Five Buck Fatigue
underjord.io
underjord.io
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.
I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
If you've listened to some Bach (for example) and didn't like it, why would you spend 200 hours listening to the rest?
Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.
Finally, what is the artist and album?
So, what's the problem then?
It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.
This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.
The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.
"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"
Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.
Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.
So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.
Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.
By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.
Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.
They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.
It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.
Chinese Cooking Demystified https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw
Tasting History https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
Ethan Chlebowski https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDq5v10l4wkV5-ZBIJJFbzQ
Townsends https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw
All high quality cooking channels that have exploded in popularity due to the sheer quality, and educational value, of their content.
"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).
Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”
For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.
The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.
This post is about journalism though.
Kurt Vonnegut sold cars, John Grishman worked at a nursery watering bushes, George Orwell was a police officer in Burma, Herman Melville was a cabin boy, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Philip Glass was a plumber and a taxi driver, Richer Serra was a furniture remover, Rothko was an elementary school teacher, Ai WeiWei did street portraits, house painting and carpentry, Keith Haring was a busboy at a night club, the same club where Madonna worked as a coat-check girl, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker, Jackson Pollock was a babysitter, Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and worker at an industrial laundry...
I could go on...
And for every of those names there are plenty of anonymous artists who produced awesome work which never attained the same level of widespread impact on mainstream culture.
As Vonnegut would write: so it goes.
See, digital technology seemingly lowered the bar to reach an audience of millions. It largely has cut out the middle man, the distributor. However, so many young content creators discover now that content doesn't create itself. It still takes time and effort to produce anything worthwhile.
Moreover, artistic or creative freedom is only within reach if you are able to attain financial independence. Or, more succinctly put, someone is willing to pay your living expenses for your privilege to create whatever. Usually that only happens if you find a wealthy philanthropist or patron. And usually, these are people who support budding artists for the sole purpose of showing that their wealth and power is so massive that they can.
Your other option, as creator or artist, is to live as frugally and - hopefully - make smart financial decisions. Like, try and work part time, apply for grants and public funding, try to do work on commission, freelancing,... All in hopes that your work and your name, at long last, gets valued on the market to make a proper living income... which, essentially, is just as much a risky proposition as quitting a job and getting into the start up game.
If you have an artistic vision and you want to execute that vision by pouring in all your time into it, well, you also have to be prepared to face the challenges and consequences that come with that desire. So, you better make sure it's something you genuinely want for yourself.
Instead, the trope is "well too bad, if you want to be an artist, pay for it yourself." And you wonder why a television reality star is the president of the country...if you don't invest in the arts, what else do you expect to happen?
To be clear, my point wasn't to put the responsibility entirely with the creators. It was about showing that if you reduce the discussion to "How can we get more people to donate/subscribe/like? We need some centralized platform with cutting edge tech to do it!" you're losing out in many ways, and you ignore a massive amount of murky, complex, long standing, socio-economic dynamics.
I tried skirting that last remark myself because it evokes strong emotions and tends to derail any meaningful discussion about this.
On a personal note, I think it's absolutely important that there's public funding for the arts, humanities and non-profit in general. But by the same token, it's fair to state that you can't expect society - a large group of individuals - to support anyone who starts producing and publishing content on social media full time, without question.
It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.
Two other things are different now though.
Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)
Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.
I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.
I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.
Sure, it’s always the butter, there can’t be too much.
It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.
Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...
But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.
One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.
- Site 2, 08:34
- Site 1, 08:19
- Site 3, 07:49
- Site 2, 06:02
- Site 3, 05:55
And so on, if that makes sense. I haven't looked for a "show me everything, unread or not, sorted by time" feature but if it's not there the dev just might add it for you.
My reaction was basically to lose interest in the channel entirely. Like it's something I'm mildly interested in but not totally invested in.
The problem now is that before watching any more of their videos, my thought will be "will this be actual content or a just a teaser to sell Patreon support?"
Either put up content on Youtube or don't. But this bait-and-switch is a quick path to unsubscribing entirely.
I don't have a problem with free content, and premium content, as long as the quality of the two is about equal.
Supporting something that's available for free makes you a contributor, buying restricted access makes you a customer, with all the expectations of a competitive value proposition. Most buskers would not be able to sell a single ticket.
So...what next? How do creators get paid?
(FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)
It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.
It is probably the system that is most likely to encourage people to contribute based upon their assessed value of the content and the least likely system to be gamed.
How do you ensure that creators are compensated equitably? You don't even try. Instead, creators depend upon the randomness of the decisions of contributors. It won't always be fair, but it is doubtful that it would create a race to the bottom.
The internet has just provided the final nail in the coffin there, and all these attempts to fight for relevance/get payment from companies like Google and Facebook are a dying industry's attempt to basically postpone the inevitable.
The fact is, even when things are totally free, big money finds a way to bury those things. Similar to people who used to rent DVDs from a store when their public library down the street had the same DVD on the shelf at no extra cost.
If we could destroy the funding of the ad- and paywall-driven businesses, the free stuff could shine. Of course, better to move the funding to the free stuff and have it be even better.
As David Graeber put it, people need an "out". UBI is a good out, but well-funded meaningful creative work is another potential out for at least some people.
Sponsored content that isn't totally abrasive to your audience. Lots of Youtubers seem to do it well.
Alternatively you can do old school sidebar ads that are relevant to whatever your niche is. I'm on a forum for a niche industry. Nobody complains about the banner ads for companies who are relevant to that industry because they keep the forum running.
This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
Maybe we should go in the opposite direction: tax the creators to decrease content generation in order to increase signal-to-noise on high-quality content. Or at least force marginally-profitable content to be released free or not at all.
A price floor splits these marginal works into three categories: those that become free, those that die off, those that become viable at high margins. This seems to be a pretty great outcome for consumers.
Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...
I think Flattr has (or had) a model like...
1. you give Flattr a constant $X per month (you choose the X)
2. Flattr tracks the content you consume, using a browser plugin
3. Flattr divides up your $X among the creators you viewed, and sends it to them
I never used it, but it seems like an interesting model. I like the idea of spending a flat $30/month on "internet content", without agonizing about whether X webcomic deserves my Patreon support.
I'm not sure what incentive there would be to increase the amount contributed though: seems like if users can pay any $X > 0 then it's not enough. Maybe there would need to be a bare minimum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406
If there was one thing I was expecting to come out of the cryptocurrency craze, it was a better Flattr. Yet even that failed to materialize.
My idea: ISPs become regulated like utilities (fixed rate subject to public utilities commission), there is some flat fee for service and then a content fee that gets divided up based on what you consume and paid to the originating IP address. Figure out some categories of content (audio, video, image, text), enforce something that prevents inflating of bits, and then everyone gets paid based on their content. My blog earns a few pennies a day and my account with my hosting provider gets credited monthly or something—which offsets my hosting bill. A YouTube channel gets paid to YouTube who take a cut for providing the severs and the rest passed on. Software and hardware for self-hosting becomes a thing again.
So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.
Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".
Working really well for a lot of streamers. There is pretty much zero friction on the user end once a payment method is set up.
Of course, this is a live entertainment type service and they are basically selling interaction with the audience, but I don't see why that type of payment scheme can't transfer to other products.
On Twitch you can literally donate $.01 at a time.
One might say that this may not work for all types of content, to which I say, there is always an analogue. Upcoming are paid newsletters where before they were usually free, for example, or in the worst case, people will offer money via Patreon.
A book or an audiobook represents months or years of intentional thought put into compiling information that they think will sell. Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in.
In contrast, an article/blog post or podcast is much more casual, like the author's stream of consciousness. I get a real glimpse of what their life/experience/work is like, not just the version of themselves that gets past the editing phase.
As an example, I'm loving the Trash Taste [1] podcast even though I have zero interest whatsoever in watching content made by the participants individually.
Nearly every single technical book I have ever read has pages and pages of fluff to pad it out to some arbitrary length that the author or the publisher thinks is necessary to make it worth the price.
Something similar happens to YouTube videos once the creator stars making a living off them. They start making padding videos just to get something out for the week.
A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased).
Total Book Price: US$ 3.94 Shipping: US$ 3.00
For just a smidge over $5 dollars, I got a world class textbook written by one of the best educators on the planet. In the era of coronavirus, I've finally sat down every night with it and have put in about 40 hours reading it (mostly doing the exercises), checking out some of the citations and references, making Anki cards, etc.
As best I can tell, creators get paid by putting in high quality work of relevance and lasting value. Your average Youtuber ain't it.
Physical content like a book has a residual value; you can -- and people do--sell it when you're done. The residual value after ten years is something like 5 bucks perhaps, especially considering a new edition was published that year.
In contrast, patronage is pretty much a total writeoff.
I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't even think that's such a bad thing; there is way too much "content" out there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently creating.
Success is never a default in any world. Even in the most utopian Star Trek universe, not everybody gets to be a starship captain.
I actually have thought about recording videos of my hobbies and sharing them, just to share, but I'm discouraged by the high production value expectations that people have now and it's not worth the hassle. But I would never expect to turn it into a career. I respect and support several content creators, but they are handful among tens of thousands. The majority of creators simply aren't generating $5/mo in value.
I think finding something you get paid for that you can get some sort of enjoyment out of is way easier than monetizing a hobby and keeping what you enjoy about that hobby alive.
We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
When it's all said and done, we're going to end right back up with the HBO/Showtime model for VOD across the board.
I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
Many unemployed people are jumping on the creator bandwagon created a supply glut and also a noise problem.
This will drive down prices and what people are willing to pay, particularly as people's ability to pay for anything in general craters if the jobs don't come back.
There will probably be some companies that make a quick buck selling the dream to those investing their last few dollars trying to eek something out, but perhaps we will also see some disruption of the models and general content creator and curator space.
The "get rick quick" scams will proliferate.
Will there be any positive outcomes from this economic tumble?
I was recommended a video the other day "The Downfall of Blizzard" or something like that, started watching it and was surprised at how incredibly bland the content was. Even more surprising was the amount of views and likes the video had. The jokes were bad, the production quality was low, there was no critical or opinionated analysis, etc.
There are tons of channels like this, full of videos where it's just some some guy or gal talking to a camera with some uninspired editing and generally run-of-the-mill content. And this is just one slice. I see this kind of content everywhere now.
Of course, everyone wants to be happy doing what they like doing, but it simply isn't sustainable that everyone lives off of their hobbies. Not only are they providing little value in general, but they're just not really good at it...
I put a lot of the blame on YouTube, because people seem more than happy to reward/watch well produced content but YouTube's algorithm rewards daily junk content over polished content produced biweekly or monthly. You can see glimmers of old YouTube from time to time where the video is trimmed precisely to support the actual content even if it's 3 minutes or well edited to be engaging but YouTube keeps creating (and revising) a game where that kind of content loses.
- The artists get paid and still get to display stuff publicly, attracting more fans and more commissions.
- The fans get a chance to have their favorite artists draw their favorite things.
- The vast majority of silent passersby get more reasons to keep coming back and maybe turn into paying fans too.
Dealing with fans and managing expectations becomes even more of a can of worms when money gets involved, of course, and people tend to under-value creative work in general, but I've seen some people make that work for 10+ years now even before the era of Patreon and Gumroad and friends.
This was my read of the post too, strengthened by the complaint about Wikipedia. There are reasonable thoughts about one of the pitfalls of the subscription model, but the motivating complaint behind the post seems to be "compensating creators is annoying". It's possible there's a method for doing so at scale that's a Pareto improvement over all existing options, but I think it's just as likely that "paying" for things in any manner is going to cause friction. The payment isn't meant to be the pleasant part of the exchange for you; the content is.
To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
I don't like deciding whether I can afford another 5 bucks. The article mentions "$5/month adds up pretty quickly", well, it adds even quicker in other countries. See decision fatigue.
I don't like tipping. I don't like feeling the responsibility of someone's livelihood on my shoulders. Maybe I'm a selfish bitch for putting my likes and someone's livelihood in the same sentence.
I do like sharing, though, when I'm feeling financially secure.
I like buying stuff. I love getting myself a nice big fat book of content. I love getting a bargain: lie to me that it's 50% off and I'm yours. I like Scribd for that reason.
Not that I have a business model from this. The day I've paid my bills, or at Thanksgiving, talk to me about gratitude and giving to creators?
Maybe there's no easy way around the fact that people don't like paying. If the money is valuable to creators, it's probably valuable for me too, and therefore I can't give it away easily.
If you're a band then the real money is made with merch and performance. If you're a YouTube creator then you need to start thinking of your videos as promotion and provide some sort of high margin product you can shill every video.
Example of a youTuber doing this right is GreyscaleGorilla which started out as just a guy doing very basic 3D software tutorials but once he built an audience then spread out into making 3D software plugins and resources. It works perfectly because you can use the product you sell in your tutorials.
Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.
Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
Niches like theirs will always exist.
Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.
$5 month gets you a group of creators in a given field. Hell, I would happily pay that for a whole group of 3D printer/Blender gurus doing their thing and showing me how...
Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.
I just renewed my subscription to "Sound on Sound" - an _incredibly_ high quality recording industry magazine - for $58.50 for the year, which includes both the print edition and digital edition, so that works out just under $5/mo...
Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best offers available.
Private Eye is £34 a year, so $3.72 a month. And it comes every two weeks.
But that's not really a great world for individual agency or the creative arts. A writer with 1,000 readers can only write so much per month -- and $5 doesn't (or only barely) makes it possible. People who want a world which HAS niche content are going to have to cough up more -- I'd like to think most people here are in that camp.
There are lots of products and media that is niche/boutique/artisanal or whatever your preferred term is. And people are willing to pay much more for that.
Me too. The way I look at it, if I'm going to live off 4% of my assets a year in retirement, I need an extra $1500 to fund a $5 a month recurring charge.
So it's a matter of looking at how long it would take to save that $1500 and asking if I would commit to working that much longer before I retire in order to afford the recurring payment.
If "that much longer" is measured in days/weeks/months instead of minutes or hours, the answer is almost certainly going to be no.
Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc.
I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.
I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop .
Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff.
Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them.
In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.
I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.
However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them.
But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.
It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.
Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily.
I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.
YouTube Premium?
You could pay your money to some entity that curates the creators and content you enjoy. This entity would then redistribute the payments among the creators.
You would go on that platform and create your own content 'bundle'. You could also choose from various pre-bundled categories : tech, science, self-help, cooking, music ...
You also would have the option to simply consume some content and pay for that 1 item (song,video,podcast,print or other content).
I would definitely go for that!
I bet Patreon could take on a similar model, but I'm not sure how it would be curated. Who would bundle creators? Patreon, the creator(s), or the user(s)? I don't think Patreon would want to show bias by grouping anything. To support creators working together it might be really cool to see them create alliances and tag team projects. But I'd probably want to bundle them myself to hand pick who I support.
I only follow 1 Patreon user, a good (very talented) high school friend with a knack for explanation of musical concepts. He's brilliant on a guitar and I want others to see that.
What about indie hacker-type services?
I often donate fairly large amounts to open source projects I really like, or that are responsive to issues raised by me. Especially the small single-dev ones. Most of them also have patreons but I usually contact them on IRC or whatever and just wire the money directly to them (saving payment platform fees as well). Even though they don't offer this as an 'official' option, they never say no to $100 ;) Of course none of these have any 'paid members only' stuff as it's open source already.
However small regular amounts I'm not willing to do. My interests tend to fade quickly and I tend to forget about such subscriptions, leaving them to run much too long. It also stimulates never-finishing projects.
The same with good causes/NGOs, trying to sign you up on the street. They don't want money anymore, they want your bank details. They'll never get them. In their case I think the problem is just that they're becoming too commercialised. They're thinking and acting as big corporations, CEOs making too much money, having big marketing departments etc. They're not the 'grassroots' movements they once were, and as such I don't feel like sponsoring them anymore.
I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.
onlyfans?
in all seriousness thanks for the correction.
People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan, what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude, it just makes people more miserable.
Right, that's what I mean. You go without all those things for a year and all you get is a measly few hundred dollars?
Consider someone on a $15 minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year. Their pre-tax income is $31,200. Let's say they cancel subscriptions and save $20 per month, saving $240 per year. That is how much they earn in 16 hours of work -- merely 0.77% of their annual income. I think most people would be ok blowing 0.77% of their income on streaming if they get multiple streaming subscriptions for that money.
They go without their subscriptions for 4 years and they have their emergency fund. Moreover, after year 1, they can then start buying more of their things in bulk and save the 10% bulk discount on everyday essential items, which can probably give them another 20-30 dollars a month. And then you have to take that time you were spending watching netflix and invest it in learning skills so you can make more than minimum wage.
I struggle with the middle class version of this question all the time. My company pays overtime at about 30/hr after tax. Is it worth it to work on Saturdays or a couple 10-12 hour days through the week in order to collect the overtime? I'll be exhausted and only pick up an extra 150-300 a week. If I do it for a year I can earn an extra 10 grand or so a year and then put it in the stock market where it will pay me $200/year in dividends (and in 45 years I will have replaced my salary).
This is why Naval says you can't trade time for money and get rich the math doesn't work. But in the beginning you have to while you develop the skills and cash reserves so that you can take the risks which can help you build real wealth.
Netflix is really good value for money. If you want to cancel something, cancel your cable.
If you quit smoking, you will not just save the money you spent on it, you'll also get more energy, no cravings, and not spend an hour a day smoking. That adds up really quick.
A "measly few hundred dollars" means nothing to someone making 100K/year. It means everything to someone making 18K per year. Not least of which is the joy and comfort of knowing you actually have some savings.
> I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
I suspect people don't know just how little discretionary income for things like this the average person really has. Something like 3/4 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors.
It's an interesting internal conflict to have.
> I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis.
I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.
> I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia
I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.
I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad.
OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.
I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.
There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.
Personally, I've never earned enough BAT in a month to pay out creators what I would actually owe them. In fact, I've tried to research why I'm not earning BAT even though I theoretically should be. I don't know what's up. I guess I'm just not being shown ads. That's one thing about BAT that's bad. It all depends on this one centralized ad ecosystem. If people aren't buying ads on the BAT network, then you won't get served ads and you won't make money.
In any case, I don't know if the Coil economics work, but at least all these $5 subs are sustainable and reliable.
The Web Monetization standard is the solution to the problem described of wanting to support a lot of creators effortlessly. There are many creators I want to support, but don't want to deal with managing a unique subscription to them—and also don't want to support them with a minimum $5/month.
I'd love to see WebMonitization work with at least 1 other coin besides XRP. Supposedly Interledger works with any coin, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more.
And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants.
This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.
In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"
As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."
"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee.
Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.
The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".
Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
But that would be Universal Basic Income :)
think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy.
This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.
But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.
For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.
This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively
It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania.
If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments.
Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.
Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.
If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.
I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.
Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?
They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.
I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.
Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.
I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!
There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.
I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees.
Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.
Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.
Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.
For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable.
As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation
PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.
AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.
I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.
Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).
I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.
The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!
And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.
IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.
Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators.
I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...
I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.
Does it?
If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other expenses, you're doing it wrong :)
A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000