3 ms·

Those kinds of jobs are only sustainable when the audience is 100-1000x + the size of the pool of creators. It's not a broad panacea.

• zanny 9y ago
  Just look at patreon. It is fairly unreasonable to expect even your fans to spend more than $1 a month on you, so if you want a reasonable income (and I'd consider reasonable to be peak happiness if you want success in life) than you want around 100k USD in yearly earnings. Take out the 40% self employment tax, the 3% Patreon takes, and you need roughly 12,000 people giving you a dollar a month to "succeed" in terms of income happiness as a creator on Patreon. Now, some of your audience are going to be whales that have vastly more money and are willing to treat $100 like $1. But you also have a huge portion of your audience that pays nothing, by nature of the default state of Patreon being a free main product with only supporter bonus content rather than paywalling your main focus (because how are people going to discover your stuff if its paywalled?). I imagine the best conversion ratio is like 20% and that is wildly optimistic. Twitch subscriptions are comparable, where most streamers float around 20% of their average viewership as subscribers. So you need 60,000 fans, at least, to make happiness income creatively. Now, each fan would probably support more than just one creator per month, and there are additional revenue sources including ads, merch, cons, kickstarters, etc. But no matter how you subdivide this economy the ratio of creators to consumers has to be drastically biased towards consumers over creators.