Likening a passionate fan to a whale does not work for me. A whale spends thousands to ten thousands times as much as a casual, but a passionate fan does not spend orders of magnitude more than a casual. A business analyst can only see this first-order effect as money is easy to measure; the second order effect of the passionate fanbase having a larger-than-usual reach and being to organise mass gruntle/review bombing/boycotts and other forms of IP burning/resistance is invisible to him, or he does not care because the cost is already sunk, whereas whaling is always an ongoing business.

The exact shape of a Pareto distribution depends on two or three algebraic parameters. And the Pareto principle isn't some universal law that applies everywhere.

Sure — do you think it’s likely or unlikely to apply to things like profit per customer in media? …do you think the distribution will be significantly different than mobile games?

Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?

If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.