How The Art of Manliness built its loyal audience

The publisher intentionally stayed small, choosing to focus mostly on his website and podcast.

Most major media companies are focused on scale. They want to reach ever larger audiences and then leverage that reach to drive more revenue. To accomplish this, they invest time and resources to create content across all major social platforms, from YouTube to TikTok to Snapchat.

The Art of Manliness isn’t that kind of media company. Let me give you an example of what I mean: it managed to build its YouTube channel to 1.2 million subscribers, an impressive feat, only to mostly abandon the channel several years ago. In a 2017 video, founder Brett McKay explained that there were other projects he’d rather devote his time to — projects like writing a book, lifting weights, and producing his podcast.

According to Jeremy Anderberg, the Art of Manliness’s managing editor and one of only three full time employees, this kind of narrow focus is part of the company’s ethos. It purposefully didn’t try to scale like the BuzzFeeds and Vox Medias of the world. Instead, its team devotes nearly all of its energy into writing articles and producing a podcast, the latter of which has an incredibly loyal audience. That audience is so loyal that thousands have signed up for a 12-week bootcamp the company runs for “those who wish to revolt against our age of ease, comfort, and existential weightlessness.”

Anderberg spoke to me about how The Art of Manliness built its audience, why it launched its bootcamp, and what it’s like to work for a media company that purposefully stays small.

Let’s jump into my findings…

How the company was founded

Brett McKay launched The Art of Manliness as a blog all the way back in 2008. “He was at a bookstore browsing the men's magazines section and was disappointed with the content he was seeing,” said Jeremy. “It was stuff about the latest six figure car and how to get six pack abs.” Brett wanted to create content that appealed more to the average male. “The very first article he published was on how to shave like your grandpa, which was about straight razor shaving, and it's still a popular article.”