Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy
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Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)
I remember years ago it was a usual thing for me to find myself bored and start checking out authors I liked (writers, singers, movie directors, whatever). I'd then find out what they've been up to and check out their new stuff. Nowadays I very rarely do that, because I always have an ever increasing pile of media to consume I can barely keep up with, so I don't go out to find new things.
In such an environment an artist can't choose to build an audience very slowly over decades because there's no retention. The only way to succeed is to explode virally and then keep pushing content constantly to remind people of your existence for as long as you can surf the wave.
Books maybe, but aren't people watching more movies than ever?
The thing is, they're also watching a smaller slice of the movies produced than ever...
It's not theaters, between Netflix and piracy, there are tons of more movies consumed. And whole TV-series, binge watched series by series, each of which amounts to 5+ movies running time...
While there's arguably been an overall shift to shorter content, I don't really see a marked falloff in movies being produced.
But that’s not the good stuff. For the good stuff I turn to 18 hour audiobooks, real movies, deep technical articles.
Bite sized for staying in touch, long and in-depth for things that interest you.
Then I watched "The Foreigner", yup, same old revenge plot.
I don't think I could study something difficult with Audio Books or any noise, but for example, tinkering or life's chores like washing clothes, emptying dishwashers, hoovering, showering.... These tasks which must be done anyway can become secondary to an audio book which takes the prime brain space to the point that those tasks become "enjoyable". Especially if you find a good book!
So I go back to artists that were great in the 60s and 70s and look for other albums of theirs - found a lot of stuff I really like that way.
For Books, I'd mention Amazon (as nowadays it has become far easier to self-publish)
So true. Very, very few published authors don't also need a real job to pay the bills. JK Rowling is a unicorn.
Yes, and I assume at least some of the more successful self-published authors on Amazon are churning out material they can create a lot of quickly. I also assume they do a lot of marketing and have a reliable fan base in most cases.
It's the difference between product and culture.
Culture makes you think, changes your world view, surprises you, challenges you, and is driven by imagination.
Product fills a gap, fuels a transaction, and is driven by cash.
There used to be more of a balance, but now the scales are tilted heavily towards product.
There are other reasons too but it’s no wonder that studios are most interested in investing in movies that will have broad international appeal.
You hear different views of the cause of this, but may see increasing inequality as a cause. I'm convinced extreme financialization from money debasement is the primary undiagnosed issue.
One difference is that people in those days simply did not know how to go about entrepreneurship, or thought it required some magical skills they didn't have. That's all changed because the info is so readily available on the internet.
I think it was Patio11 who said "Now you can download your steam engine for free and rent a factory for $10/month".
A lot of those people work on small budget stuff for Hulu and Netflix now (as you point out). I think the big streamers have replaced the big studios as far as funding small budget work (single digit millions budgets).
We have an abundance of new media. Making music went from needing a studio and finding a record label to needing nothing but a PC or even just smartphone and you can upload it to youtube or 50 other services.
Video is trivial as well though movies still take more effort than most are willing to put in but even so, the number of new movies or TV shows per year is way way up AFAICT.
Games is insane when you add in smartphones. Just like videos, games got easier to make. There are ~20k new games a month on smartphones. Sure, a game like GTA5 or Cyberpunk 2077 takes 400+ people multiple years, but just like video, documentaries that used to take a larger team of people are now regularly created by individuals and uploaded to youtube. Same with games. Lots of great indie games created by 1-4 people in 3 to 9 months. Especially with Unity and Unreal.
Publishing a book like this seems way more attainable than getting even a low level of success through traditional publishing a couple decades back.
In the days of very expensive post production equipment or studio recording equipment the cheap stuff simply could not exist. The blockbusters and middling content were sorted/binned accordingly. Blockbusters were milked and middling content was salvaged and polished.
These days are indeed different. There's so much content. "Middle class" most likely has to come up from the bottom instead of failed blockbusters thrown to newbies and fixers. Advertising goes a long way and gems in the rough don't get that. However, there's almost certainly more good content than ever before.
Historically, distance was a big source of economic friction. This make local retailing and manufacturing a profitable enterprise. As shipping became cheaper and more reliable, local retailing and manufacturing became economically impractical.
Another source of economic friction that generated a middle class was the need for a large number of middle managers and clerical staff to operate a large enterprise. This had two effects. One, it employed large numbers of people. Two, the cost of operating the organization scaled faster than linearly, and this prevented organizations from scaling to planetary scale. Computers have eliminated both those obstacles.
Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.
There is technically no contradiction between the existence of a middle class and the existence of a small number of big winners.
> Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.
are software engineers the upper class then or are they part of the proletariat? What about doctors and lawyers?
The policies that supported the middle class have just been slowly undone in the wake of the Reagan “Revolution”
As far as I'm aware, the historical "middle class" was never conceived of as being in the "middle" economically. They were the middle class because they were rich like aristocrats, without being nobly born like aristocrats. That put them in the middle of no scales of status; rather, they pegged the high end of economic status, and the low end of blueblood status. They couldn't be treated as well as noblemen, because (1) they weren't noblemen, and (2) everybody hated them. But they couldn't be treated as poorly as peasants, because they were too rich.
I don't see what we gain by applying this term to the majority of the United States today; the concepts just don't match up.
More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.
E.g. I'm subscribed to a bunch of obscure, specialized subreddits that would be deadly boring to most people. But my reddit is far more interesting to me than the reddit I see when I'm not logged in, where posts have thousands of upvotes instead of dozens.
I once read about an experiment where users would listen to music and and the platform counted the number of listens and showed users. When the experiment was rerun, a different set of songs from the first experiment were popular. I believe I read this in Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger.
The point is that most content platforms select for content that is sufficiently good (or clickable) but not necessarily the best.
Best is in the eye of the beholder anyway. But, truth be told, as long as an algorithm is reasonably dialed into my genre preferences... (There are some genres I just don't like even if you show me the very cream of the crop. And there are less popular ones that I'll probably enjoy even Tier 2 performers well enough.) I'll be pretty well satisfied with the overall most popular songs in those genres. Will it hit all my favorites. No. But it wouldn't be a bad cut.
I actually think this has gotten quite a bit worse thanks to algorithmic content recommendations. For instance, when Pandora launched with hand-curated content, the recommendations were a lot better than I currently get with spotify.
As an example, I play accordion and I like to hear other accordion play songs on YouTube. There may be lots of covers of a popular song I want to learn, but there are rarely many accordion covers, let alone good ones.
So the question is whether you are looking for generic entertainment, or do you take an interest in something specific? Add another search term to a query and the results can thin out pretty quick.
From a professional creator’s point of view (not me), the question is whether these niches have enough money in them to get started and grow from there? And that depends on market conditions. Can people find what they like when it’s not mainstream?
So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Unless accordion covers go viral on its own, it’s probably not going to break out. But if it did then YouTube would add fuel to the fire as long as people are responding
It doesn't have to be mainstream to get the flywheel started, just well-liked by some niche.
If you have Spotify, here's a playlist of accordion recordings I like: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Ydvyr0ZjfiG4085izipNC
Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this.
edited: for typos
The platforms make kings and the quality of the content isn’t always “first-rate”
Nothing in your post back this up with experience or some data
But the bigger problem is that you have a circular argument - you already assumed spme content is second-rate before anyone has viewed it or reviwed it. Sony's 23'rd remake of spiderman and endless marvel movies are allegendly first-rate content, despite having zero emotinal intelligence, relevant issues or plot.
Meanwhile there is probably some great plotwriting languising somewhere, waiting to be discovered
The major issue WRT Hollywood is that everyone is playing it mega safe, fixating on a genre or niche for years before changing tack. Before superheroes we had zombies, rom-coms, 3D, to name a few. Superheroes is mostly only notable because it has made so much money for such a long time, but it will eventually peter out; I’m not the only person I know who thinks there are too many supe movies to catch up with.
Your comment, by contrast, hinges on the assumption that platforms today are perfect at elevating the best content, and everything else is second-rate.
The arts have to work harder. There are certain stock tropes and narratives musicians and movie producers can draw on, with varying degrees of deliberate awareness. But the target demographics are more varied, and some are even mutable. So it's harder to hit the bullseye with any consistency.
For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes: https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM
Sometimes money changes hands and marketable but otherwise not very interesting music suddenly appears on hundreds of playlists - in the hope that it will break through into mass appeal.
You can only push this so far because ultimately listeners still decide what's hot and what isn't. But they're forced to make their choices from a limited and crafted pool of suspected high-performing product, and not from a much wider pool of more varied styles and less homogenous artists.
There's also going to be pushback from creators (and especially large creators) when they find out that YouTube is adding backpressure to their success. It's going to mean the algo helps you get some level of popular, and then it fights you getting really popular.
> For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes
That author is misunderstanding the market. I know a lot of people who watch those; they have 0 intentions of actually cooking the things they see. To them it's closer to art than it is cooking, where they appreciate the end result and don't really care how the creator got there. I don't know why it doesn't seem obvious from the format. Those quick clips are an awful way to give cooking instructions, and they give none of the usual tips like "when you're done whipping, it should have the texture of...".
I think the style is inherited from Pinterest, where people constantly pin things they have no intention of actually doing. I had an ex that loved Pinterest, but her whole feed was pretty much just "Here's 1,000 things you don't have time to do unless you're a professional creator".
There was a debate recently about how working class people are underrepresented and it's all middle class children at private schools and teens at elite universities.
That definitely seems to be the case for the YouTubers my daughter is interested in - they're very nice people but they are a bit relentlessly middle class.
I’d venture a guess that the concept (“Middle Class of the Creator Economy”) was thought of before any backing was found.
> In our analysis, “middle-income” Americans are adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size.
And they seem to use "middle-income" and "middle-class" interchangeably.
Note that this definition is quite different than what may have been used in your history/economics classes in school/college.
But the remaining two have the most talent, and will do fine regardless of finances. Because killing it. :)
Now it's flipped 180 degrees. Musicians make all their money from touring. They release records to find new fans who will buy tickets to their shows.
We live in a golden era for the little guy. Before the Internet if you didn't own the means of production no matter how talented you might be you made money for those who did.
Now you can start a SaaS company and bootstrap your way into a living because the means of production have become ridiculously cheap. A musician can release music on the Internet and go from a local following to a regional one and if they're good enough a national one.
I well remember it taking Bob Seger ten years to go from a Detroit artist to a regional success and another ten years until he was 'discovered' and overnight became a national one. Bruce Springsteen did it faster because he was on the east coast and got a Time magazine cover.
The only difference now is that the young want success overnight and that is rare. Are you committed enough to work for ten years or more to reach the level of finding a thousand fans? Sometimes that means taking a lesser paying job to learn. Or to have the time to code or play gigs on the weekend. Thing about the Internet is you find your true talent level fairly quickly and you might not always like what you learn;<).
Do you want to know Vine's biggest problem? They were owned by Twitter! There is room for only one product to succeed there despite its best efforts to continually sabotage themselves. FYI I do like Twitter.
Until this year, when that income source has been largely obliterated.
I'm watching someone from Germany right now. She's a bit unique in that she publishes her real time subscriber number. If you do the math you can see she makes about $25,000/mo just from subs, and that doesn't include bits during hype trains.
Especially for EDM, the songs seem to be premixed. The DJs seem to be standing around, pretending to turn some knobs but the sound doesn't seem to be impacted too much.
I understand artists playing a guitar live on Twitch, but for electronic music?
Of course, that’s still pretty boring to watch, which is why there’s a lot of fake knob twists and styling going on.
I consume a lot of Youtube DJ sets but it’s all just playing in the background, I never watch the video.
The author is a woman.
I was flipping through a music history textbook, and the author identified the development of movable type for printing music with the birth of the "music industry."
His sonata was never played (or may be once) in the first 100 years in public. It was meant to be read and played to the score.
If not mistaken his last act is to rewrite his quartet to 4 hand as this is very popular music at home. There is no mp3 and we do not have 4 person at home unlike Schubert.
But the difference is circulation is still a bit limited. Hence some can still survive. Imagine today if Beethoven is here, he would not be struggle and worry about income in his dying bed. (He would not be starved to death or without a drink. The newly formed London symphony society heard about his worry and sent in money for his tenth and later wine. But even he is on ...)
However he did have some unfortunate twists - war caused him to lose a stipend income, promised to him so that he doesn't take up a well paid position for Napoleon's brother. Then of course a period of inactivity due to depression.
For the sonata... are you referring to the Hammerklavier? That was simply a monstrosity of a piece, but it was played in concert only a decade or two later by the virtuoso Liszt.
I agree though, the audience that Beethoven could reach today would well exceed what he could from 1800's Europe, even if most people today prefer pop.
I'm not sure that's what Anderson argued (though I would have to go back and read his original piece). Collectively, the long tail is large even while a power law distribution means that a relatively small amount of content captures an outsized amount of attention. But that doesn't mean individual content creators in the long tail capture much attention (and compensation).
Otherwise, I guess the author is arguing that platforms should adopt strategies to create a gentler power law distribution so that more creators are in the knee of the curve because that would create a healthier environment for more people. I guess I don't really disagree with that although I'll note that most creators will still be in the long tail.
[ADDED: And ultimately it's really the users that determine the distribution even if the platform can influence it.]
I think what the author has tried to argue for is heavy/fat tail.
> a recent study of kids ages eight to 12 found that nearly 30% aspire to become YouTubers
People will always want to go out there, do their own thing, and get paid a middle-class wage for it. The problem is there's a surplus of these people, most actually aren't talented enough to achieve that, and for those who don't have a natural market fit with what they do, they'll have to compromise their vision.
It reminds me of artists getting priced out of a gentrifying urban center. It takes away the character of the neighborhood, but who is to say their art is good, worth fighting for, and that they're more deserving of their apartment than someone with enough money to afford the apartment.
Basically, I don't want to subsidize someone's hobby/lifestyle. I completely support them doing what they want, I just don't want to hear complaints that there's no money in it.
In that case it's mostly the parents that subsidize the lifestyle up until college level.
It doesn't seem like that's the case today. Unless you have a profession or work multiple jobs (both of which prohibit having enough time to seriously pursue art) you are completely priced out of America's cosmopolitan cities.
I respect this; they decided what's important to them, and I think this is a fair situation to be in.
> It doesn't seem like that's the case today
While I agree, at least in the Bay Area, I'm not super sympathetic to this because, and I'm guessing here, I bet a lot of the people who got priced-out or evicted in the last decade+ voted for supervisors in favor preservation and anti-landlord policies. There weren't artists saying "build new luxury condos so I'm not competing with engineers for a run-down studio."
The bad parts of cities are still cheap. Within the last ~4yr I did a $1500/mo single bedroom in Boston and a $1300 single bedroom in Waltham (which is a nice but not "surgeons and lawyers buy houses here suburb of Boston). Yes there were mice but I think that is a pretty reasonable trade for the price.
Things start getting stupid expensive when you try to live how you think a white collar professional should live.
Of course I've pulled the numbers out of my own ... but I think it is reasonable assumption.
I don't think the question makes sence - like what does it actyally mean, obviously we aren't talking about food. Is it perhaps better phares as:
If average amount of money people are willing spend on entertainment, how many creators can a million people support?
But what about people who make repair tutorials, etc, are they included? Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? Are game developers i cluded in this?
And time.
For a given person, I think it roughly is. I'm probably going to spend about the same time (and money) watching video somewhat independently of the quality of content available (within reason). Preferences may shift over time--I spend more time reading things online relative to reading books than I did 20 years ago. But broadly, more or better entertainment options won't really shift my total time and money budget.
I can make reasonable money by selling my books online, having my own e-shop is great, because there is no need to pay various middle men.
2020 was a good year and my total revenue from this business is comparable to what a Google software engineer makes here in Prague. I used to code for living, this is a much less stressful way of life.
But the total amount of supporters necessary exceeds 1000 by a large margin. Even if 1000 people bought two of my books yearly, I would struggle financially.
I know two creators on YouTube of about the same size (about 50K subscribers), and their results have been very different. One of them made enough money to tour the world non stop, and currently lives a digital nomad esque lifestyle, and the other one had to get a job after his channel couldn't support a lifestyle in rural China.
Generally, the more you rely on YouTube for your income, the higher your stats will need to be to live full time off your work. Whereas if you've got money from Patreon, merchandise, etc... then things don't need to be as extreme.
So someone in the former group will likely need about 200K subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views per video on YouTube, whereas one in the latter could get away with a 30-50K channel and far less views per video.
The topic obviously matters too. Gaming content is hell to monetise, whereas financial or business related content seems to have much better ad rates and what not.
If Neil Patel was a gaming blogger, he'd be maybe one tenth as rich.
The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws.
That said, glad they close out with UBI. If we can't quota the views per video from above, we can at least provide a revenue floor.
We're a non-society with with centralized media: increasingly atomized associated people transfixed by the machine. Only in rebuilding society in meat space forces the sparsely connected graph that coupled with technology allows heterogeneity to really shine.
Interesting observation.
Why? Isn't that a function of "the algorithm" which can be changed?
Instagram could pull off what TikTok did, but not YouTube.
If a large swatch of people with even weakish bonds all watch the same thing, that's a lot of additional value. Smaller groups consuming the same stuff can also work, but you need very strong bonds to commensurate.
The latter stands a chance of producers have a UBI to fall back on. It's kind of like how growing an orchard takes 10 years to turn a profit, but growing a wheat field is instant gratification.
Part of the problem I have with this sort of thing is that it seldom addresses the "other half" of personal finance: how you spend your money.
I can't write a big long thing about it right now, but check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/about
Food forests would be a quick early solution, the long-term solution would be the creation of vitamin supplements that contain all the necessary nutrients at a low cost and faster compared to what it takes to grow plants.
> "and let others determine if it is working or playing" (quote in your web page)
I do not distinguish between play and work when I do research in mathematics, but I have to work as a programmer because mathematicians are starving in Latin America (It is a phrase to say that they do not earn much, for those dumbasses who do not understand the joke and downvote me) and worse someone like me, 19 years old, without work experience nor university degree.
I think that a lot of problems arise for creators when these are not aligned, for instance, in many advertising-driven models. YouTube, which has received a lot of creator backlash, will always be pressured financially to serve the needs of advertisers first, since they are the ones putting money into the system. YouTube doesn't want to do things that are bad for creators, but creators are not their primary customers.
Another example of misalignment is the case of Spotify, who sold significant stakes to the major record labels to bring them on board. CEO Daniel Ek says (probably sincerely) that they want to help one million artists live off of their art. Spotify renewed its deal with Universal Music Group in July, and Ek, in a podcast [1] last year, in spite of repeating the one million artists goal, went on to discuss their desire to provide additional services to the labels, which would seemingly run counter to this in favor of preserving existing power structures.
Some of this must also be a scale problem: once you reach a certain size and have made deals with big existing players to get there, you need to serve their interests because the risk of losing them is too great.
12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size.
13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts.
The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month.
About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained.
What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets.
I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.
I do not think he will survive in the older days. Bit in the new economy and have a few hundreds Patreon he got enough to live by in USA. Not much just write an article a day or two and filter and react to fan comment.
Not sure he saved enough as USA has no health and he lived alone. When he stopped writing for 2 days without saying it, I really started to worry. ... USA is so harsh in this aspects. But guess that is a reality. Still read him everyday.
And he is sixty something.
The winner take it all is an issue. This is totally different from the issue of top 1% controlling the politics and finances in the old (finance based) economy.
Solution needed but not hers.
The real middle class in the creator economy is with all the people supplying these celebrities. Working on building tools, platforms, content like games and providing services and so on.
Technically true, but changing moods and fashion mean that relatively few contemporary people will spend their life listening to Fats Domino. Only the very best of the past has even chance to be heard.
I had a fit once and put on some Glen Miller. I won't say it wasn't very good, but it wasn't something I am interested in at the time.
If anything, modern music is more spread out than ever allowing more subcultures to have their favorite music niche, something that wasn't possible in the sixties.
Many people create art for the wrong reasons. Their goal is to be the center of attention, but they don’t have anything interesting to say, haven’t put in very much work, haven’t really considered why what they created is in the best interest of the audience, not just in the best interest of the artist.
If a platform goes too far in recommending content that isn’t very good, and taking resources away from its successful creators and redistributing them to its less successful, their viewers and talent will leave for another platform. For most of the long-tail creators, their best chance at a middle class income will be a day job off the platform, or in a job as support system for a successful creator that hires staff (crew, marketing, props, editing).
Hmm, as someone working in the media in some fashion, I'd say there's a huge number of creators that deserve an audience and income who aren't getting it now. Those 6 or so lists of underrated gaming YouTubers I posted in the last few years should be evidence of that to some degree (though many of the people included did take off afterwards).
Every week or so I come across at least one creator who I believe should be much more successful than they currently are.
A lot of people are making a lot of good stuff for free online and making pennies on it because in practice its not talent that is scarce, its eyeball access and virality. Your average webcomic artist today does not have the resources to exploit the psychology of target demographics the way Disney will for their next streaming show or the war chest to shove ads for it down throats until it reaches a critical self perpetuating mass of popularity.
That doesn't make the stuff they make less worthy of being enjoyed, though. They just can't spread the message by themselves.
I'd assumed that there was a solid, or at least "quiet but present", middle class of content creators. I believed this because I felt like I follow a set of content creators which where pretty far outside the "mainstream", since I didn't observe them having "superstar" numbers, nor did I ever see them casually mentioned outside of their own content.
Looking at the data, all of them are in the top 2,000 Patreon users and most of them are in the top 1,000. Here's a compacted list:
| Creator Name | Patreon Rank | Estimated Monthly |
| | | Income (Patreon) |
|---------------------------|--------------|-------------------|
| Well There’s Your Problem | 108 | $11,196.00 |
| LoadingReadyRun | 411 | $14,772.00 |
| Jay Foreman | 995 | $2,620.00 |
| Summoning Salt | 1478 | $2,026.00 |
| Wendover Productions | 1684 | $2,220.00 |
| Practical Engineering | 1872 | $1,600.00 |
I have to assume their success comes from them doing well on platforms outside of YouTube, and their consistent marketing of Patreon rewards (additional content for Patreon subscribers).
Goes to show that there's more than one way to find success, though the number of paths still seems pretty constrained.
[0] - https://graphtreon.com
[1] - https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/02/patreon-content-...
Pokimane, for instance, doesn't have 6 million subscribers because she plays video games. She has 6 million subscribers because people find her attractive. The content she produces is incidental.
As long as the content produced involves the creators themselves, the most attractive people are going to bubble towards the top and take the largest slices of the creator pie, and that can't be changed.
See this new video today by an independent creator. He may be a satanist but I believe satanists deserve to have their voices heard also. "Youtube Has Basically Shadowbanned All Independent Political/News Commentary" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s