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Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a

by fluxic 10y ago

Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent living (see: Hemingway, DFW, etc.) Now, unless you're a staff writer for the NYT or maybe 10 other 1%er sites, there's no way to make a living off subscription sites. They have killed local markets that have supported writers. Book sales are down. Newspaper sales are down. Literary magazine sales are non-existent. Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper. Two things: this isn't necessarily all doom and gloom. There are probably more artists living than at any point in history. And the internet helps us reach more people than ever before. However, bragging that the world's most popular newspaper is adding subscriptions and that another couple of creators are making $10,000 on Patreon does not a Renaissance make. Patreon's PR team is trying to spin something that—at least for writers—isn't happening. The needle is not moving.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vtange 10y ago
I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read. With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.
- thwarted 10y ago
  With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something. Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    > Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    > Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.
    - paganel 10y ago
      > Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets. As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
dasil003 10y ago
The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense. But on the positive side, I think this gives us a helpful sign post on the way to UBI/post-scarcity society. Consider that one of the biggest political impediments to UBI is not just the puritan work ethic as applied to others, but perhaps even more fundamental is the individual's own need to feel useful. De-coupling creative output from ones livelihood does not necessarily have to be a terrible thing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 10y ago
  People can care for their own needs, or team up to care for the needs of their community. There is still work to do. Some communities could become self reliant, also making use of technologies such as 3d-printing, automation and solar panels. It would make people the creators of their own future, instead of passive recipients.
- milesrout 10y ago
  Whether or not you think that 'the last 150 years [...] is a historical anomaly' is irrelevant. The fact is that it was better, and there's no legitimate reason that it should now be worse except for the anticompetitive actions of a few big corporations that loss lead by providing expensive-to-produce services for free to eliminate competition.
oblio 10y ago
> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper. False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I think in 1910 it would have been like counting people passing by the newspaper stand as "hits".
- fluxic 10y ago
  30-40% of people read to the end of the articles
  - oblio 10y ago
    Alright, different attack angle: you wouldn't have reached 70k readers in 1910 because the barrier to entry for mass circulation was much higher :)
    - skywhopper 10y ago
      And even if you had reached 700 readers with your 5-cent pamphlet, it would have cost you $50 to print the 1000-copy run, and you'd be $15 in the hole. Whereas you posted to Medium for free, with no editor or publisher in the way. You're out very little, and presumably your stuff is still out there for more people to find. Not true with your pamphlet in 1910.
- milesrout 10y ago
  >False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.
  - oblio 10y ago
    "Most" was an exaggeration, but I'm willing to bet that the funnel is narrower than we'd expect. Going from the moment when someone sees a link on the page to the moment when they decided to actually click it, to them waiting for the page to load and to the moment where they actually bother to scroll till the end... where by scroll I don't mean "Page Down/Page Down/...", but scrolling at a "reading pace".
msabalau 10y ago
Is writting a particularly representative example of cultural production? Back in the 40's only a quarter of the adult population even had a high school degree, now nearly everyone who has the temperament and interest to write can be trained. Thanks to the internet, a nearly infinite pool of writers have the opportunity for self expression, which they clearly value. At the same time, the economic value of undifferentiated writting approaches zero. Contrast this with our current "golden age of television"--while costs are going down and quality is going up for viewers, the genuinely scarce and economically valuable skilled people who can make quality TV are being paid more. Overall the median salary for an artist today is higher than that of the average worker. You can believe that there are social issues that need to be overcome to improve the lives of people who work in and out of the arts, but it's hard to say that artists generally are living in "the worst of times" And, of course, historically a large number of writers (those who weren't aristocratic dilettantes) had day jobs totally unrelated to writting. T.S. Eliot famously continuing to work in the sub-sub-basement of a bank for 3 years after publishing The Waste Land.
edmccard 10y ago
>But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  I disagree. This would increase the value of the useful impressions and increase the demand for advertising from niche players who can now effectively target their market.
  - timthelion 10y ago
    Totally agree with you. Right now, half the time and money that I invest in repairing the 100 year old house I'm living in is wasted due to poor quality workers. If the workers were higher quality, I'd probably spend more money not less (especially calculating in the fact that getting the reconstruction done faster could mean more rental income thus more money to spend). The same is with advertising.
codexjourneys 10y ago
Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome. Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality. What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?
- dinglejungle 10y ago
  https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What-s-the-difference-between-a-monthly-Patreon-page-and-per-creation-one- https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What...
  - codexjourneys 10y ago
    Cool, thanks! I think it's a little different from Kickstarter since with per-creation, supporters are still charged for every creation even if they may not like some of those creations. Whereas if I fund a Kickstarter for a board game, I'm choosing that specific project/creation.
shams93 10y ago
Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.
- vtange 10y ago
  It's also funny he said that while playing up the power of machine learning and recent A.I. advances. I thought we already have algorithms that generate news articles, poetry and music?
  - milesrout 10y ago
    The algorithms that 'generate news articles' don't: they abbreviate news articles. The algorithms that 'generate music' don't: they generate noise that sounds a little like music but is completely derivative and unoriginal.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
paganel 10y ago
> Literary magazine sales are non-existent. "To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is almost dead, the art of painting is being confined to museums, cinema as we used to know it having been replaced by comics-related marketing materials and some made-for-fancy-festivals movies that nobody watches (thank God for TV series that have replaced what cinema used to be) etc etc.
- milesrout 10y ago
  If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all, let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time, then you're part of the problem. Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with blockbusters - there have always been mass market blockbusters and films for the intelligent at the same time. The TV series you claim have 'replaced what cinema used to be' are a far cry from art, the Breaking Bads are few and far between and rubbish like Game of Thrones (occasionally well-shot but very poor for at least the last three seasons) is not art.
  - jhbadger 10y ago
    The fate of classical music certainly depends on where you live, but it's not been doing very well in the US for a while. Public Radio (which used to be most people's exposure to classical music) has been playing less and less of it over the past couple of decades, the death of music stores means it's not that easy to browse recordings, and the new streaming services are much more pop music focused. You can still be a classical music fan but it takes work.
    - milesrout 10y ago
      I think Spotify's selection of classical music is actually pretty good. Much better than any local music store where I live has ever had in my memory. (City of 400k people in NZ.) We still have Radio NZ: Classical along with Radio NZ: National. This is the benefit of public service broadcasters, you know.
soperj 10y ago
Is it really harder to make money though? You take the best of the best in painting from 150 years ago, and none of these people were very well off. Gaugain, Van Gogh, Matisse, Braque. These aren't people who lived luxurious lives.
examancer 10y ago
On the flip side, there has never before been a point in history where one could make a good living riding miniature motorcycles around Omaha (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA), crushing things with a hydraulic press (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw), making robots that don't work (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ), or wrapping assorted proteins in bacon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A). This probably just furthers your point somehow, as I'm not sure how any of this benefits culture, but there are lots of emerging "artists" who are making surprising incomes in this strange strange new world.

by fluxic 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vtange 10y ago

I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read. With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.

thwarted 10y ago
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something. Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?
- clock_tower 10y ago
  > Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? They normally couldn't in pre-revolutionary France; The Great Cat Massacre has the details.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  > Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets.
  - paganel 10y ago
    > Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets. As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.

dasil003 10y ago

The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense. But on the positive side, I think this gives us a helpful sign post on the way to UBI/post-scarcity society. Consider that one of the biggest political impediments to UBI is not just the puritan work ethic as applied to others, but perhaps even more fundamental is the individual's own need to feel useful. De-coupling creative output from ones livelihood does not necessarily have to be a terrible thing.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
visarga 10y ago
People can care for their own needs, or team up to care for the needs of their community. There is still work to do. Some communities could become self reliant, also making use of technologies such as 3d-printing, automation and solar panels. It would make people the creators of their own future, instead of passive recipients.
milesrout 10y ago
Whether or not you think that 'the last 150 years [...] is a historical anomaly' is irrelevant. The fact is that it was better, and there's no legitimate reason that it should now be worse except for the anticompetitive actions of a few big corporations that loss lead by providing expensive-to-produce services for free to eliminate competition.

oblio 10y ago

> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper. False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I think in 1910 it would have been like counting people passing by the newspaper stand as "hits".

fluxic 10y ago
30-40% of people read to the end of the articles
- oblio 10y ago
  Alright, different attack angle: you wouldn't have reached 70k readers in 1910 because the barrier to entry for mass circulation was much higher :)
  - skywhopper 10y ago
    And even if you had reached 700 readers with your 5-cent pamphlet, it would have cost you $50 to print the 1000-copy run, and you'd be $15 in the hole. Whereas you posted to Medium for free, with no editor or publisher in the way. You're out very little, and presumably your stuff is still out there for more people to find. Not true with your pamphlet in 1910.
milesrout 10y ago
>False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.
- oblio 10y ago
  "Most" was an exaggeration, but I'm willing to bet that the funnel is narrower than we'd expect. Going from the moment when someone sees a link on the page to the moment when they decided to actually click it, to them waiting for the page to load and to the moment where they actually bother to scroll till the end... where by scroll I don't mean "Page Down/Page Down/...", but scrolling at a "reading pace".

msabalau 10y ago

Is writting a particularly representative example of cultural production? Back in the 40's only a quarter of the adult population even had a high school degree, now nearly everyone who has the temperament and interest to write can be trained. Thanks to the internet, a nearly infinite pool of writers have the opportunity for self expression, which they clearly value. At the same time, the economic value of undifferentiated writting approaches zero. Contrast this with our current "golden age of television"--while costs are going down and quality is going up for viewers, the genuinely scarce and economically valuable skilled people who can make quality TV are being paid more. Overall the median salary for an artist today is higher than that of the average worker. You can believe that there are social issues that need to be overcome to improve the lives of people who work in and out of the arts, but it's hard to say that artists generally are living in "the worst of times" And, of course, historically a large number of writers (those who weren't aristocratic dilettantes) had day jobs totally unrelated to writting. T.S. Eliot famously continuing to work in the sub-sub-basement of a bank for 3 years after publishing The Waste Land.

edmccard 10y ago

>But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.

Eridrus 10y ago
I disagree. This would increase the value of the useful impressions and increase the demand for advertising from niche players who can now effectively target their market.
- timthelion 10y ago
  Totally agree with you. Right now, half the time and money that I invest in repairing the 100 year old house I'm living in is wasted due to poor quality workers. If the workers were higher quality, I'd probably spend more money not less (especially calculating in the fact that getting the reconstruction done faster could mean more rental income thus more money to spend). The same is with advertising.

codexjourneys 10y ago

Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome. Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contributors may feel more like they're donating to someone's rent money rather than bringing a product into reality. What do you think? Would there be some way for Patreon to tie donations more directly to product creation, or would that undermine the people who are using Patreon?

dinglejungle 10y ago
https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What-s-the-difference-between-a-monthly-Patreon-page-and-per-creation-one- https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What...
- codexjourneys 10y ago
  Cool, thanks! I think it's a little different from Kickstarter since with per-creation, supporters are still charged for every creation even if they may not like some of those creations. Whereas if I fund a Kickstarter for a board game, I'm choosing that specific project/creation.

shams93 10y ago

Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.

vtange 10y ago
It's also funny he said that while playing up the power of machine learning and recent A.I. advances. I thought we already have algorithms that generate news articles, poetry and music?
- milesrout 10y ago
  The algorithms that 'generate news articles' don't: they abbreviate news articles. The algorithms that 'generate music' don't: they generate noise that sounds a little like music but is completely derivative and unoriginal.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

paganel 10y ago

> Literary magazine sales are non-existent. "To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is almost dead, the art of painting is being confined to museums, cinema as we used to know it having been replaced by comics-related marketing materials and some made-for-fancy-festivals movies that nobody watches (thank God for TV series that have replaced what cinema used to be) etc etc.

milesrout 10y ago
If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all, let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time, then you're part of the problem. Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with blockbusters - there have always been mass market blockbusters and films for the intelligent at the same time. The TV series you claim have 'replaced what cinema used to be' are a far cry from art, the Breaking Bads are few and far between and rubbish like Game of Thrones (occasionally well-shot but very poor for at least the last three seasons) is not art.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  The fate of classical music certainly depends on where you live, but it's not been doing very well in the US for a while. Public Radio (which used to be most people's exposure to classical music) has been playing less and less of it over the past couple of decades, the death of music stores means it's not that easy to browse recordings, and the new streaming services are much more pop music focused. You can still be a classical music fan but it takes work.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    I think Spotify's selection of classical music is actually pretty good. Much better than any local music store where I live has ever had in my memory. (City of 400k people in NZ.) We still have Radio NZ: Classical along with Radio NZ: National. This is the benefit of public service broadcasters, you know.

soperj 10y ago

Is it really harder to make money though? You take the best of the best in painting from 150 years ago, and none of these people were very well off. Gaugain, Van Gogh, Matisse, Braque. These aren't people who lived luxurious lives.

examancer 10y ago

On the flip side, there has never before been a point in history where one could make a good living riding miniature motorcycles around Omaha (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPr-L6BprRHBS0EIBxciCA), crushing things with a hydraulic press (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw), making robots that don't work (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ), or wrapping assorted proteins in bacon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYjk_zY-iYR8YNfJmuzd70A). This probably just furthers your point somehow, as I'm not sure how any of this benefits culture, but there are lots of emerging "artists" who are making surprising incomes in this strange strange new world.