Five Buck Fatigue(underjord.io)
underjord.io
Five Buck Fatigue
https://underjord.io/five-buck-fatigue.html
261 comments
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.
Two other things are different now though.
Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)
Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.
It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.
Two other things are different now though.
Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)
Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.
>There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day.
I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.
I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.
Check this out, it's a 90s/00s-style Web Ring full of interesting indie sites with no marketing/SEO angle to them
https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/
https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/
Perhaps there wouldn't be so many "content creators" if tech/the Internet hadn't destroyed their livelihoods over the past 20+ years. Authors, journalists, photographers, the list goes on and on.
"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
That may perhaps be because some of the best content also comes from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).
When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).
A lot of brilliant content just requires more time or investment than someone with a day job has. And arguably, creating content alongside a 40 hour job is a compromise on quality itself.
Plenty of famous writers started out holding odd jobs to make ends meet.
Kurt Vonnegut sold cars, John Grishman worked at a nursery watering bushes, George Orwell was a police officer in Burma, Herman Melville was a cabin boy, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Philip Glass was a plumber and a taxi driver, Richer Serra was a furniture remover, Rothko was an elementary school teacher, Ai WeiWei did street portraits, house painting and carpentry, Keith Haring was a busboy at a night club, the same club where Madonna worked as a coat-check girl, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker, Jackson Pollock was a babysitter, Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and worker at an industrial laundry...
I could go on...
And for every of those names there are plenty of anonymous artists who produced awesome work which never attained the same level of widespread impact on mainstream culture.
As Vonnegut would write: so it goes.
See, digital technology seemingly lowered the bar to reach an audience of millions. It largely has cut out the middle man, the distributor. However, so many young content creators discover now that content doesn't create itself. It still takes time and effort to produce anything worthwhile.
Moreover, artistic or creative freedom is only within reach if you are able to attain financial independence. Or, more succinctly put, someone is willing to pay your living expenses for your privilege to create whatever. Usually that only happens if you find a wealthy philanthropist or patron. And usually, these are people who support budding artists for the sole purpose of showing that their wealth and power is so massive that they can.
Your other option, as creator or artist, is to live as frugally and - hopefully - make smart financial decisions. Like, try and work part time, apply for grants and public funding, try to do work on commission, freelancing,... All in hopes that your work and your name, at long last, gets valued on the market to make a proper living income... which, essentially, is just as much a risky proposition as quitting a job and getting into the start up game.
If you have an artistic vision and you want to execute that vision by pouring in all your time into it, well, you also have to be prepared to face the challenges and consequences that come with that desire. So, you better make sure it's something you genuinely want for yourself.
Kurt Vonnegut sold cars, John Grishman worked at a nursery watering bushes, George Orwell was a police officer in Burma, Herman Melville was a cabin boy, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Philip Glass was a plumber and a taxi driver, Richer Serra was a furniture remover, Rothko was an elementary school teacher, Ai WeiWei did street portraits, house painting and carpentry, Keith Haring was a busboy at a night club, the same club where Madonna worked as a coat-check girl, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker, Jackson Pollock was a babysitter, Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and worker at an industrial laundry...
I could go on...
And for every of those names there are plenty of anonymous artists who produced awesome work which never attained the same level of widespread impact on mainstream culture.
As Vonnegut would write: so it goes.
See, digital technology seemingly lowered the bar to reach an audience of millions. It largely has cut out the middle man, the distributor. However, so many young content creators discover now that content doesn't create itself. It still takes time and effort to produce anything worthwhile.
Moreover, artistic or creative freedom is only within reach if you are able to attain financial independence. Or, more succinctly put, someone is willing to pay your living expenses for your privilege to create whatever. Usually that only happens if you find a wealthy philanthropist or patron. And usually, these are people who support budding artists for the sole purpose of showing that their wealth and power is so massive that they can.
Your other option, as creator or artist, is to live as frugally and - hopefully - make smart financial decisions. Like, try and work part time, apply for grants and public funding, try to do work on commission, freelancing,... All in hopes that your work and your name, at long last, gets valued on the market to make a proper living income... which, essentially, is just as much a risky proposition as quitting a job and getting into the start up game.
If you have an artistic vision and you want to execute that vision by pouring in all your time into it, well, you also have to be prepared to face the challenges and consequences that come with that desire. So, you better make sure it's something you genuinely want for yourself.
I always find it odd that historical arguments are rejected for basically everything - imagine arguing against social security because it didn't exist historically, or for indentured servitude because it did - and yet the exact same line of thought is used against arts and culture, which are ostensibly some of the most important products of a civilization.
Instead, the trope is "well too bad, if you want to be an artist, pay for it yourself." And you wonder why a television reality star is the president of the country...if you don't invest in the arts, what else do you expect to happen?
Instead, the trope is "well too bad, if you want to be an artist, pay for it yourself." And you wonder why a television reality star is the president of the country...if you don't invest in the arts, what else do you expect to happen?
And that's a sentiment I can totally get behind.
To be clear, my point wasn't to put the responsibility entirely with the creators. It was about showing that if you reduce the discussion to "How can we get more people to donate/subscribe/like? We need some centralized platform with cutting edge tech to do it!" you're losing out in many ways, and you ignore a massive amount of murky, complex, long standing, socio-economic dynamics.
I tried skirting that last remark myself because it evokes strong emotions and tends to derail any meaningful discussion about this.
On a personal note, I think it's absolutely important that there's public funding for the arts, humanities and non-profit in general. But by the same token, it's fair to state that you can't expect society - a large group of individuals - to support anyone who starts producing and publishing content on social media full time, without question.
To be clear, my point wasn't to put the responsibility entirely with the creators. It was about showing that if you reduce the discussion to "How can we get more people to donate/subscribe/like? We need some centralized platform with cutting edge tech to do it!" you're losing out in many ways, and you ignore a massive amount of murky, complex, long standing, socio-economic dynamics.
I tried skirting that last remark myself because it evokes strong emotions and tends to derail any meaningful discussion about this.
On a personal note, I think it's absolutely important that there's public funding for the arts, humanities and non-profit in general. But by the same token, it's fair to state that you can't expect society - a large group of individuals - to support anyone who starts producing and publishing content on social media full time, without question.
Maybe we should all accept that nobody has to be a journalist (or content creator) and that most of journalism is actually pretty useless trash.
Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”
For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.
Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”
For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.
"Trash" journalism pays for the deep investigative stuff, though.
Advertisement have always paid for most of journalism. If the equivalent of classified ads magically vanished from the internet, there would be a rebirth of small newspapers, and the big ones would become much healthier.
Right, but ads only pay for journalism insofar as newspapers sell, and papers only sell insofar as readers are interested in buying.
With the number of newspapers closing every year, apparently trash journalism doesn't even pay for itself.
And why does this apply to journalism and not other pretty useless trash like BTC or ad sales or stock price speculation or content marketing or most local and national politics or startups that only sell gourmet pet food?
The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.
The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.
Of course this applies to all those things as well. And we even have very similar threads about other topics -- like "is SEO evil" or "should we adblock"
This post is about journalism though.
This post is about journalism though.
That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.
In my experience professionalising content creation (on youtube) hardly helps quality.
Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.
They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.
It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.
Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.
They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.
It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.
This is complete bull.
Chinese Cooking Demystified https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw
Tasting History https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
Ethan Chlebowski https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDq5v10l4wkV5-ZBIJJFbzQ
Townsends https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw
All high quality cooking channels that have exploded in popularity due to the sheer quality, and educational value, of their content.
Chinese Cooking Demystified https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw
Tasting History https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
Ethan Chlebowski https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDq5v10l4wkV5-ZBIJJFbzQ
Townsends https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw
All high quality cooking channels that have exploded in popularity due to the sheer quality, and educational value, of their content.
But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.
> there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes.
I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.
I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.
I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?
Nothing about that idea sounds fun to me.
If you've listened to some Bach (for example) and didn't like it, why would you spend 200 hours listening to the rest?
If you've listened to some Bach (for example) and didn't like it, why would you spend 200 hours listening to the rest?
Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more than most people? Because if there is there’s someone who likes it 100 times more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven’t gone through multiple of these lists then you you’re not even trying to get through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly disproportionately likely to be great, for you.
You underestimate how specific people's tastes can be. There are nano niches. For example what if I like the music of a person so much that I'd rather listen to that person for 100 hours than to anything else? Well, that's exactly what I'm doing but when the author has only ever published 12 songs each 3 min long then that means I've heard the songs over a hundred times already and unfortunately at some point I just get bored of a song. I wish I could enjoy them longer but for me it would be just as good if the same author released a new batch of songs.
You no longer enjoy that person’s music so much that you would rather listen to it than do anything else. It seems unlikely that all of your interests are so specific. If you have some more general tastes there will be lists of good stuff you should check out in those genres. If you love these 12 songs more than acting else but have listened to them so much that all joy has drained from them have you listened to songs others with taste recommend for those who love these songs?
Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.
Finally, what is the artist and album?
Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.
Finally, what is the artist and album?
I understand the enjoyment of collecting stuff or completing lists compiled by other people, but that isn't connected to what I enjoy about art, so I'm still not finding this a fun suggestion.
Per this reasoning, producing The Wire or Breaking Bad and most of the "Western Canon" was already unnecessary. Humanity has produced enough written content in antiquity to keep you reading for a lifetime.
Yes, and? My point wasn’t about cultural production, it was about the availability of enormous amounts of excellent curated content. People will make art of various forms without remuneration, even without audience, for the love of creation. Greater rewards will lead to more. But there really is enough great work in antiquity to spend a lifetime on.
With that reasoning we should have stopped producing music after Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Instead, our cultural context and technology evolved and so did our forms of expression. There will always be more possibilities and combinations of known elements (ingredients, words, notes, interesting questions) that nobody has tried before. Be it in the realm of cooking, music, programming, podcasting or literature -- the possibilities are (almost) endless. If I find pleasure consuming that content I have no problem rewarding those that produce it -- and I would never be able to produce such content / will find a way to do so. I am a reasonably good programmer and cook, but a pretty crappy musician -- I would never be able to produce musical content like Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin or Black Sabbath.
But... they can do exactly that. You can whip up a few pages in HTML with pictures and put on Github or shared hosting. Heck, you can even use a publishing platform like WordPress if you're not technically inclined. Each time you use your pot for a family dinner, you jot down the recipe and you publish it. Boom: you've created content!
So, what's the problem then?
It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.
This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.
The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.
"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"
Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.
Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.
So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.
Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.
By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.
So, what's the problem then?
It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.
This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.
The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.
"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"
Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.
Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.
So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.
Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.
By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.
That's nice, but this thread isn't about you then.
I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.
I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.
[deleted]
> Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter.
Sure, it’s always the butter, there can’t be too much.
Sure, it’s always the butter, there can’t be too much.
Want to share your mashed potato recipe?
I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me values it less because it isn't freely accessible.
I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or even remember, really) to actually visit the website.
It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.
It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.
> If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it
Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...
But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.
Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...
But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.
That actually really might! I've been in the market for a new reader, since Feedly's product people seem hellbent on making it worse with every update, and Newsblur might be just the thing. And while it hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned that (for which thanks!), any email-to-RSS gateway should let me do what I'm looking for.
One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.
One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.
There's an "All Site Stories" category that shows all unread articles from each site (a newsletter counts as a "site") with the most recent entry at the top. Most recent is across all sites, so something like this:
- Site 2, 08:34
- Site 1, 08:19
- Site 3, 07:49
- Site 2, 06:02
- Site 3, 05:55
And so on, if that makes sense. I haven't looked for a "show me everything, unread or not, sorted by time" feature but if it's not there the dev just might add it for you.
- Site 2, 08:34
- Site 1, 08:19
- Site 3, 07:49
- Site 2, 06:02
- Site 3, 05:55
And so on, if that makes sense. I haven't looked for a "show me everything, unread or not, sorted by time" feature but if it's not there the dev just might add it for you.
I agree with this. Just recently I watched a couple of videos from a Youtube channel I follow (and like). I get through the second one and it was basically "if you want to find out more, support us on Patreon to see this supporters-only content".
My reaction was basically to lose interest in the channel entirely. Like it's something I'm mildly interested in but not totally invested in.
The problem now is that before watching any more of their videos, my thought will be "will this be actual content or a just a teaser to sell Patreon support?"
Either put up content on Youtube or don't. But this bait-and-switch is a quick path to unsubscribing entirely.
My reaction was basically to lose interest in the channel entirely. Like it's something I'm mildly interested in but not totally invested in.
The problem now is that before watching any more of their videos, my thought will be "will this be actual content or a just a teaser to sell Patreon support?"
Either put up content on Youtube or don't. But this bait-and-switch is a quick path to unsubscribing entirely.
It's extremely hard, because they have to advertise their patreon somehow, and Youtube is clearly the best way to do it.
I don't have a problem with free content, and premium content, as long as the quality of the two is about equal.
I don't have a problem with free content, and premium content, as long as the quality of the two is about equal.
"Worth supporting but not worth buying", that can definitely be a thing.
Supporting something that's available for free makes you a contributor, buying restricted access makes you a customer, with all the expectations of a competitive value proposition. Most buskers would not be able to sell a single ticket.
Supporting something that's available for free makes you a contributor, buying restricted access makes you a customer, with all the expectations of a competitive value proposition. Most buskers would not be able to sell a single ticket.
I do this and I feel bad about it when I'm not reading someones stuff. Please don't take it personally. There's a lot going on, my plan is to eventually get to it and support you along the way for making it. Also I'm hugely supportive to any devs going off and doing indie projects mostly out of wanting to make that a real source of income for the rest of us.
It doesn't help that patreon's js-riddled atrocity of a website doesn't exactly make it fun to access that content.
Same here exactly. And I always feel I've got more than my money's worth
Yeah it's like, "it was an absolute steal at $0, and it's still an absolute steal at $10!"
About half my patrons are like this. The other half do look at posts, but don't really care what I post since they have eclectic tastes. I thought something was wrong when I first noticed the phenomenon.
It's usually not very good.
Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those.
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.)
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.)
> So...what next? How do creators get paid?
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 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 actually completely agree with this statement. I tend to follow the gaming industry pretty closely and lately I've noticed that there are simply too many low-quality gaming YouTube channels.
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 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...
This definitely has been bred from 'fitting content creation to the algorithm'. There seems to be many dimensions of this with the first being maximizing minutes watched which is where the meandering and stumbling content seems to come from. The second is monetization and knowing if you have to dispute it's essentially already too late, re-uploading is punished heavily and the algorithm heavily favours new content. The third is people observing that to get reliably recommended having a strict upload pattern seems to be favoured by the algorithm which can turn into 'produce to produce' instead of a creative effort. The fourth is just the overhead of dealing with claims and other weird administrative backend and/or YouTube making a sweeping policy change that generates dozens of hours of manual work for people with a large catalog. The last is that because of all of these previous problems many of these people moved over to twitch and then just use their old YouTube account as a clip/advertising mill/stream archive dump site.
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.
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.
Don’t most have jobs? All these creator platforms end up with a power law distribution of attention and money. The vast majority are not making a living already yet here they are.
I think you might start seeing netflix-like consolidation into content packages.
We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
There have been (and still are) many networks among YouTube channels already. Some like Linux Tech Tips have a number of channels and a pretty large team. Others are more corporate and adopt creators as they get popular, but the actual network/org is not as obvious since they kind of act in the background, getting sponsors and distributing funds and services to their affiliated creators.
I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
*Linus Tech Tips
We are already seeing this in its fledgling form. Sites like Masterclass, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc are all trying to carve out their chunk of the "curated collection of content from independent creators" pie.
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.
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.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the shattered US economy fully hits the end of its cash infusion rope.
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.
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.
I find this prediction very plausible. The economy contracted by one third this past quarter. Many will lose the ability/willingness to pay $100/mo to 18 different content creators.
The "get rick quick" scams will proliferate.
Will there be any positive outcomes from this economic tumble?
The "get rick quick" scams will proliferate.
Will there be any positive outcomes from this economic tumble?
I wonder what's the ratio of people who genuinely expect to be able to live off their hobbies vs people who don't even get to enjoy a hobby due to The Fear forcing them into "The Hustle" in a world where success and even survival are not defaults?
> a world where success and survival are not defaults?
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.
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.
"Contentment" would probably be a better word for what I had in mind. I wish I could just, like, exist, you know? I don't want a damn job lol
“contentment content,” i.e. stuff put online just because it makes the creator happy
Where do you see "high production value expectations that people have now"?
On YouTube. I watch a lot of other content creators and anytime anybody makes something that wouldn't pass muster as a Netflix Original there are detractors in the comments. Putting yourself out there on the Internet invites criticism and at least for me, I have no desire to allow my hobbies to be invaded by outside criticism so it's not worth the effort to produce content about them if I know I can't meet the bar required to avoid the most obvious criticisms.
A high % of the comments?
There's definitely some people for whom these are legitimately just hobbies and if they make some money for it then great, sure. But for those people it's not really a problem if they don't get paid, they'll almost certainly continue to create anyway.
I think one of the worst(?) parts is when someone turns a hobby that their friends and family enjoy them doing/sharing in to a business. Suddenly it's this all consuming thing. Their instagram/SNS posts turn in to nothing but a stream of what amounts to advertisements for their fledgling business/hustle.
It's inherently no longer a hobby once you have to do it every day to pay your rent.
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.
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.
Aren't we seeing the bubble bursting right now in academia? Hobby PhDs let you into the college content-creation club, to teach the next generation of content creators.
No, we're seeing a very different bubble (maybe) bursting in academia. PhDs do not have a lot in common with content creators.
That's not a creator-only thing. Thanks to automation and technology, most people have no way to add value, even at a "regular" job.
> So...what next? How do creators get paid?
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 $5 dollars, I got a world class textbook written by one of the best educators on the planet. In the era of coronavirus, I've finally sat down every night with it and have put in about 40 hours reading it (mostly doing the exercises), checking out some of the citations and references, making Anki cards, etc.
As best I can tell, creators get paid by putting in high quality work of relevance and lasting value. Your average Youtuber ain't it.
A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased).
Total Book Price: US$ 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.
By buying used, and spending $5 for content that you've used for 20 years, I wouldn't suggest you're providing better income to that professor than YouTubers get from Ads or Patreon
I'm not, I'm saying the bar is very high.
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.
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.
Most people subscibe to creators to support the creator in producing content they value, not to purchase a book or something they can sell on one day. I mean really $5 resale value for a book it's chicken feed, barely worth considering in the value equation.
What was the name of the book?
Not OP but a cursory search would suggest that it is this book:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3C...
> So...what next? How do creators get paid?
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.
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.
Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr:
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.
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.
No blockchain currently has the scale for this. FWIW, Visa couldn't handle this either. Youtube alone serves over 10,000 videos per second to just mobile clients. Add in podcasts, text content, music, games, etc. and it's a monumental task.
You don't have to be as big as youtube. The only infrastructure you need is ingestion points for all the feeds, and then reporting mechanisms. The ingestion can just go into an autoscaling group. At that point your cloud costs track almost directly with your revenue, so a big AWS bill is a good sign.
I like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly.
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.
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.
I pay about $50 a month for internet, and none of that goes to the creators. The ISP transmits the bits but profits from others creating something that makes me want to be connected.
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.
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.
> 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.
So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.
So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.
Won't that pave the way to the very thing everyone got up in arms about net neutrality for? Having to pay more for certain types of traffic or to certain websites. If your ISP is supposed to forward on some funds to certain types of content then you'll bet they'll add packages and throttle bandwidth for certain content unless you pay extra.
Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".
Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".
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One thing I see some artists do is sell commission slots and then post the finished artwork for everyone. Some commissions are kept private, of course, but for many of them it's win-win-win to share:
- 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.
- 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.
Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives.
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'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.
While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution.
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.
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.
If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?
Yeah, that's a fair point. The old media only existed because of technological limits and a near monopoly over their market, and as new forms of media have arose, that monopoly has slowly fell apart.
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 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 problem isn't volunteering or things being free. The problem is people getting bullshit jobs or even harmful-to-the-world jobs to pay the bills so they can do their volunteering. The problem is a world of extreme inequity in wealth and political power. The problem is that most products remain non-free by being encumbered by ads and paywalls.
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.
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.
Bullshit jobs are an orthogonal problem, though. With solutions like UBI, or different arrangements wrt ownership of capital. I don't think it makes much sense to narrowly focus on it in the context of content creation.
I just meant that BS jobs are a symptom of a society that doesn't fund creative work where it matters. If we did fund creative work better (however we did), a lot of creative people would leave their BS jobs.
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.
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.
That's the thing, though - it's pretty clear that the market for creative work has too much supply and too little demand for it to be well-funded for everybody who wants to participate. Any arrangement that you make to change that is going to be welfare in disguise; so why not just be honest with ourselves, and spell it out? Let people have UBI that's good enough to actually live on - and then they can do creative work that they want to do, without having to worry about how they'll sell it.
It's not that I don't like paying.
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.
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.
Being a YouTube creator and expecting to just be able to make a living off making your videos is as naive as a band expecting to make a living off record sales.
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.
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.
They don't. Or rather, there is some nuance to this. People value things that have high signal to noise ratios. I will read books (given they have a good review) over articles, or audiobooks over podcasts, both of which I pay for because I know that the signal is high relative to the noise. Creators, should they wish to make money, will move into these higher value productions.
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.
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.
I'm almost the complete opposite. I find that most people with a following don't understand at all what their audience finds compelling about their work.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q
> Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in.
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.
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.
>So...what next? How do creators get paid?
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.
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.
YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.
I broke down and started paying for YouTube. Another 12 bucks :) On the laptop, I block ads, but on the tablet, I like to use the official app.
Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell.
This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...
> Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected.
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.
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.
I believe in micropayments, and I don't think there has been a compelling service for it.
Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...
Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...
On Twitch, they use subscriptions (for ad free), ad revenue, merch, donations directly and donations via Twitch.
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.
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.
I would like to see ads on websites, just not the terrible ads that almost all of them are. So far I have unblocked ethicalads.io, which has ads mainly on readthedocs.io but I recently noticed their ads on some blog site. Perhaps as browsers implement tracker blocking, there will be more space for this kind of ad networks.
I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people
To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage
Merch. Merch is the answer.
Its always seems like a bit of a waste of the carbon budget to get another t-shirt to me. Digital stickers?
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Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in.
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.
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.
I find a lot of the noise in contemporary content is calls to action(payment). Your idea might just ensure content that is mostly about trying to get people to pay for it survives.
What it would do is put a price floor on content. People's willingness to pay, say, $5 instead of $1 for a piece of content is a strong filter, I'm pretty sure low-quality content that's purely CTA wouldn't survive.
Why do you need state enforcement for such a filter? If you only want to see content that the author is asking $5+ for, that's a very simple filter to implement for any website that sells content (and many of them do just that).
The problem is that a lot of potentially viable content falls by default into the marginally-profitable category, where the small amount of utility they provide to the end-user is offset by the incessant user-monetization impulse.
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.
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.
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You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5 monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short.
Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.
Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.
What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the price of quality content.
Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.
I pay a $10 podcast Patreon that is the last subscription service I would cancel, because the content is weekly and I consistently enjoy it. I regularly go a week without watching anything on Netflix.
How do you define $5/mo worth of content? Comparing with how people use Netflix, 2-3 hours of entertainment a week? That's not impossible to get from a single creator if what they do fits your tastes.
IMO it's subjective. I once was horrified by a creator's video thanking his fans in an obviously poorly produced setting and style. Years later I've grown to enjoy both their older, rougher works and their newer, polished content. Maybe it's just the illusion of a human connection or hip to support indies, but I'm seriously considering making some monthly donations to support their work.
Niches like theirs will always exist.
Niches like theirs will always exist.
That sounds a lot like AvE. I've been on his Patreon for, oh, must be years now, and he was very gracious when in a fit of excitement I sent a couple of photos of my first completed metalworking project.
Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.
Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.
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Is this the next stage of Patreon? Be more magazine like?
$5 month gets you a group of creators in a given field. Hell, I would happily pay that for a whole group of 3D printer/Blender gurus doing their thing and showing me how...
$5 month gets you a group of creators in a given field. Hell, I would happily pay that for a whole group of 3D printer/Blender gurus doing their thing and showing me how...
Judging by my actual spend, I'm infinitely more likely to put $5 a month toward some individual's excellent work, via Patreon, than I am toward a magazine subscription. Meanwhile, the persistence of my Netflix account relies entirely on inertia.
Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.
Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.
I think my average magazine subscription has been 80% off cover price. $5 a month is an extremely easy bar to clear.
Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best offers available.
Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best offers available.
> Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month?
I just renewed my subscription to "Sound on Sound" - an _incredibly_ high quality recording industry magazine - for $58.50 for the year, which includes both the print edition and digital edition, so that works out just under $5/mo...
I just renewed my subscription to "Sound on Sound" - an _incredibly_ high quality recording industry magazine - for $58.50 for the year, which includes both the print edition and digital edition, so that works out just under $5/mo...
> Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month?
Private Eye is £34 a year, so $3.72 a month. And it comes every two weeks.
Private Eye is £34 a year, so $3.72 a month. And it comes every two weeks.
Maybe I'm just old, but my mental anchor price is a yearly magazine subscription for $24. Anything more than that seems like a ripoff.
If Netflix halved their price, would you go and cancel a bunch of other services you pay for?
If we talk about Patreon and independent creators, I don't think it's a fair comparison because usually most of the content is already offered for free, unlike Netflix which you can't access without paying.
The Netflix cost-per-content is only sustainable in a world where everyone consumes the same content, because there are incredible economies of scale (where you can broadcast the same TV show to 2 billion people).
But that's not really a great world for individual agency or the creative arts. A writer with 1,000 readers can only write so much per month -- and $5 doesn't (or only barely) makes it possible. People who want a world which HAS niche content are going to have to cough up more -- I'd like to think most people here are in that camp.
But that's not really a great world for individual agency or the creative arts. A writer with 1,000 readers can only write so much per month -- and $5 doesn't (or only barely) makes it possible. People who want a world which HAS niche content are going to have to cough up more -- I'd like to think most people here are in that camp.
Ya, thinking that Netflix is the standard of price and quality is like saying no one needs anything more than Walmart.
There are lots of products and media that is niche/boutique/artisanal or whatever your preferred term is. And people are willing to pay much more for that.
There are lots of products and media that is niche/boutique/artisanal or whatever your preferred term is. And people are willing to pay much more for that.
Or another metric: $5 give you a single digitalocean droplet, or a sub to CrunchyRoll.
> I'm allergic to monthlies
Me too. The way I look at it, if I'm going to live off 4% of my assets a year in retirement, I need an extra $1500 to fund a $5 a month recurring charge.
So it's a matter of looking at how long it would take to save that $1500 and asking if I would commit to working that much longer before I retire in order to afford the recurring payment.
If "that much longer" is measured in days/weeks/months instead of minutes or hours, the answer is almost certainly going to be no.
Me too. The way I look at it, if I'm going to live off 4% of my assets a year in retirement, I need an extra $1500 to fund a $5 a month recurring charge.
So it's a matter of looking at how long it would take to save that $1500 and asking if I would commit to working that much longer before I retire in order to afford the recurring payment.
If "that much longer" is measured in days/weeks/months instead of minutes or hours, the answer is almost certainly going to be no.
I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only option ... which I am not willing to do.
Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc.
I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.
Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc.
I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.
What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage donations.
I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.
However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them.
But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.
It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.
Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily.
I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.
I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.
However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them.
But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.
It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.
Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily.
I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.
> But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.
YouTube Premium?
YouTube Premium?
Does YT Premium redistribute any money to content creators?
Yes, but not to your creators. Google's description is vague, but my impression is YT Premium revenue (after google's cut) goes into a big pool and is split up among all creators: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re... So your creators are getting paid by watch time, but not all of your $10 is going only to creators you watch.
Yeah, the Spotify model. Not the best thing if your main intention is supporting the creators you enjoy.
Some creators note it is many times what ad revenue brings them and is a significant part of their income on that platform. I think LTT and other tech creators have mentioned this however buying merch or subscribing on Patreon/their own site is a bigger generator than anything on YT.
Yes, but there are vanishingly few people who pay for it, IME. It's maybe 3% of the revenue I get on my channel.
I don't care about their premium content or enriching Google instead of the creators I want to actually reward.
This exactly.
You could pay your money to some entity that curates the creators and content you enjoy. This entity would then redistribute the payments among the creators.
You would go on that platform and create your own content 'bundle'. You could also choose from various pre-bundled categories : tech, science, self-help, cooking, music ...
You also would have the option to simply consume some content and pay for that 1 item (song,video,podcast,print or other content).
I would definitely go for that!
You could pay your money to some entity that curates the creators and content you enjoy. This entity would then redistribute the payments among the creators.
You would go on that platform and create your own content 'bundle'. You could also choose from various pre-bundled categories : tech, science, self-help, cooking, music ...
You also would have the option to simply consume some content and pay for that 1 item (song,video,podcast,print or other content).
I would definitely go for that!
Some media groups have done this but only for content under their umbrella like Rooster Teeth FIRST. If you follow a few RT groups, ten it likely pays for itself vs youtube premium as you get live and locked shows on the RT site.
I bet Patreon could take on a similar model, but I'm not sure how it would be curated. Who would bundle creators? Patreon, the creator(s), or the user(s)? I don't think Patreon would want to show bias by grouping anything. To support creators working together it might be really cool to see them create alliances and tag team projects. But I'd probably want to bundle them myself to hand pick who I support.
I only follow 1 Patreon user, a good (very talented) high school friend with a knack for explanation of musical concepts. He's brilliant on a guitar and I want others to see that.
I bet Patreon could take on a similar model, but I'm not sure how it would be curated. Who would bundle creators? Patreon, the creator(s), or the user(s)? I don't think Patreon would want to show bias by grouping anything. To support creators working together it might be really cool to see them create alliances and tag team projects. But I'd probably want to bundle them myself to hand pick who I support.
I only follow 1 Patreon user, a good (very talented) high school friend with a knack for explanation of musical concepts. He's brilliant on a guitar and I want others to see that.
flattr does exactly that. I never really caught on, though.
you will likely be interested in this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503
I'm exactly in that category.
I often donate fairly large amounts to open source projects I really like, or that are responsive to issues raised by me. Especially the small single-dev ones. Most of them also have patreons but I usually contact them on IRC or whatever and just wire the money directly to them (saving payment platform fees as well). Even though they don't offer this as an 'official' option, they never say no to $100 ;) Of course none of these have any 'paid members only' stuff as it's open source already.
However small regular amounts I'm not willing to do. My interests tend to fade quickly and I tend to forget about such subscriptions, leaving them to run much too long. It also stimulates never-finishing projects.
The same with good causes/NGOs, trying to sign you up on the street. They don't want money anymore, they want your bank details. They'll never get them. In their case I think the problem is just that they're becoming too commercialised. They're thinking and acting as big corporations, CEOs making too much money, having big marketing departments etc. They're not the 'grassroots' movements they once were, and as such I don't feel like sponsoring them anymore.
I often donate fairly large amounts to open source projects I really like, or that are responsive to issues raised by me. Especially the small single-dev ones. Most of them also have patreons but I usually contact them on IRC or whatever and just wire the money directly to them (saving payment platform fees as well). Even though they don't offer this as an 'official' option, they never say no to $100 ;) Of course none of these have any 'paid members only' stuff as it's open source already.
However small regular amounts I'm not willing to do. My interests tend to fade quickly and I tend to forget about such subscriptions, leaving them to run much too long. It also stimulates never-finishing projects.
The same with good causes/NGOs, trying to sign you up on the street. They don't want money anymore, they want your bank details. They'll never get them. In their case I think the problem is just that they're becoming too commercialised. They're thinking and acting as big corporations, CEOs making too much money, having big marketing departments etc. They're not the 'grassroots' movements they once were, and as such I don't feel like sponsoring them anymore.
> I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great
What about indie hacker-type services?
What about indie hacker-type services?
What I am writing may not a good idea, but it works. Let's assume you like 12 patreon content creators. You can subscribe one month per year to each (1st-Jan, 2nd-Feb, and so on), binge consume the contenct they made for the past 12 months, and unsubscribe to them. This way you kick your FOMO habit, get to see what you enjoy.
I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop .
Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff.
Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them.
In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.
I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop .
Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff.
Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them.
In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.
Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for.
I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
The "average person" in the US also couldn't cover a $1000 emergency expense before the pandemic so maybe there's something to this and we shouldn't be encouraging more: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-woul...
Saving $5 here and there is not going to substantially improve emergency savings for the average person. However, it will make their life a little bit less pleasant.
People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan, what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude, it just makes people more miserable.
People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan, what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude, it just makes people more miserable.
Well, cigarettes are a $5 subscription of sorts. $5 per week, maybe $5 per day. That could substantially improve a savings fund. Netflix on its own might not, but Netflix, Crunchyroll, and hulu, if you cancel them all that's a couple hundred bucks a year.
> if you cancel them all that's a couple hundred bucks a year
Right, that's what I mean. You go without all those things for a year and all you get is a measly few hundred dollars?
Consider someone on a $15 minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year. Their pre-tax income is $31,200. Let's say they cancel subscriptions and save $20 per month, saving $240 per year. That is how much they earn in 16 hours of work -- merely 0.77% of their annual income. I think most people would be ok blowing 0.77% of their income on streaming if they get multiple streaming subscriptions for that money.
Right, that's what I mean. You go without all those things for a year and all you get is a measly few hundred dollars?
Consider someone on a $15 minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year. Their pre-tax income is $31,200. Let's say they cancel subscriptions and save $20 per month, saving $240 per year. That is how much they earn in 16 hours of work -- merely 0.77% of their annual income. I think most people would be ok blowing 0.77% of their income on streaming if they get multiple streaming subscriptions for that money.
I'm with you, but also there isn't really another way. Digging yourself out of poverty is slow, tedious, unglamorous and full of pitfalls which send you back to square one. The alternative is to be content with being poor.
They go without their subscriptions for 4 years and they have their emergency fund. Moreover, after year 1, they can then start buying more of their things in bulk and save the 10% bulk discount on everyday essential items, which can probably give them another 20-30 dollars a month. And then you have to take that time you were spending watching netflix and invest it in learning skills so you can make more than minimum wage.
I struggle with the middle class version of this question all the time. My company pays overtime at about 30/hr after tax. Is it worth it to work on Saturdays or a couple 10-12 hour days through the week in order to collect the overtime? I'll be exhausted and only pick up an extra 150-300 a week. If I do it for a year I can earn an extra 10 grand or so a year and then put it in the stock market where it will pay me $200/year in dividends (and in 45 years I will have replaced my salary).
This is why Naval says you can't trade time for money and get rich the math doesn't work. But in the beginning you have to while you develop the skills and cash reserves so that you can take the risks which can help you build real wealth.
They go without their subscriptions for 4 years and they have their emergency fund. Moreover, after year 1, they can then start buying more of their things in bulk and save the 10% bulk discount on everyday essential items, which can probably give them another 20-30 dollars a month. And then you have to take that time you were spending watching netflix and invest it in learning skills so you can make more than minimum wage.
I struggle with the middle class version of this question all the time. My company pays overtime at about 30/hr after tax. Is it worth it to work on Saturdays or a couple 10-12 hour days through the week in order to collect the overtime? I'll be exhausted and only pick up an extra 150-300 a week. If I do it for a year I can earn an extra 10 grand or so a year and then put it in the stock market where it will pay me $200/year in dividends (and in 45 years I will have replaced my salary).
This is why Naval says you can't trade time for money and get rich the math doesn't work. But in the beginning you have to while you develop the skills and cash reserves so that you can take the risks which can help you build real wealth.
One nuance here is someone making $31,200 is barely getting by. It might only be .77% of their salary, but 50% of their annual savings. The difference between saving $500 and $750 is substantial. E.g. if you’re trying to put together 20k for a down payment, that could be a > 10 year difference in time it takes to get a house.
If you're living that close to using all your salary every month, there are probably better things you can do to save more than cancel Netflix. I think that's what the OP is trying to say.
Netflix is really good value for money. If you want to cancel something, cancel your cable.
Netflix is really good value for money. If you want to cancel something, cancel your cable.
I'm with you. People ignore the value these services bring, which at least for the consumer (even when poor) is far outsized what they are paying.
The other thing is that Netflix is cheap. How many activities can one go out and enjoy that are cheaper than Netflix, especially when the weather outside is crap?
There's a hidden opportunity cost of Netflix though: instead of spending 10 hours a week watching Netflix, you could do something much more productive. Netflix is cheap, but it's also pretty much a waste of your time, you're not going to learn anything, and it doesn't satisfy: you always need the next series.
If you quit smoking, you will not just save the money you spent on it, you'll also get more energy, no cravings, and not spend an hour a day smoking. That adds up really quick.
If you quit smoking, you will not just save the money you spent on it, you'll also get more energy, no cravings, and not spend an hour a day smoking. That adds up really quick.
Humans need entertainment, too. Mindless, low-energy entertainment sometimes - especially so when they're already exhausted from work.
I remember a time when I finally got a few hundred dollars in savings. It meant I could write the rent check without counting the days until my next payday.
A "measly few hundred dollars" means nothing to someone making 100K/year. It means everything to someone making 18K per year. Not least of which is the joy and comfort of knowing you actually have some savings.
A "measly few hundred dollars" means nothing to someone making 100K/year. It means everything to someone making 18K per year. Not least of which is the joy and comfort of knowing you actually have some savings.
But how is that worth the sacrifice of not having pleasure in life? Media isn't some purely extraneous feature in life, it's far more important that you're suggesting.
I didn't lack pleasure. I would play volleyball on the beach on Sundays with coworkers, I would borrow books from the library, I would go to parks and gardens. There was always OTA TV as well.
IMO suggestions like "cancel Netflix" are meant to be a little deeper than just "stop spending $16 every month". Binge-watching the same old TV shows is such an easy depression loop to get stuck in :/
I was under the impression that most subscriptions to OnlyFans were made in a.. less rational state of mind.
That's absurd. Humans do not lose all executive decision making just because the pixels on their phone are in the shape of a nipple.
See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.
See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.
I think OP meant that some type of content just makes more money. I'm also curious, beyond explicit adult content, I wonder how much OnlyFans is pulling in.
Check out Twitch streamers. I have personally witnessed a $5000 donation on a live stream from a variety streamer who mostly would dance, cosplay and stream gaming.
Research shows that higher order brain function shuts down when being sexually stimulated, but I understand your general point.
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I don't think there's been enough time. I firmly believe that subscription fatigue will eventually hit enough people to show that model isn't sustainable for everyone. People will still have subs for some apps, but only a few.
> I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
I suspect people don't know just how little discretionary income for things like this the average person really has. Something like 3/4 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
> I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
I suspect people don't know just how little discretionary income for things like this the average person really has. Something like 3/4 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
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> I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I spend my money. And $5/month adds up pretty quickly.
So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors.
It's an interesting internal conflict to have.
> I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis.
I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.
> I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia
I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.
I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad.
OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.
So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors.
It's an interesting internal conflict to have.
> I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis.
I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.
> I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia
I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.
I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad.
OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.
When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the production indirectly.
Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.
Companies like https://coil.com are solving this by giving you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the WebMonitization standard https://webmonetization.org
Maybe I'm wrong. I do hope the model works. But all I can think of when I see their business model is Spotify. Where content creators are being paid cents, and have to rely on alternative streams of income like concert and merch. Except in this case, there is no alternative, the patron model was supposed to be the alternative to ads and sponsorship.
I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.
I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.
There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?
Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more approachable now.
This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example.
There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.
There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.
> This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example.
Personally, I've never earned enough BAT in a month to pay out creators what I would actually owe them. In fact, I've tried to research why I'm not earning BAT even though I theoretically should be. I don't know what's up. I guess I'm just not being shown ads. That's one thing about BAT that's bad. It all depends on this one centralized ad ecosystem. If people aren't buying ads on the BAT network, then you won't get served ads and you won't make money.
In any case, I don't know if the Coil economics work, but at least all these $5 subs are sustainable and reliable.
Personally, I've never earned enough BAT in a month to pay out creators what I would actually owe them. In fact, I've tried to research why I'm not earning BAT even though I theoretically should be. I don't know what's up. I guess I'm just not being shown ads. That's one thing about BAT that's bad. It all depends on this one centralized ad ecosystem. If people aren't buying ads on the BAT network, then you won't get served ads and you won't make money.
In any case, I don't know if the Coil economics work, but at least all these $5 subs are sustainable and reliable.
I was just coming here to make this comment.
The Web Monetization standard is the solution to the problem described of wanting to support a lot of creators effortlessly. There are many creators I want to support, but don't want to deal with managing a unique subscription to them—and also don't want to support them with a minimum $5/month.
The Web Monetization standard is the solution to the problem described of wanting to support a lot of creators effortlessly. There are many creators I want to support, but don't want to deal with managing a unique subscription to them—and also don't want to support them with a minimum $5/month.
My only issue with Coil (and I suspect why it hasn't taken off) is because XRP seems extremely scammy (pre-mined, centralized, etc).
I'd love to see WebMonitization work with at least 1 other coin besides XRP. Supposedly Interledger works with any coin, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I'd love to see WebMonitization work with at least 1 other coin besides XRP. Supposedly Interledger works with any coin, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It’s kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it’s hundreds), while others practically have to beg.
Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more.
And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants.
This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.
Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more.
And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants.
This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.
I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down here:
In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"
As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."
"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee.
Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.
The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".
Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"
As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."
"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee.
Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.
The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".
Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
"but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic"
But that would be Universal Basic Income :)
think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy.
This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.
But that would be Universal Basic Income :)
think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy.
This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.
The big difference is that Patreon/Memberful subscriptions are optional and not burdensome.
I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far:
- a friend of mine, because he is a friend of mine
- a guitar teacher that I followed, because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes schedule a 1 on 1 private with him.
But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.
For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.
But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.
For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.
You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non-commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own one.
I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and, in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing, interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well, anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the things I value.
> Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy.
This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively
This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively
> There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for .. indefinite duration.
It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania.
If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments.
Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.
Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.
It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania.
If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments.
Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.
Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.
My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to figure out how to pay ~$1/hour.
If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.
If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.
I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.
I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever.
I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.
Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.
Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them.
Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?
Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?
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@lawik not sure if you caught this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 <- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this. Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world to adopt it).
Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub, especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.
Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast - ATP.FM).
They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.
I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.
Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.
I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!
They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.
I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.
Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.
I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!
I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program. The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason & Myke also announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little of that FOMO, but I don’t feel any guilt for not paying.
$5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.
$1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are offering.
Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to the low thousands than the high dozens.
I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now?
There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.
There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.
What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible to overcome barrier to the rest of the world.
I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees.
Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.
I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees.
Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.
$1 seems to be the lower limit.
Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.
Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.
Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple creators off one transaction fee.
Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.
Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.
One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be ballpark similar monthly costs.
For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable.
As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation
For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable.
As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation
I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like this?"
PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.
PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.
For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free.
AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.
I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.
AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.
I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.
Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's like "oh great I got a penny"
It would be a model I'm more comfortable with. Just set a fixed monthly fee, and let it be distributed automatically; with an option for me to review the monthly split to blacklist sites that try to game the system.
Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).
Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).
I can see the potential convenience of divisibility with crypto
There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed!
I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.
The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!
I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.
The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!
I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free anyway.
I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.
Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.
I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves.
And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.
And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.
The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those services as they do for cable.
Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.
People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.
Tangent: I don’t have access to a computer right now to analyze this website more, but it’s blazing fast! Great work, author. I’d love to know more about the technology stack (seems like it’s hosted on AWS with CloudFront).
I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to crowdsource an album on Kickstarter.
IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.
IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.
I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget.
Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators.
I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...
Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators.
I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...
I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.
I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag me.
I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.
I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.
"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web."
A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000
A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000
Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.
why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead like for a normal movie?
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.