, that is going to be an issue. So we are going to have to continue to figure it out. I applaud Substack for trying to innovate in this space where they have both a subscribe and a follow, trying to figure out later touchpoint models and provide the value of a platform with direct relationships where consumers have that desire. We are in a similar strategy to them, and that is what I think is the right long-term model. But what you bring there is that real-world interaction component, facilitating that real-world consumption.

I do believe that there will be a creator platform that emerges. Right now, there is an innovator’s dilemma problem. If I were to ask you who is Instagram’s client, is it the advertiser or is it the creator creating all the content that the advertiser gets to show their ad behind? The answer is inevitably the advertiser. The advertiser is paying and calling up whoever the executives are. That does not scale in the long run. I believe there will be a platform whose underlying service is all geared towards helping these creators build their businesses.

Then the question is what is going to determine the winner of this platform. I think there are three factors. The first is who has the largest network, who can generate that organic incremental growth. The second is who has the largest product completeness, who can allow the artist and entertainer to make money in all the different ways that they possibly can, including podcasts, newsletters, merch, branded content, and tickets. Everyone who has an audience is making money the exact same way now. And then the last part is what is the take rate of that platform. Substack and Patreon take 10%, Beehiiv has a flat fee, we are taking 7% on content and nothing for all of our marketing and automation tooling. The question is who has the right mix of all these variables to emerge as the next generation platform, and I think we are right in the throes of it. Substack just is going hard at podcasts, Patreon is trying to move into newsletters, and Beehiiv is going incredibly hard at Substack. We are just unique in that we started in the live space.

ES: And Netflix is going to podcasts; that is a big push for them.

DF: Totally. The hard part with Netflix is that nobody could work on anything at Facebook unless it had a $100 million potential revenue attached to it. Is Netflix ever really going to get into the live space? I do not know if there is enough margin and revenue for them to pivot away from their core business, but you can see the steps and they are doing Netflix is a Joke and getting more and more into the live space.

ES: I was in New York last week, staying at the Plaza Hotel, and right next to that is a theater that used to be an indie theater until Netflix bought it to premiere their own shows. I would imagine that is not a strategy for them; that is just a fun thing to do. But if you think about the roasts, that has got to be massive margin for them. It is probably pretty cheap to put on. The stand-up special must also be very attractive economically because they fill out a stadium, they write the jokes, it is not a big production, and we just got an hour of content. The roasts are sort of cultural milestones now and they get a lot of attention. Talk to me about the economics of that. Is that something that you see proliferating more?

DF: I would assume that it is pretty similar to the economics of a Super Bowl where I think the Super Bowl performer gets paid some insanely small amount of money or nothing, and the payment is essentially exposure. This is the right model long-term, and again what the entire premise of Punch Up is: taking viewership and turning it into the actual core durable business which is ticket sales. My sense is the value dwarfs whatever the production costs are on it, and I would assume that they can cover most of the production costs from selling tickets.

It relates back to nobody really knowing exactly what the right thing is right now. There was a period of time where roasts were not really that big. I have always loved them, like the old Greg Giraldo Comedy Central roasts, but they certainly were not as big until the Tom Brady roast. It fits a couple different nice spots. Like you said, it is not burning material, so comedians are happy to spend time on it. Second, it is culturally relevant. They chose Kevin Hart and Tom Brady for a reason. And the last is they do a great job on the marketing side, building a lot of buzz. I think I saw numbers that it did not do as well this time as it did on the Tom Brady roast, which I find somewhat surprising. They will probably keep doing these once a year and not abuse it. Dave Chappelle, his last special did more watch time than most big-budget movies and that cost a tiny fraction of a movie production budget. That is why Dave Chappelle can command $50 million per special.

ES: I have been writing about this with Netflix’s YouTube strategy series. They have got Danny Go!, they have got Ms. Rachel, and they are buying proven content here; there is no risk essentially. It is kind of win-win because the content creator spent nothing on that and it already exists. They sell it to Netflix, Netflix packages it up into a season, they kind of curate it and filter it, and that is probably much cheaper than having a whole new series developed with some big-name producer and director. You get a proven franchise that people are spending a lot of time watching. Ms. Rachel’s first season was third or fourth, and if you adjusted the watch time by the hours of content, it was like number two; it was above Squid Game. It was massive.

DF: It is a fascinating time. It goes back a little bit to even the layoffs at Facebook. There was a period of time where everything was very stable and you could get paid a very nice living to not work insanely hard. That time was an anomaly and we are now past that time. That in a lot of cases is a bummer because it allowed for work-life balance and other great things that I enjoyed for a period of time. Now we are in a very different time which is both really scary because it is so much more tumultuous in a lot of ways, but also the opportunity is so cool. There is more time ever being spent watching content. There is not a model for how exactly to support making all of that content, but the demand is certainly there. I have personally built so many tools in the last few months; it is so fun. It is just a question of figuring out with all these different variables how you can make the most of it all.

ES: Danny, thank you so much for hopping on. Where can people learn more about Punch Up?

DF: You can go to punchup.live. We actually are going to have a couple really fun new videos coming out. Mark Normand just debuted a new episode of his Page to Stage, and there is going to be a very big debut coming as well. There will be some coming out in the next couple days there, and we have some big announcements coming from the podcast side of our product offerings.

ES: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

DF: Thank you so much.