The Massive Online Community Most Brands Are Ignoring

New research reveals the manosphere is one of the most influential identity ecosystems shaping young men online today, exposing a belonging vacuum most brands still fail to understand—or act on

HAPPENING TODAY: my inaugural Digital Campfire Safari, a new live series designed to help marketers better understand the internet’s most influential community-powered spaces. First up: Reddit—a platform that feels a bit like walking into a high school cafeteria where everyone already knows the rules except you. Join me TODAY at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET alongside the team at RECHO as we go inside Reddit communities live to unpack how the platform shapes trust, recommendations, reputation, and increasingly, AI visibility online. REGISTER HERE to join live or get the replay. Now onto today’s edition…

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My 15-year-old stepson was late for school one day last week because he had to dunk his face in an ice bath.

This wasn’t some kind of high school hazing ritual. He told me it was for “puffiness.”

Which tracks: He has mouth tape on his nightstand, a gua sha in his bathroom, a cologne collection that rivals most grown men’s, and a rotating selection of protein powders. He also knows significantly more about peptides than I do.

To be clear: my stepson isn’t an optimization obsessive.

He’s a regular kid who loves sports, gaming, and hanging out with his friends.

But his TikTok algorithm treats video games, Premier League highlights, luxury cologne reviews, and “how to lock in” self-improvement content not as disparate interests, but as a single, endless loop of mandatory teenage survival gear.

The result is a lifestyle curriculum that has wrapped itself around his entire identity, and the identity of his friends. I recently learned that it also happens to be the front door to the modern manosphere.

Admittedly, this is probably not what you think of when you think “manosphere.” If you’re anything like me, that term brings to mind virulent misogyny, dark web forums, and extremism.

But according to a new study—”Development and Application of the Masculinity Content Classification Framework,“ published this month in the journal Telematics and Informatics—led by Australia-based researcher Dr. Krista Fisher and backed by the nonprofit Movember, we should be re-evaluating that entirely.

Because while my 15-year-old is firmly in the mainstream, and seemingly benign, version of this ecosystem, the study’s findings reveal that the path from “how to optimize your morning routine” to “here’s how modern society is failing men, and why women are to blame” is often much shorter than many of us realize.

This research–the first to create a taxonomic classification of masculinity content using actual TikTok data from young men themselves–reveals that the modern manosphere often doesn’t begin with toxicity.

Rather, it starts with innocuous content about fitness routines, productivity tips, and wealth advice. What draws young men in is the promise of guidance, confidence, and role models in a world that increasingly feels unstable and directionless. The dangerous ideologies come later, embedded within the very same algorithmic ecosystem.

Which is what makes this so much bigger than a story about internet extremism.

At its core, this is a story about community: who young men trust, where they look for identity and belonging, and which voices are shaping their understanding of masculinity at scale.

Given that brands increasingly see themselves as participants in culture—not just advertisers inside it—then this ecosystem becomes impossible to ignore.

And yet too many brands are still treating it as a radioactive ideological fringe movement and avoiding it entirely.

But doing so ignores the far more uncomfortable reality revealed by Dr. Fisher’s research: young men are entering these spaces for reasons that are fundamentally understandable.

In today’s newsletter, I unpack what this new research tells us about the “mainstream manosphere,” why brands hoping to reach the next generation of men can no longer afford to look away from the ecosystems shaping them, and what it might look like to engage young men around aspiration, identity, and belonging before those needs get captured by more toxic corners of the internet.