34 ms·

1000 True Fans? Try 100

512 points by tonicb 7y ago

hi5eyes 7y ago
> Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of those buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator. having a couple blogs/influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works) > As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love it's simply fun growing a brand/discovering new communities/creating one/watching the engagement and metrics
Proziam 7y ago
IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world. This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time. This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing. [0] https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking-number-of-subscribers-he-lost-by-missing-two-days-of-streaming-100449 https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking...
- quaunaut 7y ago
  Isn't this largely what Patreon is, though? And there's a lot of people who are doing surprisingly well off of Patreon despite low subscriber counts. I'd think the trick is to find the right niche- if you're too generic, you're up against the big personalities.
  - nangz 7y ago
    Yep, I subscribe to a couple of podcast patreons.. for $5 a month for 5-10 hours of good content it's a no-brainer... Patreon.com/redscare It's basically just 2 women mouthing off, it's funny though. They do well out of it.
  - Proziam 7y ago
    Patreon is quite a bit of work and requires constant upkeep to maintain a steady income flow. It's really no different from Twitch subscriptions in that regard. It does a better job of monetizing primarily because of the easily customized tiers, and secondarily because the platform specifically caters to paid content rather than free. That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
    - redis_mlc 7y ago
      I commented in detail on this a few months ago ... What Proziam wrote is a little off, at least as far as music goes. Hundreds of musicians/music vloggers are working full-time from Patreon/Adsense once they exceed 100,000 Youtube subscribers and upload weekly/biweekly and have 100+ Patrons. Patreon produces a reliable income stream (for rent, etc.) while Adsense fluctuates but adds up ($1,000 - $5,000/million views typically.) What I have heard with Twitch is that you need to be online continuously or the audience moves on. > IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author That was from a time decades ago when customer acquisition was expensive. With Youtube/Adsense it's not that hard, and one could experiment with Facebook targeting. And any time somebody uses the phrase "walked back", I've found the author didn't have a nuanced understanding of the subject.
      - Proziam 7y ago
        100 Patrons, even if they contribute well above average, say $25 (after platform fees/expenses/taxes), is still only $2,500 per month. There are some places in the US where that wouldn't be liveable, let alone offer enough stability for a person to enjoy a stable lifestyle. Of course, if you live in a low cost of living area you can make things fly that otherwise wouldn't. But even with that consideration in mind, how many places could you live a 'normal' life on 30k? I've worked with musicians as well, including some with global recognition and (many) millions of views and song plays. From what I've seen, turning 100k Youtube subscribers into 100k income per year is far from the norm. Plenty of creators in that size bracket quit, suggesting it's not particularly sustainable. That said, if you can, I'd love to get some more insight into the creators you feel are getting the most out of their effort, and how they're achieving their results!
- chongli 7y ago
  It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction. Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.
  - Reedx 7y ago
    Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well. Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate. 1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory https://www.twitch.tv/directory
    - Proziam 7y ago
      Twitch is an extremely imbalanced platform in regard to discoverability. Their model is to 'make the big bigger' and monetize a narrow field of creators well, rather than monetize a larger pool of creators. There are a number of valid criticisms of the platform, but this one is the most painful for new creators to contend with by a wide margin. It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.
- aj-4 7y ago
  I don't think Ninja is a particularly good example because (1) he is operating at a scale where the normal rules don't apply (2) his rise was equally fast and volatile (3) twitch requires a constant presence more than other content platforms. Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans" The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans. maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base. At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
  - krab 7y ago
    True fans or true Scotsmen? ;-)
  - Proziam 7y ago
    Ninja is the most visible example, but the same pattern holds true at virtually any audience size (within the range of what is typically monetizable). This pattern is actually more extreme on platforms like Patreon because the audience is expecting something for their money. They are closer to a customer than a typical viewer. The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match. Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin. To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
    - 7y ago
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Recurring subscription models help with this, as "letting the subscription continue" then becomes the easiest thing to do. Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums. There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
- gowld 7y ago
  The walkbalk was discussed on HN this week, which is almost certainly why this a18z blog post was written.
- oska 7y ago
  > Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. > ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
  - Proziam 7y ago
    What would you prefer it to be called? We can change the words around to suit our social sensibilities but at the end of the day, we're still talking about convincing people to spend some money. Nobody bats an eye if you ask for more money from your boss, but many people are under a lot of pressure not to try to be compensated fairly for consumer-facing work. Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
    - oska 7y ago
      I think my main issue is the shift in focus away from a transaction (people paying for a product or service) to reducing people to simply being sources of money. Also, the idea that fans or admirers should be converted into people who pay you money. My concept of a service like Patreon is that it's a way for people to give you money if they (independently) want to, rather than being pushed or cajoled to do so.
acd10j 7y ago
Taking this to extreme :) 100 True Fans ? try 1 Internet has enabled visibility so you need to only find one true fan who is willing to sponsor you 100,000 per year.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Aka your employer.
  - js4 7y ago
    Rofl
  - anonytrary 7y ago
    Funny, but this is not wrong either. It turns out anyone who has a good job is already building something one entity really wants -- themselves. The only difference is that they pay with their time.
- Iv 7y ago
  Also called "a job"
- nottorp 7y ago
  Actually that's how art has worked for a looong time. Most pre 19th century artists that we remember now had a rich patron who put food on their table (and possibly influenced what they did).
kbenson 7y ago
> On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years. 22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it. > Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent. Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential. Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.
hnick 7y ago
It's of course easy to prove if you define the nebulous 'true fans' as 'fan enough so that $X from each of them support me financially'. I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong. It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).
sytelus 7y ago
While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast majority of fun creative content won't qualify for this anyway. However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!
- busterarm 7y ago
  Do both instead. Do something where you can offer tiers. Group lessons (100/yr subscribers) vs Individualized (1000/yr).
  - sytelus 7y ago
    I'd suggest not doing tiers. Segmentation is repulsive. Why do I ever want to be a bronze-level customer in your product world? It perhaps makes sense for products that have monopolized or established firmly or where costs are truely substantial as feature/utilization is increased. However, most likely is often the side effect of throwing in the MBA part of your brain to squeeze in that last bit of revenue juice without you having to improve the tech. In essence, just luring in customers with "low starting from..." prices and then telling them they are fools to expect those prices. I tend to distrust products that rely on segmentation to inflate revenues and I think they are often ripe for disruption. At least, for creative/educational products please don't tell your customers that they are 3rd class citizens in your world unless they allow you to completely squeeze them out.
factsaresacred 7y ago
The 1000 fans concept is mostly about gratitude - 'thanks, keep doing what you're doing'. The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - 'I gave you money, now deliver this'. The article describes customers not fans. The VC'ing of 1000 true fans. Nevertheless it's great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.
dav43 7y ago
God these guys live in a bubble
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  My thoughts, exactly. And then they present the idea of selling what your customers want to buy as new ^_^
- dang 7y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - nottorp 7y ago
    Well it is a good critical comment but the HN readers are part of the same bubble and don't realize it :)
    - kaybe 7y ago
      It is not, it's far too short for that. The way it is now it isn't even a decent invitation to discuss. dav43 could probably expand it into one easily though. What kind of bubble? Who's in it? Why do they think so? What are the consequences and what could be done about it? etc.
      - nottorp 7y ago
        Well let me expand it again (i have another comment saying the same thing): HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers. Even in the US, tell someone who makes 30k/year that you spend 1K/year on someone's Patreon and he'll think you're crazy... or spit in your face.
        dang 7y ago
        > HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers That's a false assumption. HN is much larger than you think, with people all over the US and all over the world. It has highly paid workers, lowly paid workers, people who don't need to work, and people who need to but can't find any. We tend to make assumptions like "for the most part" based on the internal image when our pre-existing conditions meet a handful of striking data points—say the first 3 or so. And then we don't change it. But which data points happen to strike us are actually a function of our pre-existing conditions also. There are many other data points.
the_watcher 7y ago
This thesis seems like 1000 True Fans hired patio11.
- jv22222 7y ago
  I was wondering if it was written by patio11. It’s just like his writing style.
  - WA 7y ago
    What? Not at all imho. He writes very different. He likes to construct more complex sentences. This reads like your average journalist, which is okay, but not particular distinguishable.
    - the_watcher 7y ago
      Yea I don't think the writing style is patio11 at all. The thesis of, effectively, "charge more", however, is.
marknadal 7y ago
The _Future_ of the Internet, a post-scarce good, is not going to be a Profit Model Powered by The Extraction Economy. It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the gain in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: http://free.eco http://free.eco .
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > a post-scarce good There is no such thing.
fxtentacle 7y ago
TLDR: Sell what your customers want to buy. But let's call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as "Passion Economy", which sounds a lot more noble than "overcharging random strangers on the internet". I'm also surprised that "whales" went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.
- numlock86 7y ago
  TL;DR (1000 * 100) == (100 * 1000)
AJRF 7y ago
Guys what if... You had 200 fans each paying 500 a year? Amazing right? 500 is less than 1000 and 200 isn’t that much more than 100. Feel free to take down the OP and put this comment up instead
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  Have you considered 123.5 fans? ;) The 0.5 is a half-broke student only paying attention sometimes.
bnonim 7y ago
Here is a model for the author: give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc. i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he/she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his/her passion position in life but most of us should/must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time... prize tag is for goods not for people...
wtracy 7y ago
I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year. The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense. I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income. Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.") I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.
- arkitaip 7y ago
  This is a "think piece" and not based on any research or data. In reality, I'm seeing lots of relatively small entertainers do the 1000 Fans Thing on Twitch and it really works because each subscriber pays 5 USD per month.
- onion2k 7y ago
  The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit. The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
  - auggierose 7y ago
    I think there are plenty of cases. Just sell your software instead of giving it away.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    This seems to me like it does happen fairly often. It’s the entire model of JetBrains, RedGate, Sublime, Atlassian, etc.
    - bcrosby95 7y ago
CryoLogic 7y ago
We actually see a similar pattern on https://www.anim8.io https://www.anim8.io A couple animators on our platform have extremely dedicated fans making up the majority of the donation revenue.
robinduckett 7y ago
What I got from this post: Network economy matches userland economy. We should henceforth refer to billionaires as "whales".
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Is this what trickle down to economy looks like?
  - robinduckett 7y ago
    I'd like to see what a ring based economy would look like
bambax 7y ago
1. The article shows a pyramid and it's important. In order to get a few "true fans" (people prepared to pay dearly for what you produce), you need a large amount of "distant fans" (people who like what you do, as long as it's free). The key word is conversion, and, regrettably, it's not present once in the post [0]. It's probably in the 1 to 0.1% range. [0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first. 2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?
- beAbU 7y ago
  Although I agree with all you are saying and your general sentiment, I just want to understand why you state that Physiotherapy is scammy?
  - lultimouomo 7y ago
    I don't think that he meant physiotherapy is scammy, just the concept of teaching it through online courses. If you take it a few steps further, e.g. online abdominal surgery courses, the point becomes more clear.
    - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
      "Learn to perform emergency appendectomies in just one day!"
      - Anon84 7y ago
        Emphasis on "emergency". If it wasn't a medical emergency before the appendectomy, it will be afterwards :)
giantrobot 7y ago
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living. That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace. A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  How expensive can a banana really be? $10?
- anonytrary 7y ago
  > Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services. But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.
johnchristopher 7y ago
> This strategy is closely related to the concept of “whales” in gaming, in which 1 to 2 percent of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother's consent and/or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  Everybody should think deeply about ethics and act morally. Exploiting human beings is not okay. But the idea of "whales" is nearly universal in all lines of business, and there's nothing unethical about it unless your business is already operating in some kind of ethical gray area. If you are lucky enough to have customers at all, you will have some that spend 10x or 100x as others. The most obvious example would be a neighborhood restaurant or food truck. Most people in your town might visit once or twice per year, if at all. But then you have your regular customers that you see a few times per week. Somebody who stops by twice a week is spending 100x as somebody who visits once a year. Same with a department store. Most people buy nothing, some just want a pair of socks, and some will drop $2,000 on a new business wardrobe. Something worth considering: if your business is one that inspires passionate fans, do you have any options for these folks to spend more? If not, are you kinda leaving a bunch of money on the table and hamstringing your fledgling business? Probably. Of course, this is something that takes ethical consideration and good judgement.
  - nottorp 7y ago
    Your examples aren't really of whales, because there's an upper limit on how much food/clothes you can get. The whale term was invented by casinos wasn't it? Where there's no upper limit to how much you can lose.
    - naniwaduni 7y ago
      There's an upper limit to the amount that you can consume. There is no upper limit on the amount you can pay.
scoutt 7y ago
Maybe for a kid paying for school or saving it could be OK, but 100-fans-income is quite volatile. And the end of the day these people are living out from tips, pity and the grace of 1st world country donors (I am saying this while trying not to be controversial). Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus volatile, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they'll replace him/her with whatever else is out there, and that's 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons. Very risky for making a living, IMO.
tempthrow2222 7y ago
Next up: 1 true fan.
- Matheus28 7y ago
  Also called: your employer
  - anentropic 7y ago
    LOL yes, and in return you have to produce exactly what they ask for
    - kangnkodos 7y ago
      Sugar baby
weinzierl 7y ago
The fewer "fans" you have and the more they pay the more power they will have over you and the more demanding they will become. In other words: Your fans turn into patrons and will have a major influence on your work. Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.
dvanduzer 7y ago
$ whois a1.6z.com
mouzogu 7y ago
But finding those 100 people who care enough to pay for whatever it is you're producing must have a cost. There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it's like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it's more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you. That's without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It's especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.
- paulpauper 7y ago
  the cost is immense. Look at how much money Jeb Bush spent in 2015 to get fans. Like finding a needle in a silo. Some people can do it much easier, but it's random. there is no rule or strategy to reliably get fans quickly.
al_form2000 7y ago
Tl;dr: "Sell your customers what they want, make them pay what you say, be sure they're rich enough." Best paradigm busting advice in business after "If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you'll have 5 milion customers" and "Always remember: profit is revenue minus expense".
armitron 7y ago
The "passion economy" is flooding the Internet with low SNR material and making it harder and harder to get to high quality information. Creators create not to meet some sort of quota or "monetize" but because they need to create. It's the same for artists. True art exists because it has to come out no matter what. Monetization doesn't come into it at all. This is an important point that the passion economy vultures don't seem to grasp. What we see today is monetization becoming THE purpose and overriding everything else.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Monetisation is a cult in its own right. The idea that everything has to be about the hustle is toxic and entirely insane.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
shakermakr 7y ago
The No Agenda podcast from Adam Curry and John C Dvorak have seemingly successfully worked this model. No adverts, but donation only. Of course many listen to free, but creating producers out of those who donate and giving them credits and shout outs has built an interesting community. What doesn’t work is to cut your prime value out just to those who pay. Then you can’t build momentum and the large fan base.
scandox 7y ago
> As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. As a sentence this just fills me with dread. And it's hard to say why because I know, for example, that a writer making a living from selling their books could be said to be "monetizing what they love" OR engaging in the "Passion Economy". But if I was to try and get to the heart of it it's simply that I don't want to monetize what I love. I want it to be the one part of my existence not dominated by money. And I don't want an actual passion (awful word really) to form part of an economy.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  An economy is just a group of people all making resource allocation decisions. I have no idea why you’d want to exclude passion from the decision making process of the worlds billions of economic actors.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Isn't an economy specifically about optimising resource allocation. The more general term being a financial system. I assume you're being purposefully terse, but just in case ... can you see how one might want to do an activity without considering 'could I charge people [more] to enjoy this with me, could I end this activity with less opportunity cost lost' and instead just be generous with something one loves and free with ones use of time when having fun?
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      An economy is any system that involves the production, consumption and trade of goods. It’s simply a way of describing and analysing natural human behaviour. An economy doesn’t have to aspire towards any form of efficiency, it doesn’t have to involve money, or any form of payment. It doesn’t need to be governed, or subject to any form of authority. It is simply what happens when you have people consuming or utilizing anything that was produced by another person. The only way you could exercise a passion without any economic interactions is if you did so entirely by yourself, without the use of any goods or services produced by another person, and without sharing any of the value you may potentially be creating with any other person.
gadders 7y ago
Apart from the practicality of the business process, I would say if your content is in any way "edgy" or skirts close to the edge of the Overton Window [1] I would try and self-host as much as possible. It would be all too easy for a twitter-storm to get you kicked off social media, twitch, patreon, cloudflare, stripe, paypal etc and then your business disappears overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
bernardlunn 7y ago
The real business that A16Z wants is aggregating millions of passion projects. Must have been pitched by something like that
JackPoach 7y ago
Is it just me or Passion Economy is a totally empty marketing BS term that doesn't really mean anything?
keiferski 7y ago
The problem with the "passion economy", which was alluded to in another comment, is that it strengthens the already too-prevalent assumption that everything can and should be monetizable. Markets are useful but they don't need to be involved in every aspect of existence. Sure, you don’t need to participate in Patreon to make stuff, but the trend seems to be toward relying on consumer market forces to fund culture. Tying the livelihoods of creators to the approval of their fans will lead them to censor themselves and consequently you aren't going to get anything that really pisses people off or challenges them in a countercultural way, at least enough to stop buying your stuff. The idea of basic income seems like a better path forward, in terms of preserving artistic integrity (i.e. not "make money" or "please your fans" as the motive for making things). Everyone will get enough money to survive, no matter how much your ideas go against the zeitgeist.
- subpixel 7y ago
  I just looked at Kajabi for the first time and feel similarly. A bunch of 'coaches' selling courses to other coaches, etc.
- tartoran 7y ago
  Yeah, this is a tragic outcome for culture in general but free content isn’t sustainable either, people need to pay for rent, food, and other expenses. Im still waiting for the micropayments system to spring into existence..
- marcusverus 7y ago
  I cannot think of a more trivial reason to fundamentally restructure the economy.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    To allow people to focus on meaningful pursuits rather than work largely superfluous jobs to survive? Yeah, sounds really trivial.
    - marcusverus 7y ago
projectramo 7y ago
The logical conclusion of this trend has already been reached: Adam Neumann only needed 1 true fan.
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
I do now think 1K/year is something that will sustain in time. Passion wears out.
HoustonRefugee 7y ago
I would like to see some stats from youtube and other platforms actually auditing those sub counts. I really have a hard time believing some youtube channels actually have 10,000 subs, let alone a million. While I agree with the article and the tier system, patreon is basically an e-begging platform. I understand that probably isn't popular to say but that is how I see it.
- el_cujo 7y ago
  >patreon is basically an e-begging platform This is more true for some people than others. A decent number of YouTubers I know have their patreons set up to only charge customers after they put out a video, so if several months go by without any new content they aren't just pulling a salary from patrons. This model is only really relevant to YouTubers who put effort into fewer videos released farther apart, rather than those with weekly or even daily releases of vlog content, but still it feels like a fair way of doing things where they are essentially being paid for releasing something and not like begging. Contrast this with some people I see on twitter who have a patreon... just for tweeting? Occasionally there is a spin put on it about being a minority or disabled and taking donations, but this definitely feels much more like e-begging, even though I guess you could try and make the argument that tweets are just as valid "content" as youtube videos.
nadam 7y ago
I call bullshit on this 'passion economy' thing. Masses of people never in history could make a living from what they love, and unfortunatelly there is no sign that it will happen now. Musicans, writers, indie-game creators: most of them do their passion besides a day-job. Long-tail never made much money and with globalisation it is worse than ever. The unfortunate truth is the opposite: not only long tail does not really work, but as Peter Thiel said: money is in monopolies. Non-monopolies 'compete-away' the profit. As a developer, you are better off to go work for a monopoly: they pay well. (Google, Facebook, etc). (This does not mean I do not have a passion project ('indie game'), I just know that the chance that it can replace my day-job is quite low.)
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  Sure, I totally agree, I think the realistic outcome is that we see a trend in more fields towards the 'rockstars' and 'pro players' but instead of having them behind gatekeepers (teams, agents, etc.) they're on platforms
- yters 7y ago
  Maybe the passion project can make an impact within the monopoly? E.g. use indie game dev knowledge to improve costumer engagement with the product?
  - gowld 7y ago
    Is that a good thing? "Engagement" is usually toxic Skinner boxing.
    - yters 7y ago
      Most things can be used for good or ill. A well defined and engaging UI can certainly be a good thing, if designed appropriately. Most business software is a boring slog to use. Why not design it so the user feels uplifted during the workday? Work could potentially benefit the person as well as the company bottom line, and become a virtuous whole.
- 7y ago
6510 7y ago
In my mind the article reduces to: Paywalls are cool, we need moar of them.
claudiulodro 7y ago
It looks to me what a16z has just discovered is a service business. A plumber or an SAT tutor or an upholstery shop or whatever basically just needs 100 customers a year paying around $1000.
- mcclux 7y ago
  Call me cynical, but to me the entire post just reads like an advertisment for the companies in the $1000 column that they've invested in...
haileris 7y ago
Just watched a MicroConf talk mentioned "1000 fan" theory.
- Plough_Jogger 7y ago
  This talk covers the origin & debunks the premise of 1000 fans: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273 https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273
ryanjm33 7y ago
s/fan/customer I feel like the comments here cover the main issues with this article. I kept flip-flopping between appreciating the article and disagreeing with it. The two main issues I have with it are: 1. $1000/year to provide value is a business, not a "passion" in the true sense. 2. Highlighting the outliers of a given platform discredits the concept as something that many people can achieve. "These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product." - yes, that would be a business transaction. This article could be rewritten to say that if you want to create a life-style business, make sure to generate enough value for someone (or a business) that they would be willing to pay $1000/year for your product. This will make profitability/success much easier. Yes, the original author of 1,000 True Fans retracted his original views after hearing from musicians, but the general concept/framework doesn't seem to be broken even if the numbers have to be adjusted. The main idea is that you don't need millions of people paying you $1 to have success.
- scep12 7y ago
  I understand what you're getting at but I think the relationship with a 'creator' or artist feels much more personal than that of a business. There's more to this than a simple repeating customer/business transaction.
esch89 7y ago
I've seen this work before.
Kalq 7y ago
I think there's a bit of confusion here in the way the author frames these 100 people. At this level they are not fans. They're not supporting you out of some sort of emotional attachment. They are giving you $1000 a year because they believe that the service or product you provide is worth that much. They're customers and that's all. The "whale" archetype is just a modern version of what has always existed with MLM and self-help gurus where they pray on rich and emotionally vulnerable people. It's an absolutely tiny group of people that will never translate to a widespread economy. Conflating the 1000 true fans concept with this is a mistake in my opinion.
dclusin 7y ago
I feel like these numbers are skewed by the sex workers on Patreon offering subscription pornography. It'd be interesting to see if there's a difference between the numbers adult content creators see vs. everyone else.
- octocode 7y ago
  I don't think people who create adult content should be excluded. It's a valid job which — like streaming, painting, or any other online content creation — just isn't for everyone.
  - dclusin 7y ago
    Yeah I agree. I wasn’t suggesting that it is or should be illegal and banned. I’m just saying that the economics for that business are so different than every other creative and performing art that it really distorts what non-adult content creators can expect to make from their patrons.
Plough_Jogger 7y ago
This talk from MicroConf discusses a similar idea and the origins of the 1000 true fans allegory: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273 https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Brilliant!

512 points by tonicb 7y ago

> Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of those buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator. having a couple blogs/influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works) > As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love it's simply fun growing a brand/discovering new communities/creating one/watching the engagement and metrics

Proziam 7y ago

IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world. This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time. This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing. [0] https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking-number-of-subscribers-he-lost-by-missing-two-days-of-streaming-100449 https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking...

quaunaut 7y ago
Isn't this largely what Patreon is, though? And there's a lot of people who are doing surprisingly well off of Patreon despite low subscriber counts. I'd think the trick is to find the right niche- if you're too generic, you're up against the big personalities.
- nangz 7y ago
  Yep, I subscribe to a couple of podcast patreons.. for $5 a month for 5-10 hours of good content it's a no-brainer... Patreon.com/redscare It's basically just 2 women mouthing off, it's funny though. They do well out of it.
- Proziam 7y ago
  Patreon is quite a bit of work and requires constant upkeep to maintain a steady income flow. It's really no different from Twitch subscriptions in that regard. It does a better job of monetizing primarily because of the easily customized tiers, and secondarily because the platform specifically caters to paid content rather than free. That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    I commented in detail on this a few months ago ... What Proziam wrote is a little off, at least as far as music goes. Hundreds of musicians/music vloggers are working full-time from Patreon/Adsense once they exceed 100,000 Youtube subscribers and upload weekly/biweekly and have 100+ Patrons. Patreon produces a reliable income stream (for rent, etc.) while Adsense fluctuates but adds up ($1,000 - $5,000/million views typically.) What I have heard with Twitch is that you need to be online continuously or the audience moves on. > IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author That was from a time decades ago when customer acquisition was expensive. With Youtube/Adsense it's not that hard, and one could experiment with Facebook targeting. And any time somebody uses the phrase "walked back", I've found the author didn't have a nuanced understanding of the subject.
    - Proziam 7y ago
      100 Patrons, even if they contribute well above average, say $25 (after platform fees/expenses/taxes), is still only $2,500 per month. There are some places in the US where that wouldn't be liveable, let alone offer enough stability for a person to enjoy a stable lifestyle. Of course, if you live in a low cost of living area you can make things fly that otherwise wouldn't. But even with that consideration in mind, how many places could you live a 'normal' life on 30k? I've worked with musicians as well, including some with global recognition and (many) millions of views and song plays. From what I've seen, turning 100k Youtube subscribers into 100k income per year is far from the norm. Plenty of creators in that size bracket quit, suggesting it's not particularly sustainable. That said, if you can, I'd love to get some more insight into the creators you feel are getting the most out of their effort, and how they're achieving their results!
chongli 7y ago
It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction. Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
- GuiA 7y ago
  It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.
- Reedx 7y ago
  Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well. Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate. 1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory https://www.twitch.tv/directory
  - Proziam 7y ago
    Twitch is an extremely imbalanced platform in regard to discoverability. Their model is to 'make the big bigger' and monetize a narrow field of creators well, rather than monetize a larger pool of creators. There are a number of valid criticisms of the platform, but this one is the most painful for new creators to contend with by a wide margin. It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.
aj-4 7y ago
I don't think Ninja is a particularly good example because (1) he is operating at a scale where the normal rules don't apply (2) his rise was equally fast and volatile (3) twitch requires a constant presence more than other content platforms. Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans" The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans. maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base. At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
- krab 7y ago
  True fans or true Scotsmen? ;-)
- Proziam 7y ago
  Ninja is the most visible example, but the same pattern holds true at virtually any audience size (within the range of what is typically monetizable). This pattern is actually more extreme on platforms like Patreon because the audience is expecting something for their money. They are closer to a customer than a typical viewer. The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match. Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin. To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
  - 7y ago
JohnBooty 7y ago
You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Recurring subscription models help with this, as "letting the subscription continue" then becomes the easiest thing to do. Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums. There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
gowld 7y ago
The walkbalk was discussed on HN this week, which is almost certainly why this a18z blog post was written.
oska 7y ago
> Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. > ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
- Proziam 7y ago
  What would you prefer it to be called? We can change the words around to suit our social sensibilities but at the end of the day, we're still talking about convincing people to spend some money. Nobody bats an eye if you ask for more money from your boss, but many people are under a lot of pressure not to try to be compensated fairly for consumer-facing work. Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
  - oska 7y ago
    I think my main issue is the shift in focus away from a transaction (people paying for a product or service) to reducing people to simply being sources of money. Also, the idea that fans or admirers should be converted into people who pay you money. My concept of a service like Patreon is that it's a way for people to give you money if they (independently) want to, rather than being pushed or cajoled to do so.

acd10j 7y ago

Taking this to extreme :) 100 True Fans ? try 1 Internet has enabled visibility so you need to only find one true fan who is willing to sponsor you 100,000 per year.

oefrha 7y ago
Aka your employer.
- js4 7y ago
  Rofl
- anonytrary 7y ago
  Funny, but this is not wrong either. It turns out anyone who has a good job is already building something one entity really wants -- themselves. The only difference is that they pay with their time.
Iv 7y ago
Also called "a job"
nottorp 7y ago
Actually that's how art has worked for a looong time. Most pre 19th century artists that we remember now had a rich patron who put food on their table (and possibly influenced what they did).

kbenson 7y ago

> On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years. 22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it. > Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent. Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential. Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.

hnick 7y ago

It's of course easy to prove if you define the nebulous 'true fans' as 'fan enough so that $X from each of them support me financially'. I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong. It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).

sytelus 7y ago

While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast majority of fun creative content won't qualify for this anyway. However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!

busterarm 7y ago
Do both instead. Do something where you can offer tiers. Group lessons (100/yr subscribers) vs Individualized (1000/yr).
- sytelus 7y ago
  I'd suggest not doing tiers. Segmentation is repulsive. Why do I ever want to be a bronze-level customer in your product world? It perhaps makes sense for products that have monopolized or established firmly or where costs are truely substantial as feature/utilization is increased. However, most likely is often the side effect of throwing in the MBA part of your brain to squeeze in that last bit of revenue juice without you having to improve the tech. In essence, just luring in customers with "low starting from..." prices and then telling them they are fools to expect those prices. I tend to distrust products that rely on segmentation to inflate revenues and I think they are often ripe for disruption. At least, for creative/educational products please don't tell your customers that they are 3rd class citizens in your world unless they allow you to completely squeeze them out.

factsaresacred 7y ago

The 1000 fans concept is mostly about gratitude - 'thanks, keep doing what you're doing'. The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - 'I gave you money, now deliver this'. The article describes customers not fans. The VC'ing of 1000 true fans. Nevertheless it's great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.

dav43 7y ago

God these guys live in a bubble

fxtentacle 7y ago
My thoughts, exactly. And then they present the idea of selling what your customers want to buy as new ^_^
dang 7y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nottorp 7y ago
  Well it is a good critical comment but the HN readers are part of the same bubble and don't realize it :)
  - kaybe 7y ago
    It is not, it's far too short for that. The way it is now it isn't even a decent invitation to discuss. dav43 could probably expand it into one easily though. What kind of bubble? Who's in it? Why do they think so? What are the consequences and what could be done about it? etc.
    - nottorp 7y ago
      Well let me expand it again (i have another comment saying the same thing): HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers. Even in the US, tell someone who makes 30k/year that you spend 1K/year on someone's Patreon and he'll think you're crazy... or spit in your face.
      - dang 7y ago
        > HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers That's a false assumption. HN is much larger than you think, with people all over the US and all over the world. It has highly paid workers, lowly paid workers, people who don't need to work, and people who need to but can't find any. We tend to make assumptions like "for the most part" based on the internal image when our pre-existing conditions meet a handful of striking data points—say the first 3 or so. And then we don't change it. But which data points happen to strike us are actually a function of our pre-existing conditions also. There are many other data points.

the_watcher 7y ago

This thesis seems like 1000 True Fans hired patio11.

jv22222 7y ago
I was wondering if it was written by patio11. It’s just like his writing style.
- WA 7y ago
  What? Not at all imho. He writes very different. He likes to construct more complex sentences. This reads like your average journalist, which is okay, but not particular distinguishable.
  - the_watcher 7y ago
    Yea I don't think the writing style is patio11 at all. The thesis of, effectively, "charge more", however, is.

marknadal 7y ago

The _Future_ of the Internet, a post-scarce good, is not going to be a Profit Model Powered by The Extraction Economy. It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the gain in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: http://free.eco http://free.eco .

dragonwriter 7y ago
> a post-scarce good There is no such thing.

fxtentacle 7y ago

TLDR: Sell what your customers want to buy. But let's call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as "Passion Economy", which sounds a lot more noble than "overcharging random strangers on the internet". I'm also surprised that "whales" went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.

numlock86 7y ago
TL;DR (1000 * 100) == (100 * 1000)

AJRF 7y ago

Guys what if... You had 200 fans each paying 500 a year? Amazing right? 500 is less than 1000 and 200 isn’t that much more than 100. Feel free to take down the OP and put this comment up instead

fxtentacle 7y ago
Have you considered 123.5 fans? ;) The 0.5 is a half-broke student only paying attention sometimes.

bnonim 7y ago

Here is a model for the author: give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc. i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he/she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his/her passion position in life but most of us should/must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time... prize tag is for goods not for people...

wtracy 7y ago

I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year. The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense. I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income. Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.") I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.

arkitaip 7y ago
This is a "think piece" and not based on any research or data. In reality, I'm seeing lots of relatively small entertainers do the 1000 Fans Thing on Twitch and it really works because each subscriber pays 5 USD per month.
onion2k 7y ago
The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit. The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
- auggierose 7y ago
  I think there are plenty of cases. Just sell your software instead of giving it away.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  This seems to me like it does happen fairly often. It’s the entire model of JetBrains, RedGate, Sublime, Atlassian, etc.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago

CryoLogic 7y ago

We actually see a similar pattern on https://www.anim8.io https://www.anim8.io A couple animators on our platform have extremely dedicated fans making up the majority of the donation revenue.

robinduckett 7y ago

What I got from this post: Network economy matches userland economy. We should henceforth refer to billionaires as "whales".

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Is this what trickle down to economy looks like?
- robinduckett 7y ago
  I'd like to see what a ring based economy would look like

bambax 7y ago

1. The article shows a pyramid and it's important. In order to get a few "true fans" (people prepared to pay dearly for what you produce), you need a large amount of "distant fans" (people who like what you do, as long as it's free). The key word is conversion, and, regrettably, it's not present once in the post [0]. It's probably in the 1 to 0.1% range. [0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first. 2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?

beAbU 7y ago
Although I agree with all you are saying and your general sentiment, I just want to understand why you state that Physiotherapy is scammy?
- lultimouomo 7y ago
  I don't think that he meant physiotherapy is scammy, just the concept of teaching it through online courses. If you take it a few steps further, e.g. online abdominal surgery courses, the point becomes more clear.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    "Learn to perform emergency appendectomies in just one day!"
    - Anon84 7y ago
      Emphasis on "emergency". If it wasn't a medical emergency before the appendectomy, it will be afterwards :)

giantrobot 7y ago

Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living. That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace. A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.

rorykoehler 7y ago
How expensive can a banana really be? $10?
anonytrary 7y ago
> Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services. But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.

johnchristopher 7y ago

> This strategy is closely related to the concept of “whales” in gaming, in which 1 to 2 percent of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother's consent and/or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.

JohnBooty 7y ago
Everybody should think deeply about ethics and act morally. Exploiting human beings is not okay. But the idea of "whales" is nearly universal in all lines of business, and there's nothing unethical about it unless your business is already operating in some kind of ethical gray area. If you are lucky enough to have customers at all, you will have some that spend 10x or 100x as others. The most obvious example would be a neighborhood restaurant or food truck. Most people in your town might visit once or twice per year, if at all. But then you have your regular customers that you see a few times per week. Somebody who stops by twice a week is spending 100x as somebody who visits once a year. Same with a department store. Most people buy nothing, some just want a pair of socks, and some will drop $2,000 on a new business wardrobe. Something worth considering: if your business is one that inspires passionate fans, do you have any options for these folks to spend more? If not, are you kinda leaving a bunch of money on the table and hamstringing your fledgling business? Probably. Of course, this is something that takes ethical consideration and good judgement.
- nottorp 7y ago
  Your examples aren't really of whales, because there's an upper limit on how much food/clothes you can get. The whale term was invented by casinos wasn't it? Where there's no upper limit to how much you can lose.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    There's an upper limit to the amount that you can consume. There is no upper limit on the amount you can pay.

scoutt 7y ago

Maybe for a kid paying for school or saving it could be OK, but 100-fans-income is quite volatile. And the end of the day these people are living out from tips, pity and the grace of 1st world country donors (I am saying this while trying not to be controversial). Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus volatile, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they'll replace him/her with whatever else is out there, and that's 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons. Very risky for making a living, IMO.

tempthrow2222 7y ago

Next up: 1 true fan.

Matheus28 7y ago
Also called: your employer
- anentropic 7y ago
  LOL yes, and in return you have to produce exactly what they ask for
  - kangnkodos 7y ago
    Sugar baby

weinzierl 7y ago

The fewer "fans" you have and the more they pay the more power they will have over you and the more demanding they will become. In other words: Your fans turn into patrons and will have a major influence on your work. Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.

dvanduzer 7y ago

$ whois a1.6z.com

mouzogu 7y ago

But finding those 100 people who care enough to pay for whatever it is you're producing must have a cost. There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it's like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it's more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you. That's without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It's especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.

paulpauper 7y ago
the cost is immense. Look at how much money Jeb Bush spent in 2015 to get fans. Like finding a needle in a silo. Some people can do it much easier, but it's random. there is no rule or strategy to reliably get fans quickly.

al_form2000 7y ago

Tl;dr: "Sell your customers what they want, make them pay what you say, be sure they're rich enough." Best paradigm busting advice in business after "If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you'll have 5 milion customers" and "Always remember: profit is revenue minus expense".

armitron 7y ago

The "passion economy" is flooding the Internet with low SNR material and making it harder and harder to get to high quality information. Creators create not to meet some sort of quota or "monetize" but because they need to create. It's the same for artists. True art exists because it has to come out no matter what. Monetization doesn't come into it at all. This is an important point that the passion economy vultures don't seem to grasp. What we see today is monetization becoming THE purpose and overriding everything else.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Monetisation is a cult in its own right. The idea that everything has to be about the hustle is toxic and entirely insane.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

shakermakr 7y ago

The No Agenda podcast from Adam Curry and John C Dvorak have seemingly successfully worked this model. No adverts, but donation only. Of course many listen to free, but creating producers out of those who donate and giving them credits and shout outs has built an interesting community. What doesn’t work is to cut your prime value out just to those who pay. Then you can’t build momentum and the large fan base.

scandox 7y ago

> As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. As a sentence this just fills me with dread. And it's hard to say why because I know, for example, that a writer making a living from selling their books could be said to be "monetizing what they love" OR engaging in the "Passion Economy". But if I was to try and get to the heart of it it's simply that I don't want to monetize what I love. I want it to be the one part of my existence not dominated by money. And I don't want an actual passion (awful word really) to form part of an economy.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
An economy is just a group of people all making resource allocation decisions. I have no idea why you’d want to exclude passion from the decision making process of the worlds billions of economic actors.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Isn't an economy specifically about optimising resource allocation. The more general term being a financial system. I assume you're being purposefully terse, but just in case ... can you see how one might want to do an activity without considering 'could I charge people [more] to enjoy this with me, could I end this activity with less opportunity cost lost' and instead just be generous with something one loves and free with ones use of time when having fun?
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    An economy is any system that involves the production, consumption and trade of goods. It’s simply a way of describing and analysing natural human behaviour. An economy doesn’t have to aspire towards any form of efficiency, it doesn’t have to involve money, or any form of payment. It doesn’t need to be governed, or subject to any form of authority. It is simply what happens when you have people consuming or utilizing anything that was produced by another person. The only way you could exercise a passion without any economic interactions is if you did so entirely by yourself, without the use of any goods or services produced by another person, and without sharing any of the value you may potentially be creating with any other person.

gadders 7y ago

Apart from the practicality of the business process, I would say if your content is in any way "edgy" or skirts close to the edge of the Overton Window [1] I would try and self-host as much as possible. It would be all too easy for a twitter-storm to get you kicked off social media, twitch, patreon, cloudflare, stripe, paypal etc and then your business disappears overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

bernardlunn 7y ago

The real business that A16Z wants is aggregating millions of passion projects. Must have been pitched by something like that

JackPoach 7y ago

Is it just me or Passion Economy is a totally empty marketing BS term that doesn't really mean anything?

keiferski 7y ago

The problem with the "passion economy", which was alluded to in another comment, is that it strengthens the already too-prevalent assumption that everything can and should be monetizable. Markets are useful but they don't need to be involved in every aspect of existence. Sure, you don’t need to participate in Patreon to make stuff, but the trend seems to be toward relying on consumer market forces to fund culture. Tying the livelihoods of creators to the approval of their fans will lead them to censor themselves and consequently you aren't going to get anything that really pisses people off or challenges them in a countercultural way, at least enough to stop buying your stuff. The idea of basic income seems like a better path forward, in terms of preserving artistic integrity (i.e. not "make money" or "please your fans" as the motive for making things). Everyone will get enough money to survive, no matter how much your ideas go against the zeitgeist.

subpixel 7y ago
I just looked at Kajabi for the first time and feel similarly. A bunch of 'coaches' selling courses to other coaches, etc.
tartoran 7y ago
Yeah, this is a tragic outcome for culture in general but free content isn’t sustainable either, people need to pay for rent, food, and other expenses. Im still waiting for the micropayments system to spring into existence..
marcusverus 7y ago
I cannot think of a more trivial reason to fundamentally restructure the economy.
- keiferski 7y ago
  To allow people to focus on meaningful pursuits rather than work largely superfluous jobs to survive? Yeah, sounds really trivial.
  - marcusverus 7y ago

projectramo 7y ago

The logical conclusion of this trend has already been reached: Adam Neumann only needed 1 true fan.

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

I do now think 1K/year is something that will sustain in time. Passion wears out.

HoustonRefugee 7y ago

I would like to see some stats from youtube and other platforms actually auditing those sub counts. I really have a hard time believing some youtube channels actually have 10,000 subs, let alone a million. While I agree with the article and the tier system, patreon is basically an e-begging platform. I understand that probably isn't popular to say but that is how I see it.

el_cujo 7y ago
>patreon is basically an e-begging platform This is more true for some people than others. A decent number of YouTubers I know have their patreons set up to only charge customers after they put out a video, so if several months go by without any new content they aren't just pulling a salary from patrons. This model is only really relevant to YouTubers who put effort into fewer videos released farther apart, rather than those with weekly or even daily releases of vlog content, but still it feels like a fair way of doing things where they are essentially being paid for releasing something and not like begging. Contrast this with some people I see on twitter who have a patreon... just for tweeting? Occasionally there is a spin put on it about being a minority or disabled and taking donations, but this definitely feels much more like e-begging, even though I guess you could try and make the argument that tweets are just as valid "content" as youtube videos.

nadam 7y ago

I call bullshit on this 'passion economy' thing. Masses of people never in history could make a living from what they love, and unfortunatelly there is no sign that it will happen now. Musicans, writers, indie-game creators: most of them do their passion besides a day-job. Long-tail never made much money and with globalisation it is worse than ever. The unfortunate truth is the opposite: not only long tail does not really work, but as Peter Thiel said: money is in monopolies. Non-monopolies 'compete-away' the profit. As a developer, you are better off to go work for a monopoly: they pay well. (Google, Facebook, etc). (This does not mean I do not have a passion project ('indie game'), I just know that the chance that it can replace my day-job is quite low.)

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
Sure, I totally agree, I think the realistic outcome is that we see a trend in more fields towards the 'rockstars' and 'pro players' but instead of having them behind gatekeepers (teams, agents, etc.) they're on platforms
yters 7y ago
Maybe the passion project can make an impact within the monopoly? E.g. use indie game dev knowledge to improve costumer engagement with the product?
- gowld 7y ago
  Is that a good thing? "Engagement" is usually toxic Skinner boxing.
  - yters 7y ago
    Most things can be used for good or ill. A well defined and engaging UI can certainly be a good thing, if designed appropriately. Most business software is a boring slog to use. Why not design it so the user feels uplifted during the workday? Work could potentially benefit the person as well as the company bottom line, and become a virtuous whole.
7y ago

6510 7y ago

In my mind the article reduces to: Paywalls are cool, we need moar of them.

claudiulodro 7y ago

It looks to me what a16z has just discovered is a service business. A plumber or an SAT tutor or an upholstery shop or whatever basically just needs 100 customers a year paying around $1000.

mcclux 7y ago
Call me cynical, but to me the entire post just reads like an advertisment for the companies in the $1000 column that they've invested in...

haileris 7y ago

Just watched a MicroConf talk mentioned "1000 fan" theory.

Plough_Jogger 7y ago
This talk covers the origin & debunks the premise of 1000 fans: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273 https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273

ryanjm33 7y ago

s/fan/customer I feel like the comments here cover the main issues with this article. I kept flip-flopping between appreciating the article and disagreeing with it. The two main issues I have with it are: 1. $1000/year to provide value is a business, not a "passion" in the true sense. 2. Highlighting the outliers of a given platform discredits the concept as something that many people can achieve. "These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product." - yes, that would be a business transaction. This article could be rewritten to say that if you want to create a life-style business, make sure to generate enough value for someone (or a business) that they would be willing to pay $1000/year for your product. This will make profitability/success much easier. Yes, the original author of 1,000 True Fans retracted his original views after hearing from musicians, but the general concept/framework doesn't seem to be broken even if the numbers have to be adjusted. The main idea is that you don't need millions of people paying you $1 to have success.

scep12 7y ago
I understand what you're getting at but I think the relationship with a 'creator' or artist feels much more personal than that of a business. There's more to this than a simple repeating customer/business transaction.

esch89 7y ago

I've seen this work before.

Kalq 7y ago

I think there's a bit of confusion here in the way the author frames these 100 people. At this level they are not fans. They're not supporting you out of some sort of emotional attachment. They are giving you $1000 a year because they believe that the service or product you provide is worth that much. They're customers and that's all. The "whale" archetype is just a modern version of what has always existed with MLM and self-help gurus where they pray on rich and emotionally vulnerable people. It's an absolutely tiny group of people that will never translate to a widespread economy. Conflating the 1000 true fans concept with this is a mistake in my opinion.

dclusin 7y ago

I feel like these numbers are skewed by the sex workers on Patreon offering subscription pornography. It'd be interesting to see if there's a difference between the numbers adult content creators see vs. everyone else.

octocode 7y ago
I don't think people who create adult content should be excluded. It's a valid job which — like streaming, painting, or any other online content creation — just isn't for everyone.
- dclusin 7y ago
  Yeah I agree. I wasn’t suggesting that it is or should be illegal and banned. I’m just saying that the economics for that business are so different than every other creative and performing art that it really distorts what non-adult content creators can expect to make from their patrons.

Plough_Jogger 7y ago

This talk from MicroConf discusses a similar idea and the origins of the 1000 true fans allegory: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273 https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=273

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Brilliant!