Today’s creator economy was built on subscribers and patrons – what comes next?
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Despite being considered a successful creator, I don’t think that “creator” is a real thing - at least not a category anyone can, or should aim for.
Being a creator means the content that you create gets significant enough attention. What you do with this attention is what really matters. To be a successful creator and not burn out, you need to build a one-person business that is both profitable, and sustainable. Doing this is much harder to do than most people realize. It's something that is hard to just "wing it". At the same time, winging it is exactly the strategy that most creators are following.
The reality is that most creators don't think of what they do from a business, or sustainability side. No one is telling people who accidentally became successful creators to think of this as a business, or side business. I'm not surprised so many creators end up burnt out, or surprised that on a crowded market with no real differentiation or long-term strategy, they start losing attention they once had.
What helped me is how I had been planning to start a company for some time. I did the studying and research on what it takes to run a business. I'm still doing what I was preparing to do so: but instead of running a venture-funded startup, I'm doing a bootstrapped, one-person business. One that many people refer to as being a creator.
Most successful creators are not a one person business. Things like editing, thumbnail making, writing, can be done by other people for you. Doing everything yourself can just eat up all of your time.
I work with a copyeditor for my writing. I contract on an hourly basis, doing a few hours per week. My editor is far more efficient at what they do than if I did it.
If my business grew large enough, this contract role - and perhaps other ones - might become full-time roles. But that size or workload is far enough away in my case.
Keep it up Greg!
Basically, they sound a lot like you, in that they're all running a small business, typically as opposed to pure client work. But I don't think any of them see Youtube as a basis of their revenue; it's more of just another marketing channel.
A couple of different takes on this:
- Sean Tucker, photography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI02c5DnRUg - Lincoln St Woodworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDxs5Y13rlk
I suspect the best generalization is the "1000 true fans" approach, where they're just trying to use different media to just contact those true fans. And build a business around that interaction, and just monetize everything else they can
Basically, if you've read Snow Crash you'll be disappointed, and if you haven't read Snow Crash, you should just read it instead.
I tend to agree. Although, in Snow Crash, not much happens in the metaverse. Most of the action is in the real world.
I was hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in and out of development hell for years. (It would have to be heavily censored. "Mr Lee's Hong Kong" would annoy China, "White Columns" would annoy the woke people, and evangelical Christians being a front for a cult created to support a scam would annoy the Trump voters.)
Which is one of its insightful points.
“White Columns” would not only not offend anyone woke, but satisfy their assumptions.
These people live their lives entirely in the application layer and come up with all these fantasies of Virtual Reality and all the magical stuff it entails. I hate it and everything that comes with this new world and I want to re-live the simpler times of the 90s and the 00s.
I fear that time is long gone though. Just that feeling of millennials now beginning to be brushed aside in favor of the next generation's worldview is jarring because now I have to live in it or disconnect and try to retain the memories of the past. I guess every generation goes through it.
I miss the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That took place during the beginnings of Obama's "Hope and Change". Things were on the upswing. Climate change was not in your face as much as it is now. No coming world war and economic collapse. Just a bunch of hipsters and a guy trying to overcome the baggage of his dream girl the old fashioned way: by battling her seven evil exes via old style 2d video game fighting.
There's some interesting ideas around the dystopian state of the world and whether it is a result of the virtual universe or not, but only a few chapters dig into that.
I'm hoping what comes next is a significant step not forward, and not back, but to the side: an increase in cooperatives and other forms of small-scale communism -- people who get together and do things for each other based on what they can and what they need.
People working for people. Not for layers of middle managers and subcontractors fulfilling meaningless specifications until only 5 % of the effort actually makes it to the person who needs it, with every layer along the way scraping off a bit of their cut.
If they can be more efficient, maybe they could survive.
This comment drastically underestimates the amount of capital spent on suppressing union activity, it's not as if they're operating in a vacuum.
For my coal mining grandfather, it meant safety equipment like respirators so you didn't get black lung, and that the company had to send down a meal for you if you were working a double (before that you had to rely on the next shift to give you items from their lunches, if they were willing to share).
We have OSHA for that today, so I don’t think the primary purpose of a union is to file OSHA complaints…
Who do you think lobbied to start OSHA? It was the unions.
But regardless of the history, it’s not longer especially relevant to the roles of unions today, and certainly adds nothing to the value unions supposedly provide to their members.
The question wasn't about what unions do today. The question specifically asked what unions were for. I stand by my statement that they were formed not only for pay increases, but also for working conditions improvements.
The benefits of employers to employees has certainly gone down and that’s disgusting but the creator economy that’s been propped up by the internet in a way that was not possible beforehand I think is plenty good, and not a viable career/job for most people.
I don’t think people are going to eschew traditional employment en made to try to make it as creators. It’s not going to happen for most and the pressing needs of survival aren’t going to allow many to pursue it.
Social media influencers are gross for a lot of reasons but people making content for an audience that is willing to pay is a good thing. Structuring a company so that 90% of its workforce aren’t employees to deny having to pay them reasonable wages/benefits is a bad thing. I just don’t think they’re directly connected.
Creative jobs, whether journalism, acting, writing, music, etc. have always been a difficult business.
Creator economy is no different than the poor musicians 30 years ago.
The fall of unions and rise of gig economy is more concerning. But unrelated to entertainment industry, which has always been insecure/underpaid/risky..
Side note: when I heard how taxies used to be rented on per-day basis by the driver, I'll admit I became less sure the gig economy was a step down.
Maybe. 30 years ago you could work a blue collar day job that paid decent money and play gigs at night. More places had live music back then too.
Opera, orchestras, chamber music, the “big band” period, and the 1950s-1990s “music industry” were all products of their respective times’ technological and economic structure, which some people learned to exploit and others did not. Those exploitation models were just passing artifacts.
You just see a particular point in time, a business model, and the life of the then winners and draw a conclusion from that.
I don’t know what the future may be but it is most certainly not a return to any status quo ante. But I do know that apart from a minuscule fraction of people, nobody in “music” (however it was described at a given time) ever made much, if any living from it.
It was musicians who seem to have coined the word "gig" back in the 1920s. The usage of the term is a reference to what they have always been dealing with.
But if we're on the topic of creatives, just look at the pushback that the Jackson 5 received in America or that NWA had in the '90s. Yes it probably was easier to be a white, male artist in the '50s-'90s (like the Beatles), but the case was much murkier for anyone else. And it's not like the establishment went unscathed by technology change either. There's a song titled "Video Killed the Radio Star" after all...
Yes, minority artists might not have made it big in the past, but there was demand in the establishments that were run/supported/patronized by their respective group.
If anything, technology has made success/wealth inequity worse by making music cheap and accessible, thus allowing people to have unlimited music (replays) for little money. This killed a lot of live music and funneled that money to the upper echelon on musicians.
Further improvements in portable audio like the cassette tape, the CD, and eventually digital music only improved the portability of music for individuals but commercial settings have had the ability to replace live music at venues for a century. I don't think the root cause for the decline of live music was technical. I think cultural attitudes toward music changed, that's all.
I do see cultural attitudes playing a role too. My guess is they both play a part.
An abundance of wealth and entertainment. A record number of people are able to eek out a minimal living without having to work in traditional markets. It is not a great life, but not desperate enough to enter the job market.
So a blog post where the guy teases his next entry -> don't mind. A blog post where the guy constantly intersperses affiliate links with ad copy -> irritating.
"Wow, this pie is incredible, you should open a bakery!"
I think Californians might be worse about it than most, too. Maybe it's all the pressure of keeping up with insane cost of living, plus the feeling that there's just so much stupid money sloshing around that surely you should be able to scoop some of it up...
The fact is that there is and always will be a market for consumerization Hobbies. People who would rather watch someone play a game then play a game, watch a band than play in one.
Yes, more people try to be creators than will be successful at it. So what? Unless they try to socialize the costs of their experiment, good for them. Life is an adventure and you are free to make mistakes.
For instance, hobbies are no longer things one does because they bring joy—they're now activities that people haven't figured out how to monetize. Before you’ve purchased a pound of clay and a pottery wheel—before you’ve even made your first mug—you’re buying a domain, designing a logo, and thinking about whether to sell your ceramics on Etsy or Shopify. And maybe you'll start a Patreon to document the learning process. I think for people who have been formed by the creator economy, people who have grown up in this space, the impulse to create and SELL seems almost pathological.
Then, there are the people who are afflicted with what I'm calling curatorial neuroticism. These are people who view curation as creation—they curate and share at a frantic pace. They gather, organize, present, and archive information obsessively. There's no stopping them. They spend more time writing in their seventh iteration of their Zettelkasten than they do interacting with people. If only I could get organized, if I could only "cultivate my second brain", I will unlock my creative potential, I'll figure out how to make money on Substack with a highly curated newsletter, or something.
What I sense in the curatorial creation is not really a "product", but a need to be seen. People share what they share—all of the lists, and links, and archives—so that they are viewed as having a certain literary taste, or wanting to be seen as having read these books, watched these movies, and so on.
Anyway, a quote from: Leisure, The Basis of Culture:
"I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Sort in 1830, "in what way was I useful to society as a whole; I contended myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
Despite these realities more people regard themselves as "artists" than ever before. Amazes me how many people enroll in art schools at $40K/yr. Student loans have to be paid off later on, from a hard financial viewpoint it doesn't pencil out. Yet year after year no shortage of people sign up, level of talent notwithstanding.
You're probably right. What you observe is an expression of form over substance. Maybe it's a "cargo cult" sort of thing where people think wrapping themselves in the trappings of "creatives" is the same as being genuinely creative.
The demise of hobbies probably speaks to denigrated value of "work", that is, expending effort to reach goals. I can tell you that printmaking is 5% design, color, etc., and 95% painstaking physical and cognitive labor, in short, it's work. OTOH looking for shortcuts eventually fails, and failure is followed by yet another round of seeking shortcuts.
Here's my prediction, sooner or later the "shortcut culture" burns itself out, though I won't place any bets on when that will happen.
Pretty much what happened to 95% of rock'n'roll bands, I'd guess. Either the big guys smell an opportunity and 'let' you have enough to keep working ... or you become a one-hit wonder.
Honestly, there aren't that many truly creative people. One giant is followed by a thousand wannabes. The gifted need to find new, uninfected ways to nourish and protect themselves ... with a minimum loss of creative time ... or else. One dedicated server, a couple of maintainers and an accountant would keep them away from all the sharks. Then it's up to word-of-mouth.
That number seemed... odd to me, but I think he's citing this from Stripe, which I guess make sense?
https://stripe.com/blog/creator-economy
"In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators."
I think that's a pipe dream, but I can hope.
I don’t have the expendable income to support every single creator I’d like to via Patreon/etc, and I also don’t like their livelihoods being dependent on a single company who can ruin them based on some arbitrary algorithmic magic box of reasons. I’d happily contribute small amounts based on individual content that I liked though, and spread my money wider that way.
Are there people churning out crap hoping to make a quick buck? Yes. Are there corporations trying to exploit creators and fans? Yes. Are there other problems I'm not even aware of? In all probability, yes.
But I also see a lot of good things happening. Examples from my own interests:
Table-top RPGs: before, you only got to play whatever was available at your local store (if you even had one) which was probably whatever the big companies put out (D&D) or your own crappy homebrew system. Maybe you hear about something amazing someone else has done and if you're lucky you get a photocopy/scan of their notes and try to figure things out from that. Today, you can discover heaps of amazing games and support their creators through Kickstarter, YouTube, Patreon, etc.
Muay Thai: I support someone on Patreon and YouTube who puts out tons of content. Hours and hours of her own training footage (with fighters past and present, many of them legends) with commentary. Full videos of all her fights (270 and counting), again with commentary. Commentary on legendary fights. Interviews with MT legends. A long-form podcast. Long-form articles. These cover not just technique but also culture and history. All done for love of the art but also costing money. I don't know how else all this can be made available to a wide audience and be preserved for future generations.
The need to make money modifies the artistic process. Some expressions will be modified or straight up suppressed if they are perceived as unprofitable or offensive.
Advertising is the simplest example. All it takes for a website to censor itself is for someone to complain to Google that some page is offensive, causing them to suspend their revenue stream.
But that's always been true, the creator economy didn't create that dynamic. But now, people across the world can support art that wouldn't otherwise exist.
In my Muay Thai example, there are no government or large organisations that I know of doing or funding the work to document, preserve, and spread the art in the way it's being done on YouTube and Patreon. There should be, but there isn't. I'm happy I found and am able to support the two people doing the work.
Here's Bored Ape Yacht Club's pitch deck.[1]
"BAYC is just the beginning. We are building the next frontier".
"The FOMO is real. For every BAYC member there are hundreds dying to gain access."
[1] https://twitter.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1505058932758360064
I did co-create a kid. Should I be demanding residuals?
Phooey.
This is already happening to some extent given most people live paycheck to paycheck and "intelligent algorithms" can be replaced with "investor class".
Today's economy uses supply and demand and free markets to determine prices and allocate resources "efficiently". You trade labor for capital, then choose how to spend it. The premise is that individual choice is fair and efficient and maximizes wealth creation the best compared to other models.
YT and Spotify however challenge the free choice model. They claim they can know you better than you know yourself, and do it at scale. They know what music you want. They know what content you want. If their algorithm fails, you will leave their platform for one that does it better. But once you subscribe, free choice exits the equation. Content is the resource and it is being allocated by algorithms. You choose to give up choice.
So, music and videos and other elastic supply is one thing. But what if algorithms can generally solve supply and demand? Can a central algorithm organize society more efficiently than humans can imagine or achieve through market forces?
If so, then it is also inevitable, because either through authoritarian edict, corporate capitalism, or national Darwinism it will out-compete everything else.
At which point, money is no longer a useful thing. Money is a vehicle for human choice. The algorithm has no use for such a device. It will simply mail you a voucher for your house, car, groceries, etc. you'll be getting this year.
A maximally efficient algorithm would determine what job you have, where you live, who you associate with, what your daily routine is, etc.
If there is a "next", it's one where a master algorithm organizes our lives in totality.