Advertising Age spotlighted a new venture brought to you by the founders of Blackweek…
Why Blackweek’s founders launched a social media platform for experts and thought leaders
By Brian Bonilla
The founders of Blackweek, a culture-first economic forum and festival launched by agency leaders, are officially entering the social media space with the launch of Subculture, a publishing platform designed for subject matter experts looking to monetize their knowledge as creators.
Experts as the new influencers
Subculture is currently self-funded by Joseph Anthony, who is also the founder and CEO of Hero Collective and co-founder of Blackweek. He has invested approximately $250,000 to date in the platform, and the team is looking to raise $2 million in additional capital to support product development, AI tooling and user acquisition with a goal of reaching 200,000 users within a year.
Alongside Anthony, Blackweek co-founders Walter T. Geer III, Andre Gray and Adan Romero will be playing advisory roles in helping ignite community growth for the platform.
Subculture is positioning itself as a next-gen alternative to platforms such as Substack and Reddit. The platform is now live in beta on the web, with mobile apps slated to debut during Blackweek this October.
Built for writers, educators, podcasters, coaches, and professionals, Subculture allows users to launch individual channels where they can publish long-form content, share multimedia, engage followers, and monetize through subscriptions, articles, e-commerce and advertising revenue.
The platform plans to offer a 60/40 split on ad sales for verified expert accounts only.
“We’re not trying to be the biggest. We’re trying to be better, more intentional, more inclusive and more human,” Geer said.
A key differentiator, according to Anthony, is Subculture’s focus on expertise over virality. “We think experts are the new influencers,” he said, “and that everyone has an expertise.”
How Subculture monetizes
While platforms such as LinkedIn encourage professional posting, Anthony argues that it lacks meaningful monetization tools. “LinkedIn doesn’t have a monetization engine,” he said. “Everybody on LinkedIn right now is trying to growth hack... that ultimately results in hopefully a recruiter calling you.”
Subculture’s founders believe social media is heading for fragmentation, and that there’s room for platforms designed around smaller “values-driven communities.”
“You’re going to see the emergence of these new niche platforms,” Anthony said. “The same reason why BlueSky thinks it can compete with Twitter is because the cultural ideology these things are built on appeals to specific audiences who care about where they share their data, where they share their stories.”
Subculture also aims to become a space for underrepresented creators, a response to what the founders see as bias in traditional platforms.
“Social media, for the most part, has become somewhat of a cesspool,” Anthony said. “How do we really create a platform that promotes thought leadership, promotes bold ideas and thinking in a safe space where liberal ideas will be accentuated, not suppressed?”
A changing online landscape
Alternative social media platforms such as Substack have gained popularity recently, with many brands hoping to capitalize on the interest. At the same time, AI search is changing how businesses approach their digital strategies.
“Site traffic in the open web is on a massive decline year over year,” Anthony said.
As Subculture evolves, AI and blockchain technology will play a role in the platform’s vision for creator empowerment and data ownership. Anthony said the team is working toward building a decentralized infrastructure that allows creators to not only monetize their content but also own their audience and the data associated with it.
“If everyone’s data profile that we have is on the blockchain, then you can store your own data… and take that data with you,” Anthony said. “That could be your followers, that could be all of the information that you gathered from your followers.”
Anthony framed blockchain as a potential solution to one of the creator economy’s biggest challenges: attribution and compensation in the age of AI-generated content. He gave the example of someone prompting ChatGPT to “write a script in the voice of Issa Rae,” which would yield no compensation for the artist.
“If you come to our platform and Issa Rae puts all of her content on our blockchain system, then it becomes a situation where you have to come here to ask that same question—and Issa Rae can charge you a fee,” he said.
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