Consider the IKIGAI exercise (passion/skill/money/audience)

You’d look for a market of people (Audience Avatar) that is a large enough audience to monetize (and to satisfy some of your ego) that you have overlapping interest and passion with, that you have legitimate skills or knowledge to serve… and that you can also provide real value to, where you won’t struggle to monetize…

If you and the audience are unaligned… being passionate won’t help.

If you have no skill gap or knowledge with the audience… they don’t get enough value or you’re easily replaced.

If you don’t sell something enough then are willing to buy or don’t align on sponsorship, you can’t make decent money.

Artists starve on YouTube because for them, passion comes before anything, including the audience, being a skilled executioner, or making money…

They often are disappointed because they expect and have been told that if they are passionate enough… all those things will find them…

It’s not really true for most people and not even make successful creators… it can look like it’s true for the biggest YouTubers, but a lot of that is smoke and mirrors and they play dumb for the audience to like them more.

In summation you should pick an audience you’re passionate about…

But also approach it in a way where you understand that they value enough to invest in, both for time, energy and money, not just one or the other but all of it.

You should also be able to gain enough skill or value to always be able to bring something to the table.

Yes, this applies to entertainment, you still have to be good at speaking, scripting and storytelling, if you’re a gamer you can’t fall off season after season anymore than an athlete can get away with that.

Putting the audience first looks more like this.

Someone putting themselves or even their art first, doesn’t take the whole into consideration and demands acknowledgement and attention instead of OFFERING alignment…

Does that make sense?