Olivia Mercer
Co-Founder, Shit You Should Care About
Olivia Mercer is a New Zealand media entrepreneur and a co-founder of Shit You Should Care About (SYSCA), the social-first media platform created to help people engage with news, politics, culture and world events.
Mercer co-founded SYSCA in 2018 with her childhood friends Lucy Blakiston and Ruby Edwards, while the three were students at Victoria University of Wellington, where Mercer studied psychology and later design. The platform began as a blog and grew into a major digital media brand with a large international audience.
From the beginning, SYSCA took a different approach to news. It did not separate hard news from culture or politics from internet life. It recognised that younger audiences often experience the world as a mix of headlines, memes, grief, celebrity, injustice, humour and anxiety, all arriving through the same feed. As part of the founding team, Mercer helped create a platform that made caring feel less intimidating, building trust by being transparent, direct and human and making space for people who wanted to understand the world but did not always know where to start.
Mercer’s contribution included a strong design and visual sensibility that shaped how SYSCA looked and felt across its channels. She went on to create SYSCA’s video series Extremely Online, a Web series funded by NZ On Air that broke down the stranger corners of internet culture, from deepfakes and the singularity to why AI has a racism problem, in language anyone could follow. The series reflected SYSCA’s broader editorial approach: diving into complex territory without assuming the audience already knew the terrain.
The platform’s growth reflected a wider shift in media: audiences were no longer waiting for traditional outlets to explain the world to them and were instead following voices and communities that felt closer to how they actually think and talk. As The Spinoff noted, SYSCA represented a generation learning to navigate the internet’s information overload on its own terms.
Like Edwards, Mercer later moved on from SYSCA to pursue other opportunities, having helped establish one of New Zealand’s most distinctive modern media brands.
Mercer’s profile is noteworthy because her work with SYSCA sits at the intersection of digital culture, youth engagement, social media and public conversation. It is a reminder that media influence no longer belongs only to large institutions, it can also come from founders who understand what their generation is paying attention to and why.
Sources: Newshub · The Spinoff · RNZ · The Denizen
About this profile
This profile was researched and written by Noteworthy using publicly available sources. If something here is out of date or incorrect, let us know and we’ll review it.
