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 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...
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.
We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
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.
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.
The "get rick quick" scams will proliferate.
Will there be any positive outcomes from this economic tumble?
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 $5/mo in value.
I think finding something you get paid for that you can get some sort of enjoyment out of is way easier than monetizing a hobby and keeping what you enjoy about that hobby alive.
A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased).
Total Book Price: US$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.
Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".
- 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
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.
Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...
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 $.01 at a time.
To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
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.
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.
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.)