The better model for Creators isn't subscriptions but SuperChats, it's the digital version of "don't buy the CD, buy the concert".

It's quite common to see people drop $20 for their favorite Creator to read out their comments. It's fun and provides that direct/live link that fans crave.

This provides a unique monetization channel that's not available to regular businesses while helping Creators circumvent the pervasive "why should I give you $10/month if Spotify is $10/month" narrative.

honestly I find this kinda gross. it feels a little too close to tossing bills around in a strip club. it's not so bad on music streams (eg, here's $5 to play my song), but I also watch a stream where a law student breaks analyzes current events. it's quite incongruous when they stop explaining the legal nuances to read some inane donation message out loud.

Well it's a business model most artist used for centuries before recording and mass production was possible. Busking is still using it to this day.

I find nothing gross in it, it's actually better in many ways because you have immediate feedback so you can develop quicker (whether you want to develop in a particular direction your current audience wants is another matter).

maybe this wasn't clear, but I was referring to a live performer with "music streams". donating to make a song request doesn't have that gross feel. it's mainly the paying just to have your comment read that seems weird to me. in the first case you're paying for a performance; in the second, you are basically just paying for a human's attention.

Do you get the same impression from, say, paying for VIP tickets in order to meet-and-greet musicians at a concert?

I get the same "ick" vibes from streamers reading comments too. (FWIW, I don't feel the same way about concerts or VIP tickets).

This may not be a great explanation, but there's an element of "dance, monkey, dance!" when someone pays money to a streamer to say their message. The streamer will usually read the message (barring ToS).

It's similar to how tipping at Cold Stone Creamery (an ice cream chain in the US) means the staff have to sing a short song for you. There might be fun intentions involved but if the people who you are giving money to aren't really into it, it feels wrong.

People do that?

> in the second, you are basically just paying for a human's attention.

Or for having your question answered?

Isn't that the essential essence of all live entertainment events? Tossing money at people to entertain you? What's the difference between that and a concert: that you prepaid the concert ahead of time?

I see the value in subscribing to streamers, especially if you watch them as much as you'd watch Netflix, but there's no expectation of direct interaction at a concert. As booming of a business model as it is, very few streamers will talk about how they actively exploit their audience into thinking they're your friend. These parasocial relationships are unfortunately a sign of the times and how lonely and isolated individuals have become in the age of the Internet (the pandemic has only worsened this).

That doesn't solve the absolutely fundamental unsolvable problem that digital has marginal cost so you make 0.01x revenue if you have .01x the audience.

Something like Nebula, a group of YouTube creators coming together with their own service that costs less than Netflix, but subsidizes their content. It's mostly education/engineering/science based creators, but it seems to be a decent model.

I would really like a system where by a seller wants to make $X/m and so sells their service at a base price of $Y/m.

When they have enough customers (C) such that X/C < Y, the price (Y) for all customers drops so that Y = X/C.

Obviously, as they gain more customers they may need to increase X to pay for resources or staff which would increase the price.

I read longform articles and journalism voraciously. When I'm not pulling overtime at work, I usually read 20-50 in-depth articles a day. But the challenge is how widely I read. Sure, there's a bunch at NYT (which I subscribe to), and a bunch at open-access blogs and journals around the net, but the middle are tough.

I might normally want to read, over the course of a month, 10-15 articles from each of 15 different paywalled magazines or newspapers. Which is more than the 2-5 free articles typically allowed past their paywalls, but little enough (especially compared to 15 or more competitors) to justify $15-25+ a month per source. Maybe if I was a Wall Street trader the WSJ and Bloomberg are no-brainer expenses, but right now I wouldn't get enough value from them to justify their sky-high subscription costs, but I would like to read a decent handful of articles a month. A few publishers, like NYT or WP, have picked up on this market, and regularly discount to capture various price points, but lots have held onto a 'big subscription or none' model.

What I really want is an (expensive) subscription to something like Spotify Premium across publishers. I'd happily fund the pool to the tune of $50-100 a month, if it could get me access to my top 15-25 paywalls. Everyone gets some, some get close to standard subscription rates, but it'd just enable me not to have to worry about whether I've used up my free articles for the month at each origin. And it'd also let me contribute to lots of magazines and things I do appreciate, just not $25/mo appreciation.

Direct donations? Even if they are more hassle than paying ~1-5 USD/mo on Patreon, it likely has a much greater impact on the creator.

For Patreon, probably. But it's not so clear for twitch subs since Bezos gets his cut and they get a bump in the twitch algos.

Maybe something like an attention based token built into the browser which automatically distributes a fixed amount of money each month to creators that you watched that month. This is already implemented in the Brave browser.

Maybe you could simulate subscriptions based on the token being active in a browser or not. E.g. someone can read a paywalled article if they have at least $10 a month distributed such a way (in proportion to attention).