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Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators a

Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those. So...what next? How do creators get paid? (FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)

Aeolun 6y ago
I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage
CM30 6y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives. It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.
- II2II 6y ago
  While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution. It is probably the system that is most likely to encourage people to contribute based upon their assessed value of the content and the least likely system to be gamed. How do you ensure that creators are compensated equitably? You don't even try. Instead, creators depend upon the randomness of the decisions of contributors. It won't always be fair, but it is doubtful that it would create a race to the bottom.
- int_19h 6y ago
  If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?
  - CM30 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a fair point. The old media only existed because of technological limits and a near monopoly over their market, and as new forms of media have arose, that monopoly has slowly fell apart. The internet has just provided the final nail in the coffin there, and all these attempts to fight for relevance/get payment from companies like Google and Facebook are a dying industry's attempt to basically postpone the inevitable.
  - quadrangle 6y ago
    The problem isn't volunteering or things being free. The problem is people getting bullshit jobs or even harmful-to-the-world jobs to pay the bills so they can do their volunteering. The problem is a world of extreme inequity in wealth and political power. The problem is that most products remain non-free by being encumbered by ads and paywalls. The fact is, even when things are totally free, big money finds a way to bury those things. Similar to people who used to rent DVDs from a store when their public library down the street had the same DVD on the shelf at no extra cost. If we could destroy the funding of the ad- and paywall-driven businesses, the free stuff could shine. Of course, better to move the funding to the free stuff and have it be even better.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>So...what next? How do creators get paid? Sponsored content that isn't totally abrasive to your audience. Lots of Youtubers seem to do it well. Alternatively you can do old school sidebar ads that are relevant to whatever your niche is. I'm on a forum for a niche industry. Nobody complains about the banner ads for companies who are relevant to that industry because they keep the forum running.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell. This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.
  - cerberusss 6y ago
    I broke down and started paying for YouTube. Another 12 bucks :) On the laptop, I block ads, but on the tablet, I like to use the official app.
- int_19h 6y ago
  How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...
david2ndaccount 6y ago
Merch. Merch is the answer.
- totetsu 6y ago
  Its always seems like a bit of a waste of the carbon budget to get another t-shirt to me. Digital stickers?
  - no_wizard 6y ago
    I’d buy digital knock knacks that I could use. Like stickers (that hopefully come in a nice png or svg format so I can spread the word and put it things)
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Yeah ... Who are these people who don't already have a drawer overflowing with dozens of T-shirts they never wear?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sandoooo 6y ago
Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in. Maybe we should go in the opposite direction: tax the creators to decrease content generation in order to increase signal-to-noise on high-quality content. Or at least force marginally-profitable content to be released free or not at all.
- totetsu 6y ago
  I find a lot of the noise in contemporary content is calls to action(payment). Your idea might just ensure content that is mostly about trying to get people to pay for it survives.
  - sandoooo 6y ago
    What it would do is put a price floor on content. People's willingness to pay, say, $5 instead of $1 for a piece of content is a strong filter, I'm pretty sure low-quality content that's purely CTA wouldn't survive.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      Why do you need state enforcement for such a filter? If you only want to see content that the author is asking $5+ for, that's a very simple filter to implement for any website that sells content (and many of them do just that).
      - sandoooo 6y ago
        The problem is that a lot of potentially viable content falls by default into the marginally-profitable category, where the small amount of utility they provide to the end-user is offset by the incessant user-monetization impulse. A price floor splits these marginal works into three categories: those that become free, those that die off, those that become viable at high margins. This seems to be a pretty great outcome for consumers.
- deleted 6y ago
tjoff 6y ago
I believe in micropayments, and I don't think there has been a compelling service for it. Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...
Taikonerd 6y ago
> So...what next? How do creators get paid? I think Flattr has (or had) a model like... 1. you give Flattr a constant $X per month (you choose the X) 2. Flattr tracks the content you consume, using a browser plugin 3. Flattr divides up your $X among the creators you viewed, and sends it to them I never used it, but it seems like an interesting model. I like the idea of spending a flat $30/month on "internet content", without agonizing about whether X webcomic deserves my Patreon support.
- pbuzbee 6y ago
  I like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly. I'm not sure what incentive there would be to increase the amount contributed though: seems like if users can pay any $X > 0 then it's not enough. Maybe there would need to be a bare minimum.
- avian 6y ago
  Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406 If there was one thing I was expecting to come out of the cryptocurrency craze, it was a better Flattr. Yet even that failed to materialize.
  - raisedbyninjas 6y ago
    No blockchain currently has the scale for this. FWIW, Visa couldn't handle this either. Youtube alone serves over 10,000 videos per second to just mobile clients. Add in podcasts, text content, music, games, etc. and it's a monumental task.
    - joncrane 6y ago
      You don't have to be as big as youtube. The only infrastructure you need is ingestion points for all the feeds, and then reporting mechanisms. The ingestion can just go into an autoscaling group. At that point your cloud costs track almost directly with your revenue, so a big AWS bill is a good sign.
chillwaves 6y ago
On Twitch, they use subscriptions (for ad free), ad revenue, merch, donations directly and donations via Twitch. Working really well for a lot of streamers. There is pretty much zero friction on the user end once a payment method is set up. Of course, this is a live entertainment type service and they are basically selling interaction with the audience, but I don't see why that type of payment scheme can't transfer to other products. On Twitch you can literally donate $.01 at a time.
cercatrova 6y ago
They don't. Or rather, there is some nuance to this. People value things that have high signal to noise ratios. I will read books (given they have a good review) over articles, or audiobooks over podcasts, both of which I pay for because I know that the signal is high relative to the noise. Creators, should they wish to make money, will move into these higher value productions. One might say that this may not work for all types of content, to which I say, there is always an analogue. Upcoming are paid newsletters where before they were usually free, for example, or in the worst case, people will offer money via Patreon.
- benrbray 6y ago
  I'm almost the complete opposite. I find that most people with a following don't understand at all what their audience finds compelling about their work. A book or an audiobook represents months or years of intentional thought put into compiling information that they think will sell. Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in. In contrast, an article/blog post or podcast is much more casual, like the author's stream of consciousness. I get a real glimpse of what their life/experience/work is like, not just the version of themselves that gets past the editing phase. As an example, I'm loving the Trash Taste [1] podcast even though I have zero interest whatsoever in watching content made by the participants individually. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q
  - learc83 6y ago
    > Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in. Nearly every single technical book I have ever read has pages and pages of fluff to pad it out to some arbitrary length that the author or the publisher thinks is necessary to make it worth the price. Something similar happens to YouTube videos once the creator stars making a living off them. They start making padding videos just to get something out for the week.
jldugger 6y ago
> So...what next? How do creators get paid? A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased). Total Book Price: US$ 3.94 Shipping: US$ 3.00 For just a smidge over $5 dollars, I got a world class textbook written by one of the best educators on the planet. In the era of coronavirus, I've finally sat down every night with it and have put in about 40 hours reading it (mostly doing the exercises), checking out some of the citations and references, making Anki cards, etc. As best I can tell, creators get paid by putting in high quality work of relevance and lasting value. Your average Youtuber ain't it.
- xosmel 6y ago
  What was the name of the book?
  - vikbytes 6y ago
    Not OP but a cursory search would suggest that it is this book: https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3CQgAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3C...
- yathern 6y ago
  By buying used, and spending $5 for content that you've used for 20 years, I wouldn't suggest you're providing better income to that professor than YouTubers get from Ads or Patreon
  - jldugger 6y ago
    I'm not, I'm saying the bar is very high. Physical content like a book has a residual value; you can -- and people do--sell it when you're done. The residual value after ten years is something like 5 bucks perhaps, especially considering a new edition was published that year. In contrast, patronage is pretty much a total writeoff.
    - nicky0 6y ago
z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
What's next is we dump this suicidal, money fetishizing, boat anchor of an economic system. Advertisements are little more than thinly veiled corporate propoganda, they are not an effective income generating solution unless you are the one controlling them like Google. Corporaticracy and capitalism, the lust for money and materialism they derive, and their unethical dependence on the exploitation of human labour and our natural resources in order to function are the reason we for the majority of our problems today.
lmm 6y ago
> So...what next? How do creators get paid? I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't even think that's such a bad thing; there is way too much "content" out there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently creating.
- glenstein 6y ago
  I think you might start seeing netflix-like consolidation into content packages. We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
  - felbane 6y ago
    We are already seeing this in its fledgling form. Sites like Masterclass, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc are all trying to carve out their chunk of the "curated collection of content from independent creators" pie. When it's all said and done, we're going to end right back up with the HBO/Showtime model for VOD across the board.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    There have been (and still are) many networks among YouTube channels already. Some like Linux Tech Tips have a number of channels and a pretty large team. Others are more corporate and adopt creators as they get popular, but the actual network/org is not as obvious since they kind of act in the background, getting sponsors and distributing funds and services to their affiliated creators. I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      *Linus Tech Tips
- shostack 6y ago
Lammy 6y ago
One thing I see some artists do is sell commission slots and then post the finished artwork for everyone. Some commissions are kept private, of course, but for many of them it's win-win-win to share: - The artists get paid and still get to display stuff publicly, attracting more fans and more commissions. - The fans get a chance to have their favorite artists draw their favorite things. - The vast majority of silent passersby get more reasons to keep coming back and maybe turn into paying fans too. Dealing with fans and managing expectations becomes even more of a can of worms when money gets involved, of course, and people tend to under-value creative work in general, but I've seen some people make that work for 10+ years now even before the era of Patreon and Gumroad and friends.
wutbrodo 6y ago
> Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. This was my read of the post too, strengthened by the complaint about Wikipedia. There are reasonable thoughts about one of the pitfalls of the subscription model, but the motivating complaint behind the post seems to be "compensating creators is annoying". It's possible there's a method for doing so at scale that's a Pareto improvement over all existing options, but I think it's just as likely that "paying" for things in any manner is going to cause friction. The payment isn't meant to be the pleasant part of the exchange for you; the content is.
jks 6y ago
I would like to see ads on websites, just not the terrible ads that almost all of them are. So far I have unblocked ethicalads.io, which has ads mainly on readthedocs.io but I recently noticed their ads on some blog site. Perhaps as browsers implement tracker blocking, there will be more space for this kind of ad networks.
galoisgirl 6y ago
It's not that I don't like paying. I don't like deciding whether I can afford another 5 bucks. The article mentions "$5/month adds up pretty quickly", well, it adds even quicker in other countries. See decision fatigue. I don't like tipping. I don't like feeling the responsibility of someone's livelihood on my shoulders. Maybe I'm a selfish bitch for putting my likes and someone's livelihood in the same sentence. I do like sharing, though, when I'm feeling financially secure. I like buying stuff. I love getting myself a nice big fat book of content. I love getting a bargain: lie to me that it's 50% off and I'm yours. I like Scribd for that reason. Not that I have a business model from this. The day I've paid my bills, or at Thanksgiving, talk to me about gratitude and giving to creators? Maybe there's no easy way around the fact that people don't like paying. If the money is valuable to creators, it's probably valuable for me too, and therefore I can't give it away easily.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Being a YouTube creator and expecting to just be able to make a living off making your videos is as naive as a band expecting to make a living off record sales. If you're a band then the real money is made with merch and performance. If you're a YouTube creator then you need to start thinking of your videos as promotion and provide some sort of high margin product you can shill every video. Example of a youTuber doing this right is GreyscaleGorilla which started out as just a guy doing very basic 3D software tutorials but once he built an audience then spread out into making 3D software plugins and resources. It works perfectly because you can use the product you sell in your tutorials.

Aeolun 6y ago

I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.

kalleboo 6y ago
I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage

CM30 6y ago

Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives. It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.

II2II 6y ago
While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution. It is probably the system that is most likely to encourage people to contribute based upon their assessed value of the content and the least likely system to be gamed. How do you ensure that creators are compensated equitably? You don't even try. Instead, creators depend upon the randomness of the decisions of contributors. It won't always be fair, but it is doubtful that it would create a race to the bottom.
int_19h 6y ago
If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?
- CM30 6y ago
  Yeah, that's a fair point. The old media only existed because of technological limits and a near monopoly over their market, and as new forms of media have arose, that monopoly has slowly fell apart. The internet has just provided the final nail in the coffin there, and all these attempts to fight for relevance/get payment from companies like Google and Facebook are a dying industry's attempt to basically postpone the inevitable.
- quadrangle 6y ago
  The problem isn't volunteering or things being free. The problem is people getting bullshit jobs or even harmful-to-the-world jobs to pay the bills so they can do their volunteering. The problem is a world of extreme inequity in wealth and political power. The problem is that most products remain non-free by being encumbered by ads and paywalls. The fact is, even when things are totally free, big money finds a way to bury those things. Similar to people who used to rent DVDs from a store when their public library down the street had the same DVD on the shelf at no extra cost. If we could destroy the funding of the ad- and paywall-driven businesses, the free stuff could shine. Of course, better to move the funding to the free stuff and have it be even better.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>So...what next? How do creators get paid? Sponsored content that isn't totally abrasive to your audience. Lots of Youtubers seem to do it well. Alternatively you can do old school sidebar ads that are relevant to whatever your niche is. I'm on a forum for a niche industry. Nobody complains about the banner ads for companies who are relevant to that industry because they keep the forum running.

peterwoerner 6y ago
Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell. This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.
drivingmenuts 6y ago
YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.
- cerberusss 6y ago
  I broke down and started paying for YouTube. Another 12 bucks :) On the laptop, I block ads, but on the tablet, I like to use the official app.
int_19h 6y ago
How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...

david2ndaccount 6y ago

Merch. Merch is the answer.

totetsu 6y ago
Its always seems like a bit of a waste of the carbon budget to get another t-shirt to me. Digital stickers?
- no_wizard 6y ago
  I’d buy digital knock knacks that I could use. Like stickers (that hopefully come in a nice png or svg format so I can spread the word and put it things)
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Yeah ... Who are these people who don't already have a drawer overflowing with dozens of T-shirts they never wear?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

sandoooo 6y ago

Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in. Maybe we should go in the opposite direction: tax the creators to decrease content generation in order to increase signal-to-noise on high-quality content. Or at least force marginally-profitable content to be released free or not at all.

totetsu 6y ago
I find a lot of the noise in contemporary content is calls to action(payment). Your idea might just ensure content that is mostly about trying to get people to pay for it survives.
- sandoooo 6y ago
  What it would do is put a price floor on content. People's willingness to pay, say, $5 instead of $1 for a piece of content is a strong filter, I'm pretty sure low-quality content that's purely CTA wouldn't survive.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Why do you need state enforcement for such a filter? If you only want to see content that the author is asking $5+ for, that's a very simple filter to implement for any website that sells content (and many of them do just that).
    - sandoooo 6y ago
      The problem is that a lot of potentially viable content falls by default into the marginally-profitable category, where the small amount of utility they provide to the end-user is offset by the incessant user-monetization impulse. A price floor splits these marginal works into three categories: those that become free, those that die off, those that become viable at high margins. This seems to be a pretty great outcome for consumers.
deleted 6y ago

tjoff 6y ago

I believe in micropayments, and I don't think there has been a compelling service for it. Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...

Taikonerd 6y ago

> So...what next? How do creators get paid? I think Flattr has (or had) a model like... 1. you give Flattr a constant $X per month (you choose the X) 2. Flattr tracks the content you consume, using a browser plugin 3. Flattr divides up your $X among the creators you viewed, and sends it to them I never used it, but it seems like an interesting model. I like the idea of spending a flat $30/month on "internet content", without agonizing about whether X webcomic deserves my Patreon support.

pbuzbee 6y ago
I like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly. I'm not sure what incentive there would be to increase the amount contributed though: seems like if users can pay any $X > 0 then it's not enough. Maybe there would need to be a bare minimum.
avian 6y ago
Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406 If there was one thing I was expecting to come out of the cryptocurrency craze, it was a better Flattr. Yet even that failed to materialize.
- raisedbyninjas 6y ago
  No blockchain currently has the scale for this. FWIW, Visa couldn't handle this either. Youtube alone serves over 10,000 videos per second to just mobile clients. Add in podcasts, text content, music, games, etc. and it's a monumental task.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    You don't have to be as big as youtube. The only infrastructure you need is ingestion points for all the feeds, and then reporting mechanisms. The ingestion can just go into an autoscaling group. At that point your cloud costs track almost directly with your revenue, so a big AWS bill is a good sign.

chillwaves 6y ago

On Twitch, they use subscriptions (for ad free), ad revenue, merch, donations directly and donations via Twitch. Working really well for a lot of streamers. There is pretty much zero friction on the user end once a payment method is set up. Of course, this is a live entertainment type service and they are basically selling interaction with the audience, but I don't see why that type of payment scheme can't transfer to other products. On Twitch you can literally donate $.01 at a time.

cercatrova 6y ago

They don't. Or rather, there is some nuance to this. People value things that have high signal to noise ratios. I will read books (given they have a good review) over articles, or audiobooks over podcasts, both of which I pay for because I know that the signal is high relative to the noise. Creators, should they wish to make money, will move into these higher value productions. One might say that this may not work for all types of content, to which I say, there is always an analogue. Upcoming are paid newsletters where before they were usually free, for example, or in the worst case, people will offer money via Patreon.

benrbray 6y ago
I'm almost the complete opposite. I find that most people with a following don't understand at all what their audience finds compelling about their work. A book or an audiobook represents months or years of intentional thought put into compiling information that they think will sell. Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in. In contrast, an article/blog post or podcast is much more casual, like the author's stream of consciousness. I get a real glimpse of what their life/experience/work is like, not just the version of themselves that gets past the editing phase. As an example, I'm loving the Trash Taste [1] podcast even though I have zero interest whatsoever in watching content made by the participants individually. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q
- learc83 6y ago
  > Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in. Nearly every single technical book I have ever read has pages and pages of fluff to pad it out to some arbitrary length that the author or the publisher thinks is necessary to make it worth the price. Something similar happens to YouTube videos once the creator stars making a living off them. They start making padding videos just to get something out for the week.

jldugger 6y ago

> So...what next? How do creators get paid? A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased). Total Book Price: US$ 3.94 Shipping: US$ 3.00 For just a smidge over $5 dollars, I got a world class textbook written by one of the best educators on the planet. In the era of coronavirus, I've finally sat down every night with it and have put in about 40 hours reading it (mostly doing the exercises), checking out some of the citations and references, making Anki cards, etc. As best I can tell, creators get paid by putting in high quality work of relevance and lasting value. Your average Youtuber ain't it.

xosmel 6y ago
What was the name of the book?
- vikbytes 6y ago
  Not OP but a cursory search would suggest that it is this book: https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3CQgAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistics.html?id=wj3C...
yathern 6y ago
By buying used, and spending $5 for content that you've used for 20 years, I wouldn't suggest you're providing better income to that professor than YouTubers get from Ads or Patreon
- jldugger 6y ago
  I'm not, I'm saying the bar is very high. Physical content like a book has a residual value; you can -- and people do--sell it when you're done. The residual value after ten years is something like 5 bucks perhaps, especially considering a new edition was published that year. In contrast, patronage is pretty much a total writeoff.
  - nicky0 6y ago

z3ncyberpunk 6y ago

What's next is we dump this suicidal, money fetishizing, boat anchor of an economic system. Advertisements are little more than thinly veiled corporate propoganda, they are not an effective income generating solution unless you are the one controlling them like Google. Corporaticracy and capitalism, the lust for money and materialism they derive, and their unethical dependence on the exploitation of human labour and our natural resources in order to function are the reason we for the majority of our problems today.

lmm 6y ago

> So...what next? How do creators get paid? I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't even think that's such a bad thing; there is way too much "content" out there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently creating.

glenstein 6y ago
I think you might start seeing netflix-like consolidation into content packages. We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.
- felbane 6y ago
  We are already seeing this in its fledgling form. Sites like Masterclass, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc are all trying to carve out their chunk of the "curated collection of content from independent creators" pie. When it's all said and done, we're going to end right back up with the HBO/Showtime model for VOD across the board.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  There have been (and still are) many networks among YouTube channels already. Some like Linux Tech Tips have a number of channels and a pretty large team. Others are more corporate and adopt creators as they get popular, but the actual network/org is not as obvious since they kind of act in the background, getting sponsors and distributing funds and services to their affiliated creators. I just don't see anything off-YouTube as gaining critical mass in the near future though.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    *Linus Tech Tips
shostack 6y ago

Lammy 6y ago

One thing I see some artists do is sell commission slots and then post the finished artwork for everyone. Some commissions are kept private, of course, but for many of them it's win-win-win to share: - The artists get paid and still get to display stuff publicly, attracting more fans and more commissions. - The fans get a chance to have their favorite artists draw their favorite things. - The vast majority of silent passersby get more reasons to keep coming back and maybe turn into paying fans too. Dealing with fans and managing expectations becomes even more of a can of worms when money gets involved, of course, and people tend to under-value creative work in general, but I've seen some people make that work for 10+ years now even before the era of Patreon and Gumroad and friends.

wutbrodo 6y ago

> Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. This was my read of the post too, strengthened by the complaint about Wikipedia. There are reasonable thoughts about one of the pitfalls of the subscription model, but the motivating complaint behind the post seems to be "compensating creators is annoying". It's possible there's a method for doing so at scale that's a Pareto improvement over all existing options, but I think it's just as likely that "paying" for things in any manner is going to cause friction. The payment isn't meant to be the pleasant part of the exchange for you; the content is.

jks 6y ago

I would like to see ads on websites, just not the terrible ads that almost all of them are. So far I have unblocked ethicalads.io, which has ads mainly on readthedocs.io but I recently noticed their ads on some blog site. Perhaps as browsers implement tracker blocking, there will be more space for this kind of ad networks.

galoisgirl 6y ago

It's not that I don't like paying. I don't like deciding whether I can afford another 5 bucks. The article mentions "$5/month adds up pretty quickly", well, it adds even quicker in other countries. See decision fatigue. I don't like tipping. I don't like feeling the responsibility of someone's livelihood on my shoulders. Maybe I'm a selfish bitch for putting my likes and someone's livelihood in the same sentence. I do like sharing, though, when I'm feeling financially secure. I like buying stuff. I love getting myself a nice big fat book of content. I love getting a bargain: lie to me that it's 50% off and I'm yours. I like Scribd for that reason. Not that I have a business model from this. The day I've paid my bills, or at Thanksgiving, talk to me about gratitude and giving to creators? Maybe there's no easy way around the fact that people don't like paying. If the money is valuable to creators, it's probably valuable for me too, and therefore I can't give it away easily.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Being a YouTube creator and expecting to just be able to make a living off making your videos is as naive as a band expecting to make a living off record sales. If you're a band then the real money is made with merch and performance. If you're a YouTube creator then you need to start thinking of your videos as promotion and provide some sort of high margin product you can shill every video. Example of a youTuber doing this right is GreyscaleGorilla which started out as just a guy doing very basic 3D software tutorials but once he built an audience then spread out into making 3D software plugins and resources. It works perfectly because you can use the product you sell in your tutorials.