Why 50,000 beats 5 Million
Is going small the smartest move in media right now?
“You’re renting your audience… YouTube, their job is to get you not to watch Valerie’s content. Their job is to get you to watch what’s next after Valerie’s content.”
Billy Cooper - CEO Visible things
This week I got to do something rare: sit back and relax to listen to The Media Odyssey Podcast.
Evan Shapiro flew solo this week for a guest he’s wanted on the show for a while. Valerie Bertinelli’s career started on shows like One Day at a Time, Hot in Cleveland and then she ran her own cooking show on Food Network. Earlier this year she launched something most TV stars wouldn’t even contemplate: her own platform. She built it with Billy Cooper, whose company Visible Things turns television veterans into direct-to-fan operators.
Cooper’s origin story matters here. He and his co-founders Andrew Greenberger and Willis Robertson met at a production company called 44 Blue, where Cooper ran Pit Bulls & Parolees for Animal Planet for nearly 20 seasons before Warner Discovery decided the channel didn’t need original programming anymore. The lesson he took from that collapse became the whole business. Audiences keep asking for a show long after a network kills it, so why not hand them the means to bring it back themselves.
That’s exactly what happened with Valerie. The team licensed all 172 episodes of Valerie’s Home Cooking back from Food Network, then built three new shows around her, including one where her longtime recipe developer Sophie Clark walks viewers through the swaps and substitutions a real cooking show never lets you see. There’s a book club, a wellness podcast and a Hot in Cleveland revisiting series recorded inside Valerie’s actual wine cellar.
Valerie’s Place chases the 1% of Bertinelli’s 5 million social followers who’d actually pay to be part of her community. Three months in, the platform’s own social accounts went from zero to 300,000 followers and the email list alone sits at 50,000.
Bertinelli and Cooper make the case that the business isn’t the show, it’s her. The playbook applies well beyond television. Anyone with a name, a face and an actual fan base can run the same play.
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That’s it for today but before you go: