The World According to ZANDLAND — Issue #6
On realism, incentives, and staying in the game long enough to win
Last week I was on a research call for a panel I’m doing in a month or so’s time.
At one point, someone on the call started questioning the Zandland business model, specifically the idea of making our own content, funding original work independently, and building a direct relationship with an audience alongside our partnerships with major broadcasters and streamers.
The implication wasn’t aggressive, but it was clear enough: that this approach was unrealistic, a bit naïve, and ultimately unlikely to work in a media environment dominated by scale, platforms, and big money.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. And to be fair, it’s a very reasonable challenge (despite many notable examples of success).
What made the moment stick with me was what came after. In the same conversation, that same person spoke very confidently about some of the work they were doing - work funded to the tune of millions of dollars by a state that has been repeatedly accused of major human rights violations.
There was no sense of irony in that, no visible discomfort.
It wasn’t framed as a compromise. It was framed as a sensible business decision. As some proof that model worked.
That contrast stayed with me, not as a moral judgement, but as a sharp illustration of how ideas of sustainability, legitimacy, and “realism” are applied very differently depending on where the money comes from.
And it led me back to a broader question I’ve been wrestling with for a while now:
how do you build a media company that prioritises good information — truth, nuance, care — in a system where the easiest paths to survival often pull in the opposite direction?
A necessary caveat
Just to make very clear, I’m not judging anyone here, and I’m not pretending there’s a pure way to operate in this industry.
This is a brutally difficult business. Budgets are tight. Risk tolerance is low. Platforms change the rules constantly. Partnering with brands, institutions, public figures, and streamers, sometimes even imperfect ones, is necessary and can lead to incredible work. It’s also something we do ourselves at Zandland, carefully and deliberately, via Brandland, our branded-content wing.
Companies have to eat. Teams have to be paid. Ambition requires capital. And often, this type of funding allows you to create work that would never otherwise exist.
The question isn’t whether compromises exist, they always do.
It’s how conscious you are of them, and what direction they slowly push your work towards over time.
The incentive problem
At a basic level, most media companies face a familiar set of pressures.
You either:
take money from whoever is willing to write the biggest cheque, often with vested interests attached, or
optimise relentlessly for platforms whose algorithms reward certainty, speed, and emotional charge (AKA eyeballs) over accuracy.
Most organisations, understandably, end up doing a version of both.
But the incentives matter. They shape what stories get told, how they’re framed, what gets challenged, and what quietly doesn’t. They influence tone, pacing, and, crucially, how confident you’re encouraged to sound, even when the subject matter is genuinely uncertain.
Side point: I know I talk a lot about truth and nuance in this newsletter. And I’m banging on a lot, but I genuinely think it’s one of the defining problems of our time. The incoming wave of AI-generated slop, layered on top of algorithms that reward certainty and outrage, and media business models that monetise attention rather than understanding, doesn’t bode particularly well for creating a population of thoughtful, well-informed people. And I am biologically predisposed to want my son to live in a nice world full of good people. So this is where we net out with this newsletter.
Confidence as a product
You can see this clearly in the current wave of creator-led media.
Take someone like Steven Bartlett, who’s come under increasing criticism for platforming manosphere-adjacent guests, offering little challenge, and allowing confident, often dubious claims to pass largely unchecked.
I don’t think this is about bad faith. It’s about incentives.
Long, confident monologues perform well. Provocation clips cleanly. Nuance doesn’t travel as far. And once an audience starts rewarding a particular style, it becomes commercially risky to disrupt it, even when the downstream consequences are real.
Over time, the product subtly shifts. Insight gives way to confidence itself.
That pattern isn’t unique to any one creator. It’s structural.
We’ve seen this ourselves in our most recent work.
As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, we’re releasing 3 explainers a week at the moment to have a more consistent relationship with the Zandland audience. One, which saw me speaking from the heart, and arguably in a very confidently, Instagram-friendly way, about Iran, has done very well. Being viewed by over 600,000 people in 2 days (more below).
One of me showing a great deal of nuance and talking about the oversimplification of political commentary, did less well.
And for reference, here’s one that did averagely well… talking about Nick Shirley and YouTube journalism - make of that what you will.
Why overconfidence is such a problem
There’s a substantial body of research showing that experts’ predictions about complex political and social outcomes are often no more accurate than random chance.
The work of Philip Tetlock, who tracked political and economic predictions over decades, is particularly interesting here. His research actually showed that, the more confident an expert was, the less accurate they tended to be and less willing they were to revise their views when new evidence appears.
And yet we’ve built an entire media economy that actively selects for exactly those traits: confidence, simplicity, narrative certainty.
Not because they’re true, but because they feel like understanding
Iran, and the cost of pretending to know
I’m feeling this especially strongly with our explainer strategy.
I’m British-Iranian. I have family in Iran. I went there once, when I was fifteen. And because I’m a journalist, I can’t safely go back now. So this story has a lot of meaning for me.
Talking about Iran has always come with a level of anxiety and self-censorship, not ideological, but practical. There are real risks for people on the ground. Words aren’t abstract.
As part of our explainer strategy at Zandland, I shared some personal thoughts about that tension, alongside the other explainer above about what I was seeing from political commentators speaking with extraordinary confidence about what would happen next, predicting collapse, timelines, outcomes, as if they were Nostradamus.
The explainer has done well, and generated a huge amount of discussion on Instagram. I’m hoping this is an example of how there is a hunger from people for content that offers some authentic analysis, but doesn’t profess to have all the answers and doesn’t pretend to know more than it did. (But perhaps I’m reading too much into a 2 minute video.)
When you speak to people inside Iran, what you hear is uncertainty, fear, fragmentation, and exhaustion. A situation that is evolving, dangerous, and deeply resistant to clean narrative arcs.
And that gap — between lived reality and confident commentary — is where bad information thrives. We’re currently making a more in-depth documentary on the Iran protests.
This week, Chicago
Last night, we released the latest episode of HUMAN on YouTube, a film about the reality of life in the “trenches” of Chicago. Not the mythologised version. Not the headline shorthand. But the lived, complicated, often contradictory reality of the people inside it.
That film exists because we’ve backed a strategy of making work we believe in, consistently, even when it doesn’t offer easy answers. It’s also part of the same bet: that audiences will stick with work th at treats them seriously, even when the conclusions aren’t tied up in a neat bow.
What this means for Zandland, the business
It’s worth me saying this explicitly, because it comes up a lot.
How is Zandland instantly monetising its audience?
How are we replacing traditional revenue streams?
Why not just pick one model and commit fully to it?
And the honest answer is: trying to entirely replace business-to-business funding with audience revenue would be terrible business.
Why would we stop working with big partners and platforms who want to fund us to make ambitious work? We love doing that. Some of our most important projects only exist because of those partnerships, and we want to keep making them.
Zandland isn’t trying to exit the traditional system.
What we’re deliberately not building though is a company that exists only as a B2B service provider, turning up, delivering a project, and resetting to zero every time a commission ends.
On the original content side, there’s also a fantasy that needs puncturing.
You don’t just start releasing work and immediately find product–market fit. You don’t instantly build a huge audience, unlock recurring revenue, and suddenly make millions a month. That pretty much never happens, and when it appears to, it’s usually the result of years of invisible groundwork.
The only way this actually works is slower and less glamorous.
You look at the data.
You identify where you have a genuine, defensible value proposition.
You back formats you believe can work.
And then you commit to them consistently, with a clear strategy, long enough for an audience to actually find you.
That’s what we’re doing.
We’re making premium work with major partners and funding originals. We’re owning our audience rather than renting it. We’re building IP, trust, and a relationship that compounds over time.
And yes, it is working. But it is never immediate.
The real challenge, and the real discipline, is staying in the game long enough to win big and make an actual dent in the culture.
Thanks for reading.
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Ben Z
Excellent analysis! The point about how 'realism' is applied so differently depending on the money source is truly insightful.