Value to Valuation: How Fans Can Help You Boost Worth

Value to Valuation: How Fans Can Help You Boost Worth

Everybody loves a fan! But what price love? As social networks and other tracking let you put a price on the head of each fan, soon your valuation will rise or fall based on your fan base.

Sure, fans can be evangelists for your brand, your distribution channel or your content. Fans can friend you on Facebook, critique you on Twitter and mash up your stuff all over YouTube. Fans can help you with your core business, secure second season pick-ups or boost international television sales. Fans can also inspire you take your entertainment business in new digital directions: onto apps and consoles, social networks and social games. Next up: fans will stand up and count for investors.

Soon, fans will be part of your business valuation, M+A strategies and financings. Here are some reasons why, based on some trends FanTrust tracks:

  • Fans are more likely to remember brand messaging than other audiences, a powerful reason to build a fanbase as part of any campaign. This is especially true when it comes to mobile fans, according to big brands like Marks & Spencer.
  • Facebook fans of big brands like Starbucks and McDonalds spend twice as much as other customers.
  • The estimated value of Starbucks’ Facebook Audience: $1.8 Billion.

The right number of fans can not only help you to secure deals with brands, broadcasters and distributors, but increasingly fans are part of the investment mix. Producers raising money to finance media properties need more than just great content for the right demographic, they need a baked in fan-base or at the very least accurate projections about audience reach.

For the past ten years FanTrust has seen lots of business models (and many strange bedfellows) — but only recently an increased attention to audiences, and fans in particular.

We’ve witnessed and advanced this steady rise in both television and new media companies valuing their fans, fan relationships and fan communities.

This is an important development in an entertainment industry where audiences have traditionally been seen as amorphous blobs, like ratings or bums on seats. Valuing fans will bring media rights holders, brands and investors closer together, speaking a common language and putting the committed consumer first.

Next time on the FanTrust blog, FanTrust’s top tips for connecting content creators with distributors and brands.