It seems the combination of education and entertainment in today’s content happened so fast, audiences are having trouble catching up. This is especially true with topics like beauty and fashion, which most people would agree, are already cyclical and continuously refreshed with new material. When this type of educational entertainment moved online, the synthesis of video, multimedia, and e-commerce created yet another self-reinforcing business model for trend-setters that has already been leveraged to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars as of only a year ago.
How is this new industry being built? It’s probably a lot simpler than you think.
An Old Model Made New
In the 1950s, the combination of mass media, mass marketing, and mass production created the most advanced and most valuable economic engine in human history. The culmination of the wealth generated by that model drove the development of both the space program and the Internet.
Now, the model for companies like Memebox has shifted to video, blogs, and e-commerce, which to a certain extent are less a replacement for the old model, and more an evolution of the three elements into a new synthesis. For the beauty industry, which relies heavily on photography and video for marketing appeal, the new technologies could not be more suitable. Direct sales can also be a boon when beauty and health bloggers just have to use images as part of the pitch.
More Books with Fewer Pages
The Internet has ushered in a world of limited attention spans and has necessitated an information economy built from bite-size updates instead of huge volumes of material. The blog model is ideal for this, as there are no enforceable restrictions on the weight or frequency of articles. One need only to look to social media like Instagram to see how popular visual updates of only a few words can become.
Blogs like Glossier, who take advantage of the many-regular-updates model, are seeing an accelerated version of the weekly TV show dynamics of decades past. Audiences “tune in” at predictable intervals to get their update for the day. Over time, those audiences grow into customers and more revenue through direct sales, e-commerce, and recommendations of major brands.
The most appealing thing about beauty blogging is that all three elements: blogs, video, and e-commerce all feed into each other, creating a varied selection of content that can either be generally targeted or aimed at a specific subject. As audiences make their preferences known, those same bloggers can adjust their approach and find new growth in areas they may not have considered before.