She is a divorcee standing tentatively in her new independence as she takes the rubbish out, clutching a pashmina around her shoulders like it’s the last warm thing in a cold, cold world. She taps the handle of the bin, a gesture that reassures her and those watching that she might… just… be okay. She experiences a tiny thrill, a possible sexual reawakening, when the cheeky hedgetrimmer notices her new blonde hair after a trip to Tress to Impress. You sense she hasn’t been noticed in this way for years. She does all of this to the tune of Sleepwalker, Julia Byrnes’s melancholic finger-picking reminding her “she lived her life alone, before you.”

I have watched her blooming reinvention with the devotion I usually reserve for prestige television, except I’m watching it on Instagram, and the longest episode is about 48 seconds. Delivering the pre-finale plot twist, her ex has texted: “this was a mistake…I’m sorry”. There are only two more episodes until the finale. Will she return to her ex? Does she own any other pashminas? What is her name?! Where is Tress to Impress?

For all intents and purposes, despite them being parodies, these videos are gripping, episodic, serialised drama.

Recognition is Sainsbury’s most brilliant skill

The woman in the pashmina is the latest creation of New Zealand comedian, writer and actor, Tom Sainsbury, who has long been one of our most insightful observers. He creates recognisable characters in five seconds, often using a wig, an obvious filter, or a single prop or costume. The woman taking out the rubbish has racked up close to 950,000 views to date.

Sainsbury is a master of caricature, wrapping tropes in warm blankets, taking the piss without punching down and building characters out of recognition rather than contempt. You see yourself, and people and fictional characters you love or love to laugh at.

Specifically, you see a kind of middle-New Zealandness that makes you laugh, cringe and go a bit soft all at once. Mirroring identity is now something social media strategists call out as a recognisable and valuable hook in social media video.

Comedic talent is a gift on social media

Sainsbury is a prolific creator, seen on stage, on television, and in the long, steady stream of short-form videos that have built him one of the most devoted audiences in the country. Comedians tend to start with an unfair advantage on social media because content only works when it does something for the person watching, and the thing comedians are already preternaturally good at - making people laugh- is God-tier on social media.

Content is not the only thing he does, and looking at his vast pile of other work, I suspect he has not been coolly studying the mechanics of content creation full-time, nor applying his findings with surgical precision. His wheelhouse works incredibly well on social, and he’s been doing it long enough to have shaped a bit of our online culture and influenced what success looks like in New Zealand. Creator or consumer, we’re all laying algorithmic breadcrumbs that influence what we see and create.

His talent and work ethic are also impossible to ignore or distil into a formula. Despite the level playing field social media is meant to have enabled, creating for these platforms is far harder than it looks and relies more on natural ability, talent and work than the many people flogging content creation as a business would have you believe.

The mechanics of success on social media

Despite the unquantifiable nature of talent and work ethic, there are some mechanics to his success on social media - a combination of hard algorithmic truths and intrinsic human need - that are easier to dissect, understand and embrace.

• You share the divorcee’s story because it’s funny and recognisable. You send it because you know a friend will like it, and it becomes shared language between you. Brilliantly, you return because it’s a series with a narrative structure.

• None of that happens unless it holds your attention first. Sainsbury’s videos are short. The threshold-of-revelation moment at the rubbish bin is 19 seconds long. Watch time is valuable currency on Meta platforms and YouTube, and anyone making videos understands the brutal reality of skip, hold, completion, swipe-away and hook rates.

• You then repeat all the sharing and sending because it has cultural cachet, the interest that compounds on attention. It’s the moment a thing stops being content you consume passively and privately and becomes a marker of who you are for having noticed it. The cachet is participatory; it accrues to the group as much as the sender, and the thing travels because being in on it together is the point.

The crucial thing is that cachet is now the distribution mechanism.

Reach is no longer handed to you or tied to your follower count; it is granted per piece of content by the people who decide it’s worth spending a little of their own social capital to pass along.

If you’re working on social media, your job is to make something worth carrying. It is a watercooler moment on steroids, and it travels on the backs of the people who love it, or it does not travel at all.

A format coming of age

Serialised content has come of age as a social media format and is going gangbusters if you follow the money trail.

Sainsbury’s last big serial drama in 2020 was the story of his impending marriage to Karlena, a Microsoft Paint fever dream of a woman who had more comprehensive character development than Rory Gilmore in the Gilmore Girls revival. I don’t think we would have called it serialised drama then, or even now; they were and are skit comedy videos that get us through lockdowns or just life at this point. Serialised drama is an old-world format term being given new life by an industry looking to monetise and hold attention. Storytelling instincts are storytelling instincts, and serial drama has existed long before Sainsbury or Instagram, but Sainsbury, no matter how low-fi or serendipitous his work or timing is, was about six years ahead of the curve with his Karlena yarn, and he’s right on it with pashmina woman.

Short, vertical serials known as microdramas that live on apps like DramaBox and ReelShort pulled in around $11 billion in US dollars globally last year, with forecasts nudging towards $14 billion for this one, according to Variety. Deloitte puts the forecast in-app revenue at $3.8 billion to $7.8 billion for 2026. Downloads of those apps surpassed 2.3 billion in 2025, more than double the year before, just as downloads of traditional streaming apps began to fall. Microdramas are massive in China, where they originated, with Wired reporting that half of all internet users have now watched at least one.

Many of these microdramas are in tried-and-true soap opera formats and determinedly low-fi. They’re not going to win Emmys with titles like Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress or Orange Cat Taoist Priest: Fighting the Zombie King, but they have people gripped and handing over money to keep watching.

I’m not implying that Sainsbury is some kind of cynical social media mogul deliberately crafting a multi-million-dollar microdrama play; he’s a master creator and creative, and as far as anyone can tell, he makes what he likes and always has. I don’t think he’s reading Puck or The Publish Press and chasing the moment; it’s just that the moment is turning up where he's standing.

Building the pipes for the binge

The platforms are also all in on serialised content, bringing content creators to the big screen in your living room. Meta launched Instagram for TV on Samsung smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV in the US in June. Instagram is testing longer creator content and episodic series that unfold across multiple episodes, with monetisation options for creators. Meta also offers tiered subscription plans through Meta One that provide better access to support, AI features, and verification. I think it's safe to say the company is laying plumbing for more than that. The living room and the subscription cash are the two things social media companies want next.

Early to where everyone is now rushing

Sainsbury has long been one of the sharpest people we have on social media, and he is far from the only one; a whole cohort of New Zealand comedians have understood this medium instinctively for years and have the advantages that come with social media-friendly material, performance skills and audience savvy. The thing they’ve been doing to grow fan bases, promote and showcase their work, or purely for their own amusement, just happens to be the thing Instagram is about to spend a fortune trying to own. By instinct and on a low-to-no budget (his work is low-fi and that's a compliment), Sainsbury is doing what a multi-billion-dollar industry is spending enormous money to manufacture.

To the woman in the paisley pashmina, please don’t go back to your ex.

The allegations come from a 40-minute YouTube video that currently has over 220,000 views. Its creators, and the people watching and amplifying it, are calling it an investigation and a documentary.

It’s pretty remarkable that it got through to me. While media reference social media like it’s a big centralised town square on another planet — “on social media” being a favourite phrase — it’s actually more like a giant mall full of kiosks you only know about if you’re interested in what they sell. I’m a cantankerous, cynical woman in my mid-forties with a contrarian streak. I have developed ninja-like reflexes trained to knock anything that contains the words protein, creatine, or peptides out of my algorithm. My algorithm is fine-tuned to deliver exactly 874,321 minutes of microdrama about amoral AI-generated anthropomorphic fruit and self-perpetuating reassurance in the form of incredibly accurate astrological forecasts and tarot card readings.

Institutional media took a few days to arrive at it this story. rova ran a story on June 22. Stuff and the NZ Herald followed on June 23. As reported by both, NZ Muscle has since released a statement saying that, after an internal review, it has removed some products from sale and apologised to customers. According to the Herald, a New Zealand Food Safety spokesperson says the agency was aware of the claims and is “examining the evidence”, while the Commerce Commission is assessing whether it would undertake an investigation into the company.

You may not have seen any of it. The communities around fitness and supplements are vast, but unless you’re into what they’re selling, they are algorithmically sealed off, which is how a story can be the biggest thing happening to a great many people while everyone else hears nothing.

This story has jumped out of its lane, propelled by all the usual trimmings of a social media firestorm and accelerated by the supplement industry’s close ties to social media content creators, many of whom are dealing with their own crisis of trust as former ambassadors who recommended the products of the company in question. The documentary is being discussed and clipped. Others are filming reactions to the allegations. Lawyers are filming videos breaking down the legals of it. One video of a woman tipping the powder into the bin has over 1.1 million views.

A business getting torched on social media is not new. The pipeline that carries an online pile-on into the mainstream press has been running for the better part of two decades.

The creator investigation is not necessarily new either. Independent writers and journos like David Farrier have been doing it here. Internationally, it is close to a genre by now: the lone YouTuber or small outfit that spends months on a target, publishes a long and lawyered video, offers a right of reply, and calls the result a documentary, which it is.

What is new, or perhaps has gone unchecked for a while, is the adoption and embrace of old-media visage in a new-media world, to the point where the audience just says, “yep, this is investigative journalism now”. It’s as if a vacuum appeared, was noticed and then got filled while the media was wringing its hands over how to ensure people know that journalism is important (democracy will die, etc.) and DIfFereNt from what content creators do. The problem is the audience doesn’t care and is happily awarding the NZ Muscle documentary laurels that were previously reserved for the work of our longform current affairs journalists.

The video carries all the furniture of a documentary or investigation. It opens with dramatic strings and a pacey montage of clips and voiceovers. Subsequent videos from one of the creators discuss the right of reply, months of work, legal letters, and PR firms. The channel has “Investigates” in its name. That furniture carries a whole lot of implied meaning that used to belong only to institutional journalism - trust, editorial oversight, time spent, vetting, fact checking, regulatory standards and bodies and consequential weight.

One of the people involved in making the documentary runs a business that competes directly with the company under the microscope. That’s a conflict of interest that would be caught within a news media environment, and it’s not to say it takes away from what is being alleged, or from the work that was done. It just highlights that in the eyes of audiences, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. People like ducks, even if there’s a conflict of interest bobbing around in the duck soup.

The apparatus, meant to differentiate journalism from content, is technically missing, yet the audience does not appear to miss it.

The top comment on YouTube simply says, “Close enough. Welcome back Fair Go.” People are reaching for the language of television current affairs and all it means to them to describe something made by a creator operating outside the strictures of the industry that spawned the language. It’s the nearest shorthand they have for what this video is doing.

Stuff and the Herald named no channel in their reporting and linked to nothing, sourcing the whole story to “a YouTube video”. There are sound reasons to be careful, but it will no doubt bounce around online as them not crediting the source or “stealing the story”. The caution is real, but explaining it is to fight a losing battle, and to the people already inside the story, who watched the thing days ago and know exactly where it came from, “a YouTube video” reads as an institution holding at arm’s length something everyone in the room has already picked up. The distance that keeps them safe is the same distance that lies between them and an audience that’s already walked away from them.

To that audience, this is their front page news story and the top of the 6pm bulletin. They're watching the YouTube documentary on TV screens in their living rooms. It’s a big investigation into something they actually care about, made by someone they already trust, delivered to the place they were already watching.

There is a concerted effort to keep asking whether content on social media made by creators counts as real journalism. The audience for this story was never going to wait for a masthead to bless the story. As far as they’re concerned, it is already blessed.

They have worked out what they will treat as news, who they will trust to bring it and what shape it should arrive in, without the blessing of the institutions that used to run it.

You can find that thrilling or unnerving. Mostly, it’s worth understanding, because this genie ain’t getting back in the bottle now.

Last year, I sat on an AI adoption panel for the arts and culture sector. The discussion that stuck was the one on social licence: the permission and trust you need to go about your business, especially from the people affected.

I keep coming back to it as the government couples plans to cut nearly 9,000 public service jobs, with making AI deployment a “basic expectation for all public entities“. This is not an uncommon coupling - it’s in the headlines every single day.

For what it’s worth, I use Gen AI and agentic AI most days. I don’t use it to write or do things I think people rely on my experience and credentials for. I use it to run a one-woman band more efficiently and to give me time back. I have defined and automated repeatable tasks. I have organised my bloody folders.

I have always been a pragmatist about new technologies. That doesn’t make me an optimist. This technology is fraught as hell, and people have reasonable and substantial objections, fears and anxieties. If we’re talking about social license for Gen and agentic AI, broadly, it seems this has been skipped or dismissed as unnecessary, but accepting that no social license is required is just swallowing tech-company rhetoric whole. Coupled with a lack of knowledge and strong governance, it’s the blind(ed) leading angry, anxious people with real-world concerns.

A few things I’ve been thinking about at 2am this week, reading the news:

Adoption and fear are hard to run at the same time. In fact, they’re antithetical.

The behaviour you’re hoping to influence - curiosity, experimentation, a willingness to get things wrong and learn - is a big ask while there’s a sword dangling over your head, and it’s even bigger in the public service where failures are front-page news.

A study of 2,257 employees, published this year, found that psychological safety predicts whether people pick up AI tools at all. Fortune published this headline in February: “The AI adoption story is haunted by fear as today’s efficiency programs look like tomorrow’s job cuts.” The cost-cutting, pre-Budget frame is politics, but is it actually helpful?

Social licence runs in two directions

Inwards, with the people asked to use the tools. Outwards, with the public. Concerns aren’t irrational. They sit around ethics, environmental degradation, techno-imperialism, and massive wealth generation for the few, not the many. Practically, they involve data protection, governance and sovereignty, oversight, and who carries the can when something goes wrong. The government’s current AI framework was described as a “Pollyanna policy” in an analysis on The Conversation. The success of Estonia’s Kratt framework, which enables uptake alongside transparency and legal accountability, is predicated on “building the right enablers and governance structures around AI,” according to its government chief data officer, Ott Velsberg.

What people are allowed to use shapes what they think AI is

A recent survey of AI use across the public sector by Adam Jarvis (recommended reading) shows that logically and for many good reasons (risk perception, enterprise agreements), Microsoft Co-pilot is dominant. Adam has an excellent round-up of some of the issues there. Without visibility of the full gamut of publicly available tools - Claude’s Cowork and Code or Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM, for example - your understanding of how they work, and importantly, how your public is engaging with Gen AI, is inhibited. Restrict the tools too tightly, and you get the other problem: “shadow adoption”, with people quietly using personal accounts on their phones, creating the exact data risks the policy was meant to avoid.

Public Service

How is AI used across the New Zealand Public Sector?

The progress of AI adoption in the New Zealand public sector should generate broader interest for two reasons. First, New Zealand is ahead of the adoption curve; Claude use in 2025 was roughly fo…

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2 months ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Alethios

The examples you choose when pitching adoption do a lot of work

We didn’t sell social media into business by talking about the bants and the memes. We used stats and examples. “We used AI to help write a report,” or to correct spelling and grammar in speeches, is a rudimentary use case that offers little insight into the potential for broader benefits. Rachel Karten wrote a sharp piece asking, “Does your boss have AI brain?” and included examples of staff who paste their own work into fake Copilot chats so the boss will actually read it. That’s what rudimentary “Gen AI as a chatbot” examples sound like - boss AI brain. Why not cite more sophisticated examples, like the Department of Conservation’s predator-detection cameras or ACC’s AI Scribe (Adam describes it as “likely to serve as the best-practice model for wider adoption over the coming years”, or international examples like the “Kratt” framework.

Words matter because precision is kind of central to Gen and agentic AI use

It’s why I am an annoying pedant and explicitly say Gen and agentic AI. I know it’s shorthand, but “AI” has been stamped on everything from washing-machine fuzzy logic to chess engines for decades. What’s actually being asked for is experimentation with generative AI, LLMs, and agentic AI, and agentic AI is a whole different ballgame from prompting in LLMs. That precision isn’t fussiness for its own sake. The guardrails you need depend on a clear articulation of what you’re talking about and the use cases you envisage and are seeking buy-in for.

The perception of the public service as monolithic laggards

Is it helpful or true? For most people, the story of useful Gen AI adoption is one where they’re enabled, not afraid, and able to experiment, not one where they’re framed as reluctant, unwilling, or so institutionally conditioned that they’re incapable of innovation. The PSA’s survey found 81% of members already say AI helps them work more effectively, with little fear of being replaced. The concerns workers have cited are also pretty valid and universal. Adam’s survey also provides a nuanced look at adoption in the public service.

A pre-Budget, election-year job-cuts framing is inevitable, but it could easily burn the goodwill, innovative spirit, and curiosity that exist. It’s also worth reading Henry Cooke in The Post on what a public servant actually is, the workforce numbers behind it and the “large bet” on AI’s potential.

Thank you for reading the things that popped into my head at 2 am. I don’t have firm conclusions or a wealth of expert knowledge, but I am keen to hear people’s thoughts.

I’ve seen a lot of commentary on Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri’s AMA last Friday, reductively boiled down to the idea that follower counts don’t matter. Here is what he actually said:

“The engagement rate of the content is more important than the follower count. Now it’s not that the follower count isn’t important. It is important, but it definitely correlates with reach. The more followers you have, the more reach you can get on average.

That said, a better sign for how well you’re doing online is how many likes you’re getting for posts, how many views you’re getting for photo or reel or carousel. If your followers are going down but your engagement is going up, that’s actually good. That means more people are seeing your stuff.”

I have 194 followers on my cooking account. My “best” video got 2.5k views. HUGE NUMBERS. Going to be able to quit my day job soon. It’s also the one that took the least time and is arguably the stupidest, but it did have something that really matters now. Many people with, say… 15k followers are also regularly pulling those views or fewer, and it might be because they have a little less of something that really matters now.

Instagram is leaning particularly hard into saves and sends as signals its omnipotent algorithm God picks up when deciding how far your post will go. Content with utility and shareability has always mattered, and it matters even more now. Not just because the algorithm says so, but because being audience-first and driving engagement (ergo, reach) means thinking like an actual human and not a strategist or marketer.

Saves sends a signal that suggests utility is a valued feature of content by human beings, something you’ll come back to. I save style, makeup, skincare, and food content.

Sends are a signal that the content works as a marker of human self-expression, thought, values and identity. I don’t save funny videos. I send them as a way of saying hi, or I think this is funny. I am saying something to you, the recipient of “dog does funny thing” about myself or our relationship.

The thing is, none of this should be new to people. From an audience perspective, unless your content is useful, entertaining or can be used to express something about you - your sense of humour, being in the know (see the numbers on news clips), you thinking of someone, you believing in something (see news clips spliced for political commentary) - then it’s not content for audiences. It’s broadcasting.

This has been an immutable truth since ye olde days of having Google talk to social media managers about YouTube in the mumble, mumble, mid-2010s.

Mosseri is not saying anything radical; he’s saying that audience response and judgment are the most critical factors in the success of social media content.

The hot tip for figuring this out? Would you, in a personal capacity as a nobody on Instagram, save it or send it? Not enough people run that test.

Followers do equate to reach, as Mosseri says, they just don’t guarantee it anymore. The algorithm decides and, if we’re being benevolent, acts as a leveller, but follower count is still a signal of trust and loyalty. Of people who chose someone, more than once, over the thousands of other things competing for the same attention. That doesn’t disappear because the algorithm has decided to jiggle the levers on reach.

Audiences take time to build, and what Mosseri accidentally underscores is the risk of building your house (audience) on other people’s land (platforms). The rules of engagement change overnight. Content aggregators just got a massive serve from Instagram. That’s a big ecosystem involving a lot of money that’s just been algorithmically deprioritised.

This is why I tell clients to have at least one platform or format where you actually own your audience. In most cases, that means a newsletter, which is code for a way to build a properly owned audience. Relying on any platform with an algorithm, a locked ecosystem, or a built-in “network effect”, where some unexplained signals are making or breaking you, is risky.

The through-line here is your audience. “Follower counts don’t matter” is a reduction of what Mosseri actually said. They do indicate an audience that chose you. But what drives reach now is the same thing those followers indicated in the first place by following: they value what you’re making enough to engage with it. If stuff isn’t reaching people, it’s because it’s not engaging them, i.e. it’s not moving them, helping them and ultimately, prompting them to do anything with it. The number of followers you have isn’t going to change that equation for you. Your content has to work for them.

To make things work for you, I recommend also building elsewhere - on land you do own and don’t rent. Grow reach and engagement somewhere where you’re not 100% beholden to the whims of an algorithm. After 15-plus years doing this, the one thing I can guarantee is that the rug will eventually get pulled out from under you on rented land.

Troy Superstar Daniels walked out, and the kids booed him on cue. Earlier that day, at the invitation of Ben Fagan, Troy Rawhiti-Connell (without the Superstar Daniels persona) spent time with National Youth Drama School NZ students before they attended the Aotearoa Wrestling match Troy had brought down to the school. He taught them the chants, showed them how their participation fit into the event, and gave them time to shift from tentative to disinhibited.

Over the last few years, I have grown to love pro wrestling. It’s got a lot to do with the experience of being in the audience. New Zealand audiences can be quite reticent about expressing themselves or getting involved at live events. They will shrink into their seats and hope the earth opens up to swallow them if audience participation is even hinted at.

Wrestling crowds are different. I’m never more uninhibited than when I’m sitting in a plastic chair, ringside, watching people with important day jobs throw each other against the ropes, dressed head to toe in tight lycra. The things I have yelled.

Pro wrestling has always struck me as one of the most audience-first sports and entertainment franchises in the world, and what I watched that day at NYDS was a local version of the same audience-driven phenomenon that has powered WWE’s parent company, TKO, to a market cap of $36b (USD).

I hope I’m not killing your inner child here, but pro wrestling is scripted storytelling. It has heroes and villains and soap-opera arcs that run for years. These tried-and-true narrative devices power part of its appeal, but it’s the audience’s integral role and the nods to their power and voice that have supercharged it. In 2024, #WeWantCody trended on X for three days after WWE announced that the main event at WrestleMania would not be Cody Rhodes vs Roman Reigns, but The Rock vs Reigns. In response to the backlash, WWE restructured the bill, putting Rhodes back. Audiences have come to expect to be part of how storylines and events unfold because they have solid evidence that they matter.

There’s also a shared vocabulary that has been built up and reinforced over decades. People know what to do because it’s modelled, taught and repeated over and over again. Barriers to discovering that information are low. There’s cohesion amongst the crowd, and it’s proactively encouraged by the wrestlers. As a first-time attendee at a local match, it would take you five seconds to work out who was the heel and who was the good guy, and to cheer and chat accordingly. At WWE, The Usos enter, and everyone yeets.

The inverse of that, and something I took a while to recover from, was the first time I went to hear an orchestra and clapped between movements. My face got hot, and the sound of one person clapping was the soundtrack to shame. No one had told me that a silence at what sounds like the end of something can be a break, rather than an invitation to applaud enthusiastically.

In every role I’ve had, I’ve tried to dismantle the assumption that audiences already know what to do. Audience work is, in large part, the business of smashing internal assumptions about what people know or care about. It’s often an unpopular internal role because, from time to time, the job is to remind people that no one cares about the product name or brand as much as the internal team does, and no one knows what xyz means.

The unpopular moves continue if someone is doing audience-first right. Audience-first writing often buries the brand and spotlights the reader. Audience-first social media usually starts by suggesting the logo doesn’t need to be that big, or there at all, and asks whether what’s being posted is useful or worth sharing as a form of social currency. Audience-first fundraising begins with understanding the needs and values of the people being asked for money. An audience-first attitude is saying “it’s not about us, it’s about them,” and bringing the “them” to the table, unpopular opinions and all.

What Troy did at NYDS was the whole of it in miniature. He invited the kids in, explained how the thing worked, and told them they mattered to the experience, which is a part many organisations skip when they think about audiences. The kids understood the assignment the moment they walked in, because someone had built them a toolkit and told them to use it.

It may be obvious to some people what the rituals, naming conventions, behaviours, personalities, and evolving norms of the many experiences we take part in are about. To the uninitiated, perhaps not so much. The role of someone working in the audience field is to find the bridge between the two groups and help the latter ones cross.

TVNZ is betting you will, announcing on Wednesday that the Between Two Beers Podcast and a swathe of other Frank Podcasts are coming to TVNZ+. Frank Podcasts are a New Zealand-based podcast production and brand partnership service. Between Two Beers is part of their ecosystem.

Six months ago, I would have sworn on my grandparents’ graves I would never watch podcasts (we’re going to need a new word for podcasts, she said for the 35th time this year). Podcasts were for my ears, in the car. Initially, they were made exactly for that. The long-form narrative hit Serial was designed as an audio-only product. The now-dominant chat format draws on old and familiar TV and radio formats, while being far cheaper to produce. We are acclimatised to lo-fi production after 20 years of social media, and the form has rooted itself in fulfilling both old and new audience needs while delivering video-friendly outputs.

I have been delighted by, and slightly obsessed with, this shot from a video stream of Louis Theroux’s podcast all week.

This is one of the world’s best-known documentarians, Theroux, introducing one of the world’s best-known journalists, Patrick Radden Keefe, for one of the show’s most recent episodes. We watched it like event TV, except it was on demand. It was a brilliant and absorbing conversation, and seeing their faces made it better. It was... a lot like... the long-form interview that everyone mourns has gone the way of the dodo in institutional media.

The production is, objectively, a bit of a shambles. You can clock the autocue. The producer is sitting on the floor. The logo on the screen behind Louis is half cut off. On Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, the white balance is sometimes genuinely alarming. I don’t care, and maybe nobody else does either. It engenders intimacy and authenticity, and brings the host down from the mountain of polished broadcast to something more approachable. I’ve gone from exclusively listening to podcasts to actively watching them in six months. Ramesh Ranganathan. Ezra Klein. The Rest is Politics. Amy Poehler. Theroux.

Lo-fi production now extends to some of the biggest names in entertainment and journalism. Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment understand the rules of engagement as well as anyone. Both titans of traditional media have no problems doing native ad reads, engaging their fan community with weekly mailbag episodes and events, and having their near-hour-long episodes clipped into bits for social.

Audience growth and monetisation in podcasts, including as they extend to video streaming, and despite their low production costs, requires either a celeb at the helm with big studio might, an existing platform or an almost non-negotiable toolkit that includes community building, very active social media, events, a newsletter, a subscription model, and a feedback loop with fans.

In streaming video form, they’re modern-day talk show hosts. Talk show hosts of yore always had live studio audiences. And while the needs of the audience aren’t really new - inform, entertain, inspire remain bedrocks for a reason - I’d argue that engendering a sense of companionship and two-way street engagement and participation are creeping into the “needs-must” mix.

High production values, broad, one-way-street reach and an institutional masthead used to signal trust. Now, two people chatting, revealing their own foibles and uncertainties, with a more niche audience in mind are emerging as trusted sources. The added bonus? Feeling like you, the audience member, are part of something and not alone as you grapple with things, big and small.

Between Two Beers has built something pretty incredible in a small market where we are, by and large, an importer of culture – a phenomenon exacerbated by global access to anything we like, and aided by lingering cultural cringe. Charts bob around, but a glance last night at the Spotify podcast charts right now makes this obvious. Outside radio shows packaged as podcasts and one “not for radio” New Zealand radio spinoff, only two New Zealand shows crack the top 20. The rest are from the US, Australia and the UK. Australia fares slightly better with a few Aussie-made shows cracking the top 20. Joe Rogan rules across both.

It’ll be fascinating to see how the TVNZ+ numbers play out. My hunch is that while it will time to shift pods (named for the iPod) from ears to TV screens, the direction of travel is clear. Chat podcasts translate well. We’re well acclimatised to lo-fi, and the creators doing it well understand that audiences expect to be somewhat included and recognised, even if that’s just having your fan behaviour highlighted in an Instagram story or your question read out on the mailbag episode. It fuels growth. By necessity, it’s a more generous form of media than most of us grew up with.

Cheap TV isn’t quite the right phrase for what’s happening here, and it probably undersells the people genuinely embracing an audience-first media environment. Whatever we end up calling it, Between Two Beers landing on TVNZ+ feels like a marker of something. Whether it’s a tipping point or just an interesting data point is something I’ll keep revisiting.