- Elite Video Marketing
- Posts
- FRIENDS vs Game of Thrones
Whether your goal is to educate, entertain, or monetize, you should take a moment to decide who you want to access your content.
Are you playing within a specific niche, or trying to build the largest audience possible?
Are you promoting new products as they drop?
Documenting your daily life as a creative?
Building a multi-million dollar media empire while simultaneously plotting to buy the New York Jets?
Whatever your play is, your video strategy can either have a low barrier to entry or a high barrier to entry.
Today we will be breaking down two of the most successful TV series of all time in order to understand how our own content patterns mimic them.
Let’s take a look at the Friends Playbook vs. the Game of Thrones Playbook.
Friends
Friends is a classic Low Barrier to Entry series of content. Here’s why:
Primetime airing on a major network
Approachable plots
Few characters to keep track of
Primetime Airing
Friends aired on Thursdays at 8:30pm on NBC - a highly coveted TV spot. It averaged about 25 million regular viewers over its 10-season reign, but the finale garnered over 52 million.
Now, Friends is re-aired regularly on Nikelodean, TBS, hundreds of local broadcast networks, and THOUSANDS of international cable networks. It is re-aired so often in fact, that not a minute has gone by since 2004 that Friends has not been available to watch on TV on some channel at any given time anywhere in the world.
Not to mention you can stream the whole series whenever you want on HBO Max.
Approachable Plots
What do Friends, Law and Order, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, and The Office all have in common?
You can watch any episode, within any season, at any time, and burn minimal mental calories to follow the plot.
These series rarely have season-over-season plotlines to follow. Sure, you can grow invested in various character developments over time, but generally the episodes of these shows are written to be stand-alone pieces of entertainment. They don’t build upon each other.
In Friends, this is demonstrated quite literally by the titles of the episodes:
The One with the Proposal
The One with the Blackout
The One with the Jellyfish
The One with All the Wedding Dresses
The One with the Red Sweater
The titles nicely summarize what you can expect from the episode.
Few characters to keep track of
Friends has a core cast of 6 people, each with their own distinct yet predictable quirks and traits. These characters are written in a way that encourages audience projection - are you a Phoebe or a Monica?
Are you always correcting people’s grammar like Ross, or laughing yourself out of uncomfortable situations like Chandler?
The fewer people in a core cast, the more screentime each of those characters get. The more screentime a character gets, the easier it is to connect with them.
It’s easy to relate to the Friends characters because often the episodes are made up of 2 different combinations of various duos and trios within the core 6.
Also, none of their backstories are important to the plot of any given episode. Any context you need to enjoy the show is given up front, but if you stick around you may pick up various tidbits of development that add depth to the characters.
So…whose modern-day content strategy has a low barrier to entry and is the BEST example of a Friends model?
MrBeast
Any person off the street, whether they are familiar with MrBeast or not, could watch one of his videos and be entertained. They don’t need any context outside of the piece of media they click on.
MrBeast has achieved “Primetime Airing” by not only building his main YouTube channel to over 100 Million subscribers, but also publishing regularly on his other channels:
MrBeast Reacts
MrBeast Gaming
MrBeast Shorts
MrBeast Philanthropy
MrBeast 2
He has wildly Approachable Plots to his videos:
His plots are so broadly approachable that he has translated his content into Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese and seen stratospheric growth in India, Asia, and beyond.
MrBeast also keeps his core cast of characters very small. He has a handful of recurring friends in his videos that he always calls out by name, so they are easy to keep track of and easy to relate to.
MrBeast is going by the Friends playbook and creating content that has a Low Barrier to Entry, and it’s working.
He has one of the most raving, loyal fanbases in the world, all because he made it as easy as possible for anyone to access his content.
He has translated that loyalty into similarly broad businesses like an app, a chain of burger joints, and a chocolate bar brand.
Now, let’s take a look at Content that has a High Barrier to Entry:
Game of Thrones
GoT has a High Barrier to Entry. Here’s why:
Situational, High-Context Plots
It’s Behind a Paywall
SO MANY Characters.
Situational, High-Context Plots
It is crucial to watch every episode of GoT in order, from start to finish, to really comprehend everything that is going on.
The story is always taking unexpected turns and it is not unusual for there to be 6 or 7 plotlines at once.
While Friends can be essentially spoiler-free, GoT can be spoiled (big time) and takes intense time and dedication to stick with it from beginning to end.
There is always another layer to appreciate, or a detail you might have missed.
The Paywall
Game of Thrones is an HBO original series, which means that only subscribers of HBO have ever had access to it.
For the first season, Game of Thrones had a $50-60 million budget, which allotted about $5-6 million per episode. This eventually ramped up over its 8 seasons and for the final season, HBO shelled out $15 million per episode.
With hundreds of different sets, thousands of costumes and actors, and many hours spent on CGI in post, Game of Thrones had to be behind a paywall.
The Characters
Over the course of the series, Game of Thrones listed over 40 main characters whose storylines intertwine. In total, they credited 553 cast members - not including extras.
While most of them are one-time appearances, the “core” cast of the show is still VERY large.
It is impossible to have a content series with that number of main characters without making some form of commitment. Starting GoT is a conscious decision. You have to seek it out and make time for it, while Friends is almost always readily available to you.
So, whose content has a HIGH Barrier to Entry?
Dream SMP
Dream SMP (or Survival MultiPlayer, a type of Minecraft server) is the virtual world created by popular Youtuber, Dream.
Over the course of several years, he invited well-known Gamers, YouTubers and Twitch Streamers to join him in dozens of overlapping hours of livestreams.
Within these streams, they constructed ongoing storylines and improvised narratives that were compelling enough to draw millions of live viewers daily.
The audience loved keeping track of the social politics and drama that would unfold. This Minecraft world grew to have lore as in-depth as Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. There is even a Wiki Fanpage keeping track of every “era” and storyline.
Dream SMP is the best example of successful content with a High Barrier to Entry because:
There are many streamers to keep track of
Highly contextual storylines
Insider language that only long-time community members understand
Final Thoughts
The other huge factor of these video strategies is the purpose of the content itself. Are you trying to educate, entertain, sell, build a community?
By analyzing your industry and the purpose of your content, you will gain more clarity as to whether you should go by the Friends Playbook, or the GoT Playbook.
Have an ELITE week,
Hannah