What Is Your Audience Actually Worth?

In the year or so since In Development launched, it hasn’t gone the way I planned. The original intent remains — exploring what it now means to have a sustainable entertainment career — but I didn’t expect the answers we’re all finding in real time. You can read my take so far here, but the TL;DR is: None of your presumptions are true. Reimagine, rethink, and recreate everything and you’ve got a shot.

Where that falls on the optimism-pessimism scale is your own Rorschach test, but I love it. Not the layoffs, the mergers, the rampant unemployment, and the fear that comes with it — all of that and more unreservedly sucks. What I love is the energy that emerges when circumstances change so definitively that the only meaningful choice is to respond with invention.

That’s what Josh Stein is doing as the founder of financing and lending platform Attention Capital. His thesis: Attention is an asset class and financiers will lend against it. He reached out after reading my take on compression as the Iron Backsession secret weapon and wanted to take it a step further: Before filmmakers bring personal equity to the table, know its worth.  

So, Josh is our first-ever guest writer. The timing is great — I’m spending this week celebrating my husband’s birthday and our anniversary — and it’s exciting to see people take In Development ideas and “yes, and” them into a life of their own.

And with that, take it away Josh. I’ll be back at it next week.

What the Audience Is Actually Worth
By Josh Stein

Film financing is complicated because movies are risky, but there’s a simple reason for all that risk: it’s because we can’t know how many people will pay to watch it.

Only now, that risky, pesky variable is measurable. Thanks to “Iron Lung,” “Backrooms,” and “Obsession,” everyone gets it: Audience is now the asset and filmmakers are told that it’s their leverage. 
I’ve spent my career in leveraged finance and media businesses. Leverage sounds powerful. It’s also vague. 

For filmmakers who have an audience, leverage means they hold a measurable asset. If it’s measurable, it’s financeable — but most filmmakers don’t know how to assess that value and that’s got to change. 
Typical film financing comes down to creative ways to avoid risk (pre-sales, tax credits, distributor guarantees), followed by praying over the slice of equity left at the bottom.

Now, answered prayers: That slice became audience and it’s the most financeable asset. 

Curry Barker is the cleanest proof. His 2024 YouTube feature, “Milk & Serial,” proved he could command an audience. The $750,000 “Obsession” sold to Focus Features for roughly $15 million, 20 times its cost. It was a big sale, but the losing bidders priced a midnight horror movie. Focus paid for a filmmaker with proven demand. 

Horror surfaced as the first audience model because it’s cheap to make and its fans are loud and easy to count, but it’s a bet that can work in any genre as long as the filmmaker comes with a compression mechanism. Here, “compression” means they have the  proven ability to pull a crowd into the same window at the same time. 

That’s what everyone will pay for.

However, “I have a following” doesn’t necessarily translate to “I have collateral.” Here’s how to tell the difference. 

Does your audience come back? Forget “reach.” If you have 100,000 people who finish everything you make, they are worth more than 1 million who scroll past at eight seconds. There are artists who have 100,000 real fans, tour 50 dates a year, run healthy merch businesses, and make a better-than-middle-class living, but you’ve never heard of them. 

Has your audience converted? Sounds religious, but it’s all about turning attention into money. Have they paid you before with a drop that sold out, a release that opened, a crowdfunding that closed? You can lend against that. Massive follower numbers without conversion doesn’t count.

Do you own or rent? Collateral comes from audience you reach directly on a list you own. If you can only access audience inside someone else’s algorithm, you’re in a rental. 

What haven’t you given away? A financier can only lend against what’s yours to pledge.  If you signed your email list to a brand partner or promised your next feature to a platform, you don’t hold that value.
Almost no one is Markiplier, who had so much audience and financial collateral that he wrote his own $3 million check for “Iron Lung”and kept most of the $51 million in worldwide gross. 

Everyone else needs to raise money, and the instrument you use to do that will determine what you own. Take the wrong equity and it prices your audience at zero, routes the upside to whoever wrote the check, and leaves you a contractor on your own movie.

I’ve watched this happen, and it’s the part that still makes me angry. The least business-minded person in the room often gets the worst of the deal — and often, that’s the creative person who actually built the thing.

Pausing here for a PSA: “Take it to Sundance and sell it to Netflix” is an ancient myth. Streamers stopped paying for that years ago.

This is what’s true now: The audience you built can be valued, financed, and negotiated like any other asset. The right money will structure it against demand and let you keep the upside.  

The mechanics of how that deal actually gets built are their own long argument, one I’m working through over on my Substack, The Film Bond. The part you can use today is shorter: Know what your audience is worth before you walk into a room where someone has already priced it without you.

Josh Stein is the founder of Attention Capital, a private credit platform that lends against the audiences that creators and media businesses build. He began his career in leveraged finance, first as a banker at Bear Stearns and then as a leveraged finance lawyer at Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Since then, he has spent more than 15 years building businesses around IP, audience, and distribution at companies including VICE and El Rey/Univision, long before the creator economy had a name. Operators who want to know what their audience is worth start at attncap.com/creators. Capital starts at attncap.com. More writing on attention as an asset class at attncap.substack.com.

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