Our opportunity is not to be niche. It's to be communal.
- Ben Thompson (Aug 14, 2025)
On a recent episode of Sharp Tech, Ben Thompson, who runs the highly acclaimed tech analysis Stratechery, implied a way to think about audiences: beyond mass and niche, there is a third mode - communal. That framing clicked for me immediately. I’ve witnessed communal phenomena in business (Stratechery, TED, 37signals to name a few), but naming communal as a business opportunity orthogonal to mass and niche sharpened the picture.
Ben has also been writing about this: strong content can be a totem pole people gather around (see this). In a world where AI pushes media toward hyper‑personalization, a shared artifact (essay, podcast, forum) becomes the center of gravity for people who want to co-experience something. Stratechery itself has evolved this way: subscribers references the same ideas, discuss them with peers, and WoM compounds with almost no marketing effort.
I still don’t see a definitive “Communal vs. Mass vs. Niche” comparisons written by him, but the lines are there if you look. Naming it helped me see patterns I’ve been circling for years.
Three opportunity modes - a quick contrast
What customers are buying
- Mass: entertainment/utility anyone can use
- Niche: deep fit for a specific problem or identity
- Communal: membership in a shared conversation, access to context and peers
Form of product
- Mass: standardized features/content
- Niche: highly specialized features/expertise
- Communal: content plus rituals (salons, meetups) and collaboration surfaces
Form of distribution
- Mass: mass media, retail, broad aggregators
- Niche: search & aggregators, targeted channels, referrals
- Communal: peer‑to‑peer spread inside networks (Coffee chat, Discord, meetups)
What feels new in 2025 is not the existence of communities - we’ve already seen these. But the clarity that communal can be its own operating mode. That recognition may unlock businesses that have boxed themselves into “niche” and are struggling to reach sustainability. If you’re convening a dense network with shared vocabulary, rituals, and artifacts, you might be building something communal—and your product, distribution, and monetization should reflect that. Let's remember it's not limited to the above three aspects - we need to expand the list. We also need to develop possible tactics that come from the nature of the "Communal" mode, too.
I wanted to capture this for future reference - and to apply it concretely in the weeks ahead.
I wanted to capture this for future reference - and to apply it concretely in the weeks ahead.