How to Monetize an Audience Without Selling Out | Ep 972

Join Alex At The Live In-Person Scaling Workshop In Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Many business owners are chasing the wrong metrics on social media. Alex pulled 3 billion impressions and 4.5 million new subscribers in 12 months, not by chasing views, but by obsessing over the right viewers. In this episode, he reveals the vanity metrics trap, why interest media is the game now, and the volume math that separates winners from losers. In this episode 00:00 Raw vs. curated social media content 01:29 How volume creates influence 02:45 The shift from social media to interest media 04:41 Leveraging IRL feedback in content creation 05:40 Understanding your real market size More Value: Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Join The Live Scaling Workshop In Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: ⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Acquisition ⁠ DISCLOSURE Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies, and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  In the last 12 months, my social media had a grand total of 3 billion impressions and brought in 4.5 million new subscribers. And with that, I managed to break the world record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time during just over $105 million in sales in a weekend. And here are my top lessons that I've learned when it comes to building a personal brand. Enjoy.

• 0:16Alex Hormozi?

  I mean, we have this saying, which is like butts in seats. If you just make a bunch of like meme content, right? Some of you guys are chasing views when what I think you want is you want to have prospects who are more likely to comply with a future request. And so we need to change our behavior to maximize the likely that occurs. And so in looking at this thing, this is why I'm telling you, like showing my cards, I'm going to be doing more live streams. And I think it's also, and this is me like outside of S P C L, but I think like meta themes overall, I think that the internet will always move towards truth. And so I think the A listers, everything's super curated, everything's super polished, it's photoshopped, it's scripted. And as you move closer this way, it's rawer. Like you have a three hour podcast, like they're not scripted, right? Or most of them aren't, right?

• 1:01Alex Hormozi?

  Streaming, it's like, yeah, we're live, right? I can't do anything like we're live. This idea of, of how can we approximate the rawest reality of you, us hanging out, right? And actually going through this stuff? I think that is what will unlock the most influence as long as you are still including these S P C L elements into it. And I think that's the marriage. Do S P C L and do it as many times as I possibly can. That's the idea. And so live streaming provides that, that opportunity. Let's also think about this from a context of volume. Whether you like it or not, Rogan, tremendous influence, right? To the same degree, P B D, tremendous influence. Dave Ramsey, tremendous influence. What is it that these guys have in common? They're putting out hours of content every single day.

• 1:46Alex Hormozi?

  So I said earlier that we had 35,000 pieces of content, right? I hear plenty of times, there's tons of, you know, $1 million businesses, $2 million businesses, things like that. They put out one piece of content a day, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. That's 365 pieces of content a year. And if you think about the size of acquisition.com in terms of our revenue, right, compared to somebody who's doing one or $2 million a year, and they're doing 365 pieces of content, we're just quite literally doing 100 times more. And as a result of that 100 times the volume, what do you think's happening? We get 100 times the prospects. And so people wanna try and like outsmart themselves and thinking that they can like not do the work that's required, but it's actually far more linear than you would expect. So like, we just know that's like one out of 10, you know, shorts is gonna go, you know, is gonna be a 2 or 3x outlier. We just know what that math looks like.

• 2:31Alex Hormozi?

  Same thing for longs. How do I just jam as much into that input-output machine as I possibly can? And as long as I'm checking these boxes, like I'm making the right kind of content, then you're going to get the right kind of prospects. So I'll give you one more nugget, like I said, which is that some of you guys may have heard this, and it's a concept of social media is now turning into interest media. Okay, so what does this mean? Let's unpack this for a second. If you make content and you judge it by views, I think that's dumb, and I'll explain why. If I have a grandma in public come and just do a running slap and just slaps me across the face, that video will probably get views. But does it get the grandma views? No. Does it get me, any more people who now believe more in my stuff?

• 3:16Alex Hormozi?

  No. But what it will do is it will show it to people who are interested in humor, which is a lot of people, right? But those might not be your customers, and they probably aren't. So, assuming you're not an entertainer, and you are somebody who's a business person. If you sell services to anyone, you're likely going to be an educator, not an entertainer. Meaning you're trying to provide value to people to change their behavior in some way, and ideally change their behavior that gets them to walk closer to you and buy stuff. Okay? So, what do I mean by social versus interest? If you want to attract the right avatar, make content for that avatar. That sounds so obvious and simple, and the thing is that no one does it. Because here's the right or downer. The content is the targeting. The algorithm is so good now. It knows what you're talking about. It knows, it can, it can literally judge your background.

• 4:01Alex Hormozi?

  It judges what you're wearing. It judges who you are, and will display it to the people that they know have a history of watching content that is similar to that, that people find valuable. And so if you're making stuff about how to fix pianos, because you're a piano repair guy, then you will find people who are trying to fix their pianos. But if you're making that type of content, you might be like, man, I'm only getting, you know, a thousand views a video. It's like, yeah, but the market of people who are buying pianos might be significantly smaller than the market of people who just want to be entertained or distracted. So it's not fair to, to compare your views against Mr. Beast. It doesn't make any sense. If I were to think to myself like, I have a room of a thousand people that are going to watch this and all of them are only interested in fixing pianos? That's a hell of an opportunity. I care so much more about I R L responses. So what I mean by that? If I make a video and then I get texts

• 4:45Alex Hormozi?

  from business owners that I like and that I respect, being like, yo, that was fire. Then I'm like, okay, I'm on the right track. And so some of you guys, let me know in the comments, you guys have seen a format that we've talked about. We call it cash cows, but basically it's me. There's a business owner that presents a little bit of their business. They come to this side and we talk about how to like, how to improve their business, right? So let me know in the comments if you like that style. And if you do, let me know if you're a business owner or not. Okay, so like, I like that style and I'm not a business owner. I like that style and I am a business owner. Or I don't like that style and I'm a business owner. Or I don't like that style and I'm not a business owner. If you are a business owner, when I have people who are here in person, I R L, in real life, in Vegas, right? Business owners who fly out. I ask, I say, what is your favorite type of content? Dollars to donuts. That's their favorite type of content.

• 5:30Alex Hormozi?

  And so I make more of that, even though, and it would make sense. Like, it would make sense that there's fewer of those people. Right? Just think about math. If you've got, if you've got the whole population here, let me, I'll, I'll show you a little graph on this. So let's say that a hundred percent of people, like this represents a hundred percent. Let's just use USA because I already know all the numbers for USA. Okay, so let's say this is 100%. All right, you get a hundred percent of people are interested. Okay, well, right now, only nine percent of people even own a business. Like nine percent. So right off the bat, I'm going to have a huge percentage of people that aren't my ideal audience. Now, of course, I do have people who are business interested. And that's why I'm a co-founder of school and we give people, you know, a way to go, start a business online in a, in a low cost way. Right?

• 6:14Alex Hormozi?

  Which you can do, it's nine bucks a month after a 14 day trial. You guys can check it out. And there's a bunch of like training and community. And all that good stuff. All right, but you can go skool.com, I think forward slash Hormozi. I think it's below this video. Doesn't matter. Point big. 9% is what I'm competing for. Okay. Now, that means that there's about 32 to 33 million business owners in the US. Okay. 32 million. That's, that's 100% of all business owners. Now, within that, 95% of that 9% is below $1 million in revenue. 95%. Then I've got 5% of that 9% that are over a million.

• 6:52Alex Hormozi?

  Now, if you want to get, if you want to get weird with it, what percent do you think is over 10 million? 0.4%. 1 in 250. And then 100 million, nine figures, is I think 1 in roughly 3,000, depending on like your data source. 1 in 3,000 businesses gets to 100 million a year.

• 7:12Alex Hormozi?

  This big. And so it would make sense then that we've given these numbers, right? 9% is 32 million. So out of 5% of that is only be a million and a half people. There's only a million and a half people who are business owners doing over a million. Based on the math that they, that, that this is census bureau data. Maybe theirs isn't correct, but that's the math. Right? And so if we're looking at that's the market, then it would make sense that I'm not going to get all 100% of them to watch my video. Right? If I got one and a half million views and 100% of them were business owners, that'd be insane. Right? And so it would make sense that like, if I get 100,000 views on a video that has, that's really made for that level of business owner, then I'm crushing it. Right? And it doesn't make sense to look at, you know, Mr. Beast's video with 100 million views and be like, oh, man, I suck. It's like, dude, we're going after, we have different, we have different games.

• 7:57Alex Hormozi?

  Right? And so I'd encourage you to create accurate expectations of the size of the market that you're going after. And also think about the translation of these numbers into IRL. I have two businesses that I looked at in the last year that were doing over a million dollars a year with less than 5,000 followers. You absolutely can make plenty of money with a very small following as long as you make content that's directly valuable for that following.