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.