Why Audience Size Is the Wrong Metric — and What Publishers Should Measure Instead
A new book on purposeful community-building is not aimed at publishers, but its central argument lands squarely on one of the industry's most pressing problems: reach is not the same as relationship.
David Homan is a New York-based entrepreneur and author whose work centres on trust, introductions and the design of meaningful networks. His new book, Orchestrating Connection: How to Build Purposeful Community in a Tribal World, co-authored with Noah Askin, is not written for media businesses. But its core argument is one publishers need to hear.
Homan’s central point is that genuine connection is not created by audience size, follower counts or contact databases. It is created through trust, repeated value exchange and the intentional design of relationships.
“There’s no such thing as a big or small network, or a massive audience. There’s only person to person.” — David Homan
Reach Is a Weak Proxy for Publishing Value
The media industry has spent two decades optimising for scale: search traffic, social reach, newsletter lists, pageviews and registrations. Those measures still have value, but they do not prove that a publisher has a resilient audience. They prove that the publisher can reach people, not that those people will return, pay, refer others or help the business grow.
The key commercial question is not how many people a publisher reaches. It is what that reach enables. Does it create habit? Does it generate subscription intent, event participation or useful first-party data?
These questions are becoming more urgent as discovery weakens. Search is changing, social distribution is fragmenting, and AI interfaces are increasingly answering queries without returning users to original sources. Relationship depth is becoming a strategic asset, not a soft ‘nice to have’ audience goal.
Contacts Are Not Relationships
One of Homan’s biggest distinctions is between having contacts and having relationships. Many media companies have large databases of known users, but the stronger question is not how many known users a publisher has, but which readers participate, refer, renew, contribute expertise or bring others into the brand.
This fundamentally shifts how publishers should segment audiences. Instead of grouping readers by demographics or content preference alone, Homan argues that publishers should identify the connectors inside their audience: readers, members, sources and event attendees who create value for others, not just consume it.
These are the people who forward newsletters with context, bring colleagues to events or contribute specialist knowledge. They matter commercially because they demonstrate that the publisher sits inside a live network rather than simply in front of an audience.
A further lesson from Homan is that connection depends on understanding what people actually need. Most publishers are better at showing and telling than asking. They publish, promote and target, but often lack a feedback loop capturing what readers and members are trying to solve. Without it, publishing remains too dependent on guessing what people want and measuring the reaction afterwards.
Community Products Are Often Still Broadcast
Many publishers will argue that they already have community products: newsletters, events, memberships, private briefings, reader forums. But Homan’s framework exposes a common weakness: many are still broadcast products with community language attached.
A newsletter that sends content is not necessarily a community, and an event that fills a room is not necessarily a network. The test is whether the format enables people to do something they could not do alone.
“Publishing as a whole is putting a product into a digital or physical shelf and hoping somebody looks and sees it.” — David Homan
The stronger model is to involve the audience before the product is sold. Reader panels, expert briefings and member previews create stronger pre-launch demand than a conventional marketing push and give publishers clearer signals about what audiences actually value.
Trust Is Built Through Behaviour, Not Brand Messaging
Homan’s book is organised around principles including curiosity, generosity and vulnerability. Curiosity means listening to readers before deciding what to sell them. Generosity means offering useful access or insight before asking for a subscription. Vulnerability means being more open about editorial process and product decisions where appropriate.
Trust is not built by claiming “trusted journalism”. It is built when readers repeatedly experience competence, honesty and reciprocity. Registration, payment, event attendance and referrals all require confidence that the relationship is worth maintaining, and that confidence is earned through behaviour, not messaging.
Bottom Line
Orchestrating Connection reframes community as deliberate relationship design rather than audience sentiment.
As platform discovery weakens, publishers that rely on borrowed reach remain exposed. The practical shift is from broadcasting to asking: understanding what readers and partners are trying to achieve, then building products that connect those needs to editorial and commercial value.