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Comment by supernes | Hacker News Reader

The recent Twitch earnings leak showed that 95% of streamers made less than $1,000 this year. Median earnings were less than $100 for the year. A lot of these "creator economy" think pieces talk about people hitting the seven figure jackpot, but the reality is that unless that distribution changes dramatically, it's not going to be a viable source of income for the overwhelming majority of people. Middlemen and service providers OTOH will make a killing on the sheer scale.

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Could we make a similar observation about mobile apps.

For example, how much do the "95%" of walled garden, mobile app developers make.

The discovery process for such apps is also interesting. Does the arrangment of apps into "Top 20", "Most popular", etc., type lists, as seen in Apple's AppStore, boost the success of the "5%" at the expense of the "95%" that become less likely to be discovered.

There is also an analogy to SERPs. Users are encouraged to consult only the "top result" on page one. This structure plays well with an ads sales business, where advertisers compete for a spot on the top of page one. Search results not in the top 5 are like the "95%", unlikely (and not intended) to be discovered.

To me, these "businesses" resemble a lottery in some respects. Winners are promoted but "99.9%" of players are not, and will never, be winners.

Granted, this is a subjective viewpoint I have had for a long time, and the necessary evidence to prove/disprove it is not made public, but the Twitch discovery seems to support the idea.

That's pretty much my thought as well. I find it really insidious to promote the idea that anyone can have success, by pointing out a few poster children who are by far an exception to the rule. Even more so when their success depends not on the strengths of their ideas or the work they've put in, but the connections they had or the benefits the platforms promoting them extract for themselves.

While I generally agree, what you said is more applicable to games. When you make tools, the long tail of the income distribution is thicker due to a large number of niches that are too small to to be interesting to large players with budgets for user aquisition

It's still possible to make a livable wage by publishing high-quality niche apps and investing in some ASO

But that 95% of streamers also like just put a couple of hours into it, no? Or just turn Twitch on while they're playing without actually doing anything. The question is, out of the ones trying to make a living as a creator what ratio succeed.

It's an important distinction to make, a lot of people stream just for fun and those are the ones I personally enjoy watching the most. The premise of the article and many others like it however is that this is supposed to be the future of creative work, and that somehow it's a way of making a living out of that.

Speaking of Twitch specifically, a lot of people are lured into streaming with the promise of earning money doing what they love. And a lot of them don't make it, despite streaming 8+ hour sessions most days of the week. The unfortunate reality is that success is not purely proportional to dedication, and it quickly leads to horrible problems like burnout and depression.

Exactly, it's pretty well documented at this point that labor put in is not an indicator of payment earned. Especially, when that labor is tethered to a heavily stratified economy with big biz at the top.

I do feel that this changes when people act outside platforms and companies. For example, a surfboard maker, putting in a ton of labor should see some return on the time invested, but it won't necessarily be in money earned.

Which brings up another point entirely. These pieces that used money earned as a metric for success are dated af. Thanks for the advice, dad.

I did some napkin math when the Twitch leak happened and it’s something like 0.04% of people trying make a livable wage. If you count all the people active streaming it was 0.01%. Will look up the post and edit it in.

Edit: And I was off in remembering by quite a bit the figures are 0.008% and 0.002%. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28771960

Interesting:

-- Stripe reported "aggregate earnings" as $10B, so maybe $3B last year. Unclear what the platform skims and if that was included: I bet 30%, but let's go with 0% for this

-- Based on Twitch, those 680K earners is really 34,000 people getting most of it, so say average $88K per significant earner. But we know averages are misleading in celebrity-driven fields like music/sports/writing, so probably a few lottery winners getting rich while most supposedly "successful" earners are still getting below $88K, so maybe a median of say $30-50K for them

-- Put to scale, Amazon has 150K+ drivers, so 4-5X the number of 'creators'

So the bad news this article tries to hide is that the creator economy is much smaller and lower paying than folks are marketing. But the good news is what they say little about but appears in the chart: that's an awesome growth rate! If the 30K worldwide keeps doubling over 10 years, that turns into 30M people world wide! 0.4% of the world population is a real number!

Then again, I'm unsure how different the 'creator economy' companies ultimately are for most creators, sort of like a band not caring whether they're using an accountant vs turbotax. Maybe they provide some lift for some creators, but for the regular (non-celebrity) earners, unclear how much is the platform vs the creator.

Most people aren't aiming for the jackpot. I make less than that from the things I do, but it was enough to pursue a bunch of long-deferred hobbies to the point that I could close off or change the paths I had in mind for them, for years. Now that little bit can go toward becoming more since I was able to explore the full space of possibilities and get a better sense for what I wanted to do.

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