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Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those.

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.)

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> So...what next? How do creators get paid?

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.

I wonder what's the ratio of people who genuinely expect to be able to live off their hobbies vs people who don't even get to enjoy a hobby due to The Fear forcing them into "The Hustle" in a world where success and even survival are not defaults?

There's definitely some people for whom these are legitimately just hobbies and if they make some money for it then great, sure. But for those people it's not really a problem if they don't get paid, they'll almost certainly continue to create anyway.

I think one of the worst(?) parts is when someone turns a hobby that their friends and family enjoy them doing/sharing in to a business. Suddenly it's this all consuming thing. Their instagram/SNS posts turn in to nothing but a stream of what amounts to advertisements for their fledgling business/hustle.

> a world where success and survival are not defaults?

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.

"Contentment" would probably be a better word for what I had in mind. I wish I could just, like, exist, you know? I don't want a damn job lol

“contentment content,” i.e. stuff put online just because it makes the creator happy

Where do you see "high production value expectations that people have now"?

On YouTube. I watch a lot of other content creators and anytime anybody makes something that wouldn't pass muster as a Netflix Original there are detractors in the comments. Putting yourself out there on the Internet invites criticism and at least for me, I have no desire to allow my hobbies to be invaded by outside criticism so it's not worth the effort to produce content about them if I know I can't meet the bar required to avoid the most obvious criticisms.

A high % of the comments?

It's inherently no longer a hobby once you have to do it every day to pay your rent.

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.

Aren't we seeing the bubble bursting right now in academia? Hobby PhDs let you into the college content-creation club, to teach the next generation of content creators.

No, we're seeing a very different bubble (maybe) bursting in academia. PhDs do not have a lot in common with content creators.

I think you might start seeing netflix-like consolidation into content packages.

We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.

We are already seeing this in its fledgling form. Sites like Masterclass, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc are all trying to carve out their chunk of the "curated collection of content from independent creators" pie.

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.

There have been (and still are) many networks among YouTube channels already. Some like Linux Tech Tips have a number of channels and a pretty large team. Others are more corporate and adopt creators as they get popular, but the actual network/org is not as obvious since they kind of act in the background, getting sponsors and distributing funds and services to their affiliated creators.

I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.

*Linus Tech Tips

It will be interesting to see what happens when the shattered US economy fully hits the end of its cash infusion rope.

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.

I find this prediction very plausible. The economy contracted by one third this past quarter. Many will lose the ability/willingness to pay $100/mo to 18 different content creators.

The "get rick quick" scams will proliferate.

Will there be any positive outcomes from this economic tumble?

Don’t most have jobs? All these creator platforms end up with a power law distribution of attention and money. The vast majority are not making a living already yet here they are.

I actually completely agree with this statement. I tend to follow the gaming industry pretty closely and lately I've noticed that there are simply too many low-quality gaming YouTube channels.

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...

This definitely has been bred from 'fitting content creation to the algorithm'. There seems to be many dimensions of this with the first being maximizing minutes watched which is where the meandering and stumbling content seems to come from. The second is monetization and knowing if you have to dispute it's essentially already too late, re-uploading is punished heavily and the algorithm heavily favours new content. The third is people observing that to get reliably recommended having a strict upload pattern seems to be favoured by the algorithm which can turn into 'produce to produce' instead of a creative effort. The fourth is just the overhead of dealing with claims and other weird administrative backend and/or YouTube making a sweeping policy change that generates dozens of hours of manual work for people with a large catalog. The last is that because of all of these previous problems many of these people moved over to twitch and then just use their old YouTube account as a clip/advertising mill/stream archive dump site.

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.

That's not a creator-only thing. Thanks to automation and technology, most people have no way to add value, even at a "regular" job.

> So...what next? How do creators get paid?

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.

By buying used, and spending $5 for content that you've used for 20 years, I wouldn't suggest you're providing better income to that professor than YouTubers get from Ads or Patreon

I'm not, I'm saying the bar is very high.

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.

Most people subscibe to creators to support the creator in producing content they value, not to purchase a book or something they can sell on one day. I mean really $5 resale value for a book it's chicken feed, barely worth considering in the value equation.

What was the name of the book?

Not OP but a cursory search would suggest that it is this book: https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3C...

> So...what next? How do creators get paid?

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 like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly.

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.

Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr:

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.

No blockchain currently has the scale for this. FWIW, Visa couldn't handle this either. Youtube alone serves over 10,000 videos per second to just mobile clients. Add in podcasts, text content, music, games, etc. and it's a monumental task.

You don't have to be as big as youtube. The only infrastructure you need is ingestion points for all the feeds, and then reporting mechanisms. The ingestion can just go into an autoscaling group. At that point your cloud costs track almost directly with your revenue, so a big AWS bill is a good sign.

I pay about $50 a month for internet, and none of that goes to the creators. The ISP transmits the bits but profits from others creating something that makes me want to be connected.

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.

> 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.

So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.

Won't that pave the way to the very thing everyone got up in arms about net neutrality for? Having to pay more for certain types of traffic or to certain websites. If your ISP is supposed to forward on some funds to certain types of content then you'll bet they'll add packages and throttle bandwidth for certain content unless you pay extra.

Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".

One thing I see some artists do is sell commission slots and then post the finished artwork for everyone. Some commissions are kept private, of course, but for many of them it's win-win-win to share:

- 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.

Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives.

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.

While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution.

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.

If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?

Yeah, that's a fair point. The old media only existed because of technological limits and a near monopoly over their market, and as new forms of media have arose, that monopoly has slowly fell apart.

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 problem isn't volunteering or things being free. The problem is people getting bullshit jobs or even harmful-to-the-world jobs to pay the bills so they can do their volunteering. The problem is a world of extreme inequity in wealth and political power. The problem is that most products remain non-free by being encumbered by ads and paywalls.

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.

Bullshit jobs are an orthogonal problem, though. With solutions like UBI, or different arrangements wrt ownership of capital. I don't think it makes much sense to narrowly focus on it in the context of content creation.

I just meant that BS jobs are a symptom of a society that doesn't fund creative work where it matters. If we did fund creative work better (however we did), a lot of creative people would leave their BS jobs.

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.

That's the thing, though - it's pretty clear that the market for creative work has too much supply and too little demand for it to be well-funded for everybody who wants to participate. Any arrangement that you make to change that is going to be welfare in disguise; so why not just be honest with ourselves, and spell it out? Let people have UBI that's good enough to actually live on - and then they can do creative work that they want to do, without having to worry about how they'll sell it.

It's not that I don't like paying.

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.

Being a YouTube creator and expecting to just be able to make a living off making your videos is as naive as a band expecting to make a living off record sales.

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.

They don't. Or rather, there is some nuance to this. People value things that have high signal to noise ratios. I will read books (given they have a good review) over articles, or audiobooks over podcasts, both of which I pay for because I know that the signal is high relative to the noise. Creators, should they wish to make money, will move into these higher value productions.

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.

I'm almost the complete opposite. I find that most people with a following don't understand at all what their audience finds compelling about their work.

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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q

> Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in.

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.

>So...what next? How do creators get paid?

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.

Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell.

This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.

YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.

I broke down and started paying for YouTube. Another 12 bucks :) On the laptop, I block ads, but on the tablet, I like to use the official app.

How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...

> Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected.

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.

I believe in micropayments, and I don't think there has been a compelling service for it.

Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...

On Twitch, they use subscriptions (for ad free), ad revenue, merch, donations directly and donations via Twitch.

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.

I would like to see ads on websites, just not the terrible ads that almost all of them are. So far I have unblocked ethicalads.io, which has ads mainly on readthedocs.io but I recently noticed their ads on some blog site. Perhaps as browsers implement tracker blocking, there will be more space for this kind of ad networks.

I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people

To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.

I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage

Merch. Merch is the answer.

Its always seems like a bit of a waste of the carbon budget to get another t-shirt to me. Digital stickers?

I’d buy digital knock knacks that I could use. Like stickers (that hopefully come in a nice png or svg format so I can spread the word and put it things)

Yeah ... Who are these people who don't already have a drawer overflowing with dozens of T-shirts they never wear?

Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in.

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.

I find a lot of the noise in contemporary content is calls to action(payment). Your idea might just ensure content that is mostly about trying to get people to pay for it survives.

What it would do is put a price floor on content. People's willingness to pay, say, $5 instead of $1 for a piece of content is a strong filter, I'm pretty sure low-quality content that's purely CTA wouldn't survive.

Why do you need state enforcement for such a filter? If you only want to see content that the author is asking $5+ for, that's a very simple filter to implement for any website that sells content (and many of them do just that).

The problem is that a lot of potentially viable content falls by default into the marginally-profitable category, where the small amount of utility they provide to the end-user is offset by the incessant user-monetization impulse.

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.

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