Subscribers are not a business model

After the 2019 general elections, I started a digital news YouTube channel called Mythri Media. It reached around 2.2 lakh subscribers. The money we received from YouTube was still too low for the venture, and I eventually sold it because of the losses.

An audience figure can make a business look stronger from the outside than it feels from the inside. That experience taught me to look more carefully at the relationship between attention, revenue, and the cost of producing work consistently.

Attention is an opportunity with costs attached

Content takes time to plan, produce, edit, and publish. A growing audience can increase expectations about frequency and quality. The income available from that audience does not necessarily move at the same pace as the work.

I do not treat my experience as a rule about every channel. Creators have different formats, costs, audiences, and sources of revenue. What Mythri Media made clear to me was that subscriber count alone could not explain whether our own venture was sustainable.

The better questions were commercial ones. Where does the money come from? How predictable is it? What does it cost to keep producing? What happens if one source of income falls short?

A creator needs to be discoverable for the right reason

After that experience, I began thinking about a platform that could help people who are good at creating content earn through brand work. That idea became Adency, an influencer marketing platform.

The intended connection is straightforward. A creator needs a credible way to present their work and performance. A brand needs a way to find relevant creators, assess the information available, and place an order.

Relevance matters here. A large audience is not automatically the right audience for a particular business. A smaller creator may work in a category, language, or community that fits a brand’s needs. A useful marketplace should make those distinctions easier to examine.

Verification helps a commercial conversation start

Adency’s approach is for influencers to onboard by verifying their YouTube channel and Instagram accounts. The platform uses official APIs to pull performance data, build a public profile, and showcase creators in a marketplace. Brands can search, select creators, and release an order.

Data can support a decision; it cannot promise a campaign outcome. A profile still needs to be considered alongside the content, the audience fit, and the proposed work. I see the platform’s role as helping the two sides make a better-informed connection.

A clear order also matters. Both sides should understand what is being commissioned and what delivery means. Discovery is only the beginning of a working relationship.

Build around an economic problem

The lesson I carried forward from Mythri Media was not that an audience has no value. It was that audience growth and a sustainable business need to be considered together.

For a creator, another route to income can create more options. For a brand, a clearer marketplace can reduce the work involved in finding appropriate collaborators. Those are practical problems worth addressing.

Selling a venture after losses is not the outcome a founder sets out to achieve. It can still change the quality of the next question. In this case, the question became how to help capable creators turn their work and their audience into additional commercial opportunities.