Fans Aren’t Fans Anymore… They’re Customers

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Yeah, I got a question. When did fans stop being treated like fans and instead start being treated like wallets with opinions?

[00:00:10]Hey y'all, Snarky J Cosplay and Togal here cuz he wants to be part of the video today. Anyways, when we think about being a fan now, it's not just about loving NIP. It's buying tie-in merchandise, going to events, spending way too much money on overpriced Star Wars themed hotels. They just keep coming for our opinions, coming for our favorite IPs, and more than ever coming for our wallets. It kind of feels like fandom isn't about passion anymore. It's more about monetization. And that's because somewhere along the way, fans stopped being a loved community and instead just became another market to sell to. See, fandom used to be built on connection, not consumption. When we think about back in the day, there were all these online fandom forums that were a little weird but a lot of fun. There were fanrun conventions. There was so much fan art and fanfiction to be had that it really felt like a lot of us had just gathered to be cringed together.

[00:01:11]And we did. We engaged deeply. We discussed our theories and our stories.

[00:01:17]We wrote so much reader insert fanfiction. My god. And above all, we built communities. And in the days before mass marketing along social media and the internet as a whole, the creators of our favorite IPs actually needed us. The success of an IP or a piece of content depended on word of mouth. It depended on repeat engagement and above all it depended on fan loyalty which encouraged them to treat us with a certain amount of uh the word escapes me respect. Fans weren't just buyers. We were literally the foundation of that thing. And now it kind of feels like the situation and the relationship has flipped and it started to get a little toxic. Fans are now customers and we're really easy to sell to. To be honest, I just made a video about how expensive Disney has made their theme parks. For instance, Disney adults are some of the most rabid and dedicated fans, and they're willing to pay more and more money for fast passes that were once free. They're willing to pay now for Genie Plus. They're willing to pay for premium experiences. Or maybe not as willing as Disney once thought cuz they had to close their Star Wars hotel.

[00:02:28]Aside from Disney, it feels like there's a franchise merchandise overload. I mean, have you seen how many Funkos now end up at places like Five Below, the Dollar Tree, and above all, Landfills?

[00:02:40]They just can't stop themselves. Every irrelevant side character you've ever seen is probably a Funko or on a t-shirt or some sort of terrible keychain. And they know they can do it, too. Cuz half of these merchandise companies end up doing these limited drops to create scarcity. And people buy them up like it's nobody's business. Fans buy them, scalpers buy them, and sell them at triple and quadruple the price, and people continue to pay for them. And then there's companies like Hasbro, which are kind of known for making toys, but who eventually turned to making high-priced collectibles for adults to buy and essentially sort of fund raise to eventually get online. Of course, I would not know anything about high-priced collectibles cuz I'm above that, you know, like I'm an adult. I don't need a Hot Toys Jake Sully cuz I have issues, you know? Like anyway, look, sometimes you just need a blue catman in a loin cloth as a treat.

[00:03:42]>> It's like a reward.

[00:03:43]>> Anyways, the point that I want to make here is that loving something now comes with a price tag, which also feels a lot like being in a relationship with another human being. But hey, back in the day, and again, I haven't been going to conventions for a super long time. I started cosplaying now 10 years ago, but my first convention was probably in like 2013. And even then, the experience was vastly different from what I see now.

[00:04:06]Back then, you could get in on fan experiences just by signing up or waiting in line. And they were willing to provide them as part of, let's say, your ticket into the convention. But now, everything is a product. There's literal VIP packages at conventions.

[00:04:20]There are some conventions that now have panels that you have to pay to go into.

[00:04:25]There are paid photo ops and meet and greets. If you happen to wait in line at a table, you're going to pay for a selfie. You will literally pay for them to hold your phone and snap a quick photo. And it's not going to be cheap.

[00:04:38]There's even premium seating tiers for some fandom events. It's come to the point that access to what you love is now entirely tiered purchase-wise. I think a lot of it kind of comes from the fact that content is built more frequently for engagement and not for the fans. We look at the high output that Marvel had for a really long time.

[00:04:57]And I think that was basically to keep engagement, to keep making money, and eventually they kind of lost sight of what the fans were into, and that's why they're at where they're at now. Even Lucas Film, and it makes me laugh that both of these are tied directly to Disney. But when we look at Lucas Film, the output was so incredible on Disney Plus with all these spin-offs and shows and things that we just kept getting on that platform. and they kept expanding the content to the point where we got the acolyte, you know, regardless of fan perception or fan reaction, they just had they were going to make. And both of those kind of started to show us that for a lot of these big IP makers, it's no longer about making something great.

[00:05:37]It's about keeping you watching because once they turn you from a fan into a customer, their priorities change and now it's way less about your general reaction or interaction with that IP.

[00:05:49]It's way much more about what you can spend. When fans become customers, when fans are viewed as customers, right?

[00:05:55]When that perception shifts in the minds of these big IP makers and these studios, a lot of stuff changes.

[00:06:02]Basically, passion gets replaced by data because they no longer want to just hear about, oh my god, this is my favorite thing. Now they want to quantify this to see what the next thing they can serve you that you're going to react to positively and pay for tickets or a subscription. their decisions end up being entirely guided by analytics and engagement metrics as opposed to like direct word of mouth, which could be a really great tool and isn't that hard to find considering that everybody on Twitter has an opinion. But that's the thing is that they don't view us as fans anymore. We're just data points and it's really easy to kind of dehumanize us and eventually decide that we're some sort of angry irrelevant mob, you know, when we're not people and we're just points of data on a line. And so when they start sort of quantifying us as just data points, the quality really drops because everything becomes driven by numbers and algorithms, they're no longer thinking about the quality.

[00:06:57]They're just thinking about how much stuff they can keep putting out in front of you. So you'll just consume content.

[00:07:02]It's not think about it, critically analyze. It's just consume, consume, consume, consume. And that leads to quality and oversaturated shitty quality. And if the content isn't just sometimes it's the worst thing I think besides just bad is irrelevant cuz I think apathy is worse than hate. But they start putting out this like riskfree boring sort of irrelevant content of side characters that are risk averse or stuff that just doesn't feel like it commits to anything for the sole purpose of like hey if we could market this to as many people as possible then it'll do better. And one of the core things of advertising is if you're talking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. You can't turn everybody into a data point and talk to them. You should talk to the fans. But that's the thing is that, you know, we're not fans. And the important thing is that not only do we get reframed as like data points instead of fans, but sometimes the fans themselves when they do acknowledge that fans exist, we basically, like I said, we become like monsters. We're Frankenstein's monsters. We got the bolts on our neck and we're green and we're like, I want original trilogy.

[00:08:10]Like that's that's what they see us as, right? So, it's easy for them to use PR tactics to frame fans as either toxic or well, you're not the audience. You know, we're looking for a modern audience that isn't you. And so, the creators of this content start to dismiss any criticism, valid or invalid. And look, at the end of the day, I can acknowledge that there's a lot of bad actors as far as criticism. And yes, not all criticism is valid. I can acknowledge that. But dismissing your core audience is not really a smart strategy if you ask me.

[00:08:42]And it sucks because we're seeing this shift in how they treat fans as just walking wallets in real time. It started to turn into this thing where it's not about loving something. It's about how much you're willing to spend on it. And honestly, as a fan, that kind of turns me off to a lot of things. we start running into an era where a lot of fans are feeling disengaged. Sometimes it's burnout. I do think franchise fatigue is a real thing and we're going to start seeing more of it. But sometimes it's that apathy that I mentioned earlier and apathy is much more dangerous in terms of box office returns than hate. And a lot of people what I'm hearing is I used to be really into this. I used to love this. I used to watch this. And that's how I'm starting to feel with a lot of the stuff that I deal with. And when we start to feel like this, I think the important thing that these studios don't realize is that our trust in them to honor our favorite characters and to produce good content of our franchises and favorite IPs, that trust is so valuable. And when they start making fans feel like they're being sold to instead of valued, then that trust starts to be lost. And the whole thing is short-term gains, long-term losses for them. because that constant output and treating us like, you know, cash registers, it works for a short time and they're able to make billions, but in the long run, they start seeing losses and they start seeing fans that are no longer dedicated and don't consider themselves fans anymore. And as far as longevity goes, yeah, it doesn't look good. Now, I will say that some of these shifts, you know, they're not all terrible. I mean, not every piece of content we've ever gotten has been bad, right? So, some of this increased output. We did get some good content.

[00:10:21]And I think that because they were trying to market to us and they look at us as customers, they try to come up with more ways to give us access and they come up with more ways to engage.

[00:10:31]So, in some ways, it's good, but you know, I'm just trying to be fair here.

[00:10:36]At the end of the day, when everything becomes transactional, the relationship changes. Anyways, my point is that being a fan used to mean that you were part of something. You were integrated into a community that was bigger than you and you got to really engage with other people that were like-minded and you got to let your freak flag fly. Say that three times fast or don't. You got to really just engage with other people. It used to feel like you were part of something bigger than yourself and now it feels like we're all just paying for access to it. And at the end of the day, I think we're all bearing witness to it right now. Once fans start feeling like customers, they stop acting like fans cuz loyalty can't be monetized forever.

[00:11:17]And that's all from me. I've been Snarky J. Thank you so much for watching.

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