# Where eyeballs go, money flows
> Canonical: https://skedsocial.com/newsletter/ep-37-tom-maynard  
> Last updated: 2026-09-09  
> Author: Lach Bradford
Amplify's Tom Maynard on the creator funnel that actually pays, where AI helps a 200-person content business, and why where eyeballs go, money flows for good.
### **Notes from Lach**

[Tom Maynard](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-maynard-b8a3191/) told me something halfway through this conversation that I have not been able to shake. He spent years working the digital side of Big Brother and Idol, back when success meant website visits, not view counts. Then an intern named Natalie Tran started blowing past a million YouTube subscribers while working for his team, and the ground moved. Two hundred employees later, across three continents, his read on the business has not changed: where eyeballs go, money flows.

Reply and tell me what you're changing after this one. I read every reply.

### **The funnel that actually pays**

Amplify's creator funnel has two very different jobs. The top exists to reach as many people as possible, the bottom exists to keep them. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok handle awareness: mass reach, low commitment, the algorithm doing the work. Podcasts, Patreon, Substack, merch, and live tickets sit at the bottom, and that's where the actual business lives. Those are the fans who show up to a live event, pay for a subscription, and buy the product, and they are worth cultivating for the next five, ten, fifteen years, not just the next algorithm cycle.

Tom's own marker for a top-of-funnel win is not followers, it is an organic video crossing 10, 50, or 100 million views inside Amplify's own network. But he is clear that number only matters because of what happens downstream. It is the bottom of the funnel, the people willing to pay for a Substack or show up to a live event, that Amplify actually builds a business around.

### **AI for humans, not instead of them**

Amplify uses AI the way a lot of operations teams do: fast legal-document review, more efficient production workflows, the boring parts. What Tom will not do is let it anywhere near the human voice that makes content worth watching. His argument is specific: AI works where the audience is already suspending disbelief, in scripted drama, in music, in adult content. It does not work where people want a real human telling a real story, which is exactly why he says he would not sit for an interview with his own AI clone, and would not expect anyone else's audience to want that either.

He is also candid that Amplify is fielding real pressure from brands and clients to use AI to produce content more efficiently, and the team is experimenting. The distinction he holds onto: efficient production is fair game, the actual voice in front of the camera is not.

### **The operator's lessons from live TV**

Two lines from Tom's live-TV years still run his business. The first: where eyeballs go, money flows, his shorthand for tracking where an audience is actually spending time, not where the industry assumes it is. The second: what can go wrong will go wrong, which he has turned into a permanent, useful paranoia. Inspect what you expect, as he puts it.

Neither lesson is about moving fast. Tom is openly skeptical of the instant-return, reinvent-every-six-months version of building a business. His own analogy: running Amplify with his co-founder Alex is like woodwork, showing up every day to polish, varnish, and chip away. He is also blunt about the cost of that patience: burnout has hit more than once, and he says most operators five or ten years into a business carry a permanent, low hum of anxiety about what is coming. Having a co-founder to split that with, he says, is the difference between surviving it and not.

### **The thread**

Amplify's funnel, its AI line, and its founder's live-TV instincts all point at the same thing: where eyeballs go, money flows, but only if there is a system built to catch them once they arrive. Tom's business runs on that principle at every layer, from platform strategy down to hiring.

### **Sked update**

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### **Sign-off**

Thanks for reading.

Reply and tell me what you're changing after this one. I read every reply.

– Lach

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