I’ve seen a lot more sweetshops around recently. Specifically, these Victorian-themed tuck shops and sweet connoisseurs, plucked from two hundred years ago and plopped in the middle of a high street that doesn’t quite know how to welcome its new tenant. One of the sweetshops near me plasters ‘Toys, Trains, Treats’ on dated storefront panelling; it’s the shop you thought your grandparents went to when they were young, except the steam trains on sale are battery powered.

During the first year of the pandemic, the number of sweetshops in the UK grew by 73, according to the Local Data Company. About 1 for every city. That’s not a huge number, but it’s pretty significant given the broader Covid context; the total number of clothing shops fell by 1,236 in the same period. The sweetshop near me was set up in September ‘21. It begs the question: what’s so special about sweet shops?

I spent my Saturday morning at Waterstone’s buying some books, at the sweetshop questioning the shop assistant, and now I’m writing about it on Mirror. In days gone by, I would have bought my physical items at Tesco’s and, in comparison to today, when I have my Mirror and my main website, all my digital publishing would be through the same technology stack (probably Wordpress).

Sweets are nice, but the real difference is the existence of a shop that will focus all of its resources on their specific niche product. I bought some weird caramel chocolate flakes that defy description, but they were excellent. I certainly paid a premium, but next time I want sweets, I’ll go there again because they know their product; I just bought what the shop assistant recommended. At Waterstone’s, I picked up Train Dreams because I told the manager I was after contemporary fiction; similarly, I use Mirror because it’s built for writers. What makes these businesses special is that they serve niche markets in which they can give people much deeper value.

Generation Niche

It’s not just me. In fact, Generation Z is defined by its pursuit of tailored solutions. Tailored products over mass solutions. Authenticity over scale. Deep belonging in a few places rather than surface engagement across many. BeReal over Instagram. The end result of scrolling TikTok’s vast array of clips is for the algorithm to find the handful of niches that you care more about. “Whether you’re into science, upcycling, cosplay, astrophysics, parkour, or journaling, there is a growing community on TikTok ready to welcome you with open arms,” writes Aime Hunter.

TikTok knows this as well. Their campaigns online and in-person emphasise ‘find what’s for you’ and ‘TikTok taught me’. The idea is whatever you want to do, ‘do it with TikTok’. And, given the offer of an algorithm that can sate your most unique desires, much of Gen Z is. TikTok users spend about 10% of their waking hours on the app.

TikTok is but one component of the Generation Niche toolkit. As bi-directional as a remix is, a feed is not built for conversation. Seeking that, Gen Z have pursued – and found – niches communities on subreddits, Discord servers, and video games, and with in-person events to match. A great example, writes Yusuf Ntahilaja, is the visual artist Slawn:

“Who’s taken the art world by storm. Slawn created ‘The Slawn Club’ - a community that lives on Discord and a private Instagram account - with the intention to have direct access to his fans, connecting and collaborating with them through different schemes. Slawn’s rapid rise is largely attributed to how much he values his community, often rewarding them for partaking in challenges, gifting merch and tagged pieces, even if they do not win the ultimate prize.”

As Ntahilaja puts it, “niche culture defines a generation.” Having grown up amidst social media’s nascency and being, in my view, the only generation worth calling ‘the internet generation’, Generation Z has responded to a decade of inauthenticity by becoming a cohort that craves its opposite.

In 2017, Protein, the trends organisation, suggested that “the concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic.” Toby Shorin argues that this phenomena runs even deeper: “what we are witnessing is the disappearance of authenticity as a cultural need altogether.”

Concluding that 2018 essay, he hinted at what was to come. “Trust in business can no longer be based on visual signals of authenticity, only on proof of work.” Indeed, individual alignments to brands, memes, and subcultures today are based on what lies beneath the surface. In his 2022 essay, he introduces the example of the Triple Sphere Hiking Club. “It started and remains a community: an excuse to get people together, to be in company and to perform the practice of hiking.”

Like The Slawn Club, there are barriers to this community; you have to commit and engage to access it. For example Slawn’s merch store is password-protected — as Shopify’s adoption of tokengated marketplaces indicates, this is part of an overarching trend towards memberships that you cannot fake. As Julie Rice puts it, co-founder of SoulCycle and former CMO at WeWork, “connection should be its own product.”

The 1,000 True Fans thesis eventually manifests

In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote one of the most seminal contributions in tech culture, “1,000 True Fans”. The founding editor-in-chief of Wired wrote that, in the internet age:

“To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”

A thousand dedicated fans who love your niche. Sound familiar? What took so long?

Kelly hoped that the internet would be the ultimate matchmaker. But the price for this matchmaking was almost everything: Facebook and Instagram take almost 100% of all the revenue creators see on their platforms; YouTube takes 45%; Spotify paid an average of merely £700 to each of its 8 million artists last year. These monoliths did the matching, but rendered creating or community engagement virtually unaffordable.

It was a vibe shift, not a technological one, that struck the first blow to this impoverished model. Twitch, Kickstarter, Patreon, Substack, amongst many others, are all services built for creators to cater to the dedicated fans of their niche; all built amidst the community-centric vibe that began in the late 2010s.

Blockchain is a game-changer for this dynamic

The significance of blockchain becomes clear upon investigating why Facebook, YouTube, et al. can force such high take rates on creators. One side is discovery: you rarely find creators on Patreon. This happens, still, on big social networks. Everyone is on these platforms (well, not Facebook) and when you consume on these platforms frequently, they’re experts in figuring out what content you’ll click on next; big data, Markov chains, etc. There are some problems with this, mainly that you get served addictive content rather than niches that you want to engage deeply in, but generally they do this job pretty well, and web3 techs don’t hugely change this.

But there are many platforms for discovery — this isn’t the competitive moat it once was. People use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and much more. Creators could do the same by moving to the discovery network which takes the smallest cut. Apart from one thing: they can’t. Everything you’ve ever uploaded to Spotify and all the followers you’ve earnt on Insta: the discovery platform manages this, and you can’t take your community with you. So it’s impossible to leave without starting all over again. And hence discovery networks squeeze creators for revenue.

Hence, the game-changer. Because just like with your cryptocurrency, you can store your writing, your music, your art, your videos, your followers, on a distributed ledger, or “on-chain”. As LBRY puts it: “LBRY does to publishing what Bitcoin did to money.” Sites like Spotify and Instagram don’t manage your songs and your followers because these songs and follower relationships are stored on-chain, and Spotify is reduced to one of many organisations competing to merely display this content in the best way, and help you discover new content as well. Creators are not beholden to any of them – neither is their community.

So now the community economy is fully on the way because, finally, dedicated participants in a niche community can meaningfully support their creators. When people are deeply engaged in something they care about, even the original consumers become contributors, and we’ll start to see vibrant ecosystems form around niches and creators. Greg Isenberg explores the Loot ecosystem, an NFT project upon which creators have built myriad different ideas; Jenkins the Valet is a great example of community-led storytelling, which will become a category-defining cultural genre in the 2020s, on par with ‘art’ and ‘literature’; Joma Tech, a YouTuber with 1.5m subscribers, sold a collection of 2,500 ‘Vaxxed Doggo’ NFTs to fund his videos. Jadyn Violet, a musician, told me that “I’ve never got this much interaction on my art before.” He's been spending his time building new ideas to engage his community, spending time speaking with his fans, and making more music — this is what his fans love him for. Consumers get dedicated community and deeper value in a niche they care about; creators are finally rewarded fairly for their work.

An exciting future, not an Exciting one

In 1999, Excite was a $6.7bn search engine, but collapsed soon after the 2001 dotcom crash. Google was only just getting started, but after aligning with the niche market vibe shift of the 21st century, it became the favoured search engine of billions.

Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite, explains why: Excite had been a 20th century company, targeting revenue from the top ten American companies, as media businesses had been doing for decades. Meanwhile, Google focused on attracting advertisers — and millions of them. Why did this work? “The 20th century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The 21st century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers.”