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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

The TL;DR of this is basically there are too many people creating content.

Best thing that creators could do is tell other creators to quit. The author doesn't say this part but really that is what it comes down to.

Instead she offers a generic advice about diversifying the medium of delivery.

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Democratization is the act of empowering so many people that none of them can make a living at it anymore.

Pick a hobby of interest in Youtube and there'll be a top of a pyramid where people have the right mix of attractivenes/message/marketing...and then hundreds to thousands of other people scrounging for scraps. (see Full Time RV)

The irony is that the "creator economy" was meant to democratise content and make everyone able to make a living from being a "creator".

In reality the maximum number that can be sustained in this manner is less than the number of salaried listicle writers at media outlets.

Everyone? Or more people. There's definitely more people

> In reality the maximum number that can be sustained in this manner is less than the number of salaried listicle writers at media outlets.

I think the maximum is probably quite lot more than there are salaried writers. But it's certainly a lot less then "everyone".

> make everyone able to make a living from being a "creator".

Never "everyone". A brief pause to think about how the world works and how all those physical artefacts around you get there imply that it could never be more than a few percent.

Just adding to others: not everyone, anyone. The promise was that you don't need to go through nepotistic middlemen and can just directly engage with an audience solely on the merit of your work.

It's the same problem that manufacturing has had for decades now - sure, every single town in the world could have it's own beer, there's nothing preventing that, and the additional cost per beer would be minuscule - but shipping is so cheap and the savings from consolidating so high, that unless there is substantial outside pressure it's not going to happen.

Supply and demand means it's probably not everyone. What it has meant is you have a much, much more diverse set of content than before. Realistically, attention-based economies are always going to have a few standout winners. What platforms like patreon give you is a much healthier middle section, where smaller creators that still have some audience can make a bit more than they normally would (which ranges from 'a decent living' to 'beer money'), and that does mean they make more stuff. You still have the long tail of people who mostly don't get enough attention to bother monetising it.

I wonder if monetization with a low subscriber base isn't as hard as we imagine. Afterall, you just need to net like 80K in a non HCOL city to live very comfortably. (assuming no employees, or office rent, or expensive production)

It is hysterical to me people think this.

It is just because you are not accounting for all the people trying this and failing. By definition, no one is watching all the youtube videos that only get 50 views per episode of a podcast.

It isn't hard if you use a massive selection bias towards the winners and just assume you will also be a winner.

May as well just say it is easy to make a living in the restaurant business. Just open a successful restaurant!

To monetize a small subscriber base you have to pull a sizable $x per active user that almost requires you to become a little scummy at best. I've seen a lot of personal finance influencers (FIRE especially) pull sizeable amounts of money because their niches are pretty favorable, but they end up pushing weird financial products and courses for $Xk on how to make money blogging/real estate/some other business.

That's the big problem - let's say you have 50 to 100 viewers who like you, to the point of kicking in about $70 a week (what you need to get to $80k) - that's pretty high. At that point, you have 100 pretty loyal people (more loyal than the average church-goer, for example) and the temptation to milk them could be quite strong.

A low sub base liking/commenting will keep your video somewhat relevant to the algo for recommendation. So you'll have a chunk of subs that stay the same, and a percentage of new viewers. Granted that will also cap your total views in some way, but I wonder what the threshold is. Like maybe 100k or 50k of subs is sufficient to keep you buoyant.

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