Views Don't Equal Dollars

People are using the wrong metric

I was reading an article in the Economist about the decline of Nike when I saw an interesting quote:

“A lot of celebrities have massive followings but no shot at actually moving product,” said Nik Sharma, a marketing consultant who has worked on celebrity-branded merchandise like MrBeast’s Feastables, a range of sweets. “We’ve launched a brand with someone who had 50m followers across the internet, and they’re unable to move units, while another brand with someone who had 4m followers did millions of dollars in sales within 15 minutes.”

There’s something in our lizard brain that is instinctively wowed by huge view/follower counts.