Nov 1, 2024
Audience
We are exposed to the messages of many online voices, hundreds of times a day. This is not a new observation but with that barrage of online noise getting louder and louder, the extent to which we trust to these voices becomes a key question we want to understand well.
Why is this kind of trust important to us? Being able to access and engage the audience your product, service, content, story is important to is a crucial part of delivering value to the world. The avenues through which this is possible are evolving before our eyes, POCKLA aims to be at the very front of this change.
The inputs to a level of trust in online voices are 1. who the voice is and 2. whether it is informed opinion. With the bar for ‘informed opinion’ being at an all time low (in today’s world, simply having an opinion is enough to broadcast to every corner of one’s online reach), it leaves ‘who the voice is’ as the ultimate driver of trust.
Why is there a trust issue at all?
The voices we hear from have incentives:
Brands ︎︎ want to sell to you
Celebrities ︎︎︎ want to stay relevant, cool and not get cancelled
The media ︎︎︎ just want you to read whatever they write
Friends ︎︎︎ want you to think they are clever and or funny
Family ︎︎︎ want to prove you wrong (depends on the family)
These are of course, the incentives which have the potential to skew the trustworthiness of messages conveyed by online voices - there are of course others. But these incentives exist, and the result is that if there are good products, interesting and important news and funny stories out there waiting for you — it is hard to know where to look and what to listen to.

Bo Burham| Inside on digital overload as a driver of anxiety
Substack| The home of independent opinions
Prime | KSI and Logan Paul, voices Gen Z trust with their money
We asked 500 people between the ages of 16-60, which online voices they trust and found that 43% say they trust bloggers/vloggers ahead of traditional media. In fact, independent creators ranked second behind ‘people I know’.
We are in the early days of truly understanding what it takes to build trust in today’s digital world, where the attention of the average internet-walker is saturated to capacity. Some research has been done on what has made these vloggers so effective at building trust with their audiences and it seems a blend of authenticity, transparency and real value transaction are key ingredients. But these terms mean nothing without context and the race is on to understand what this truly means for you (someone who wants to add value to the world), is on.
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