Survey · Influence Signal
A measured map of the 400 voices with the greatest pull on one audience of roughly 180,000 executives, separating reach from specific influence.
The Influence Map
Each mark is one voice: right means it engages more of the audience, up means its pull is specific to the audience, larger means more executives among its reactors. Named marks are organizations; individual voices are unnamed. Hover or tap a named mark for its measures.
Log scales on both axes. Audience specificity 1.0 means a voice engages the audience at the same rate it engages comparable professionals outside it; the dashed line at 1.5 marks where audience-specific influence begins.
Text summary: 400 voices plotted by audience members engaged (31 to 714, log scale) and by audience specificity (0.3x to 10.2x, log scale). Y Combinator holds the upper right: 150 audience members engaged, 97 executive reactors, 10.2x specificity. Databricks (164 engaged, 3.8x), GenAI Works (184, 2.0x), NVIDIA (189, 1.6x), Snowflake (81, 5.1x), and GitHub (49, 4.4x) anchor the specific lanes. Forbes (370 engaged, 1.0x) marks the celebrity tier of high reach at general-feed specificity. Unnamed marks are individual voices shown without identity.
Reaching an executive audience usually means buying the biggest voices. The biggest voices engage everyone at the same rate: Forbes engages 370 members of this audience at 1.0x, the rate of the general feed. Thirteen of the 400 voices engage this audience at more than five times the rate they engage the professionals around it. The Influence Map below separates that gravity from specific influence. The voices in its upper right engage this audience up to ten times harder than they engage comparable professionals outside it. A message placed with those voices reaches the buyers it is for.
The firm measured 1.17 million recorded reactions. The target audience that produced 724,301 of them holds roughly 180,000 professionals: mid-market executives, private-equity operating partners, chief HR officers, data and AI leaders, and the hands-on tiers beneath them. Each reaction records the author of the post that earned it. Counting distinct audience members per author yields a measured influence ranking: whose posts this specific market engages with.
The same count run on comparable professionals outside the audience gives each voice a specificity score. Specificity separates the voices that particularly engage this audience from the voices that engage everyone. Organizations appear by name. Individual voices, public or private, appear as unnamed marks with no identity attached.
The lower right is the celebrity trap. Every voice engaging 300 or more audience members sits below 1.4x specificity, Forbes at 370 included. That tier reaches the audience at roughly the rate it reaches the general feed. Reach borrowed there buys noise.
The upper region is where influence belongs to this market. On the upper right sits Y Combinator, the most valuable node on the map: 150 audience reactors at ten times the outside rate. Ninety-seven of those reactors are executives. Around it, the executive lane runs through builder and operator voices while the practitioner lane runs through data-engineering educators and the tool orbit of Databricks, Snowflake, and GitHub.
Reach and specificity price a channel differently. The celebrity tier delivers the audience at general-feed rates, while the specific lanes deliver it at multiples of the outside rate and the executive lane carries the decision tier itself. Placement against this map replaces placement by follower count.
Reach here is within-audience reach. The record holds no public reaction totals, so the map measures each voice's pull on this market and nothing beyond it.
One mark carries a dashed ring: a title-collision artifact identified in review. It stays plotted for completeness and enters no finding on this page.