14 ms·

Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy

168 points by elsewhen 6y ago

chrisseaton 6y ago
'The missing creator middle class' is funny because so many of these creators come from the middle class in the first place! That's because middle class teens have the time to make videos, not needing part-time jobs, and have the money to buy good cameras to record with, nice homes to record in, and holidays to glamorous locations to vlog about There was a debate recently about how working class people are underrepresented and it's all middle class children at private schools and teens at elite universities. That definitely seems to be the case for the YouTubers my daughter is interested in - they're very nice people but they are a bit relentlessly middle class.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Any discussion of middle class should start by defining middle class. Otherwise, it always seems pointless since no one is talking about the same thing.
  - meagher 6y ago
    ^ this. I’d venture a guess that the concept (“Middle Class of the Creator Economy”) was thought of before any backing was found.
  - aij 6y ago
    The [Pew Research article they linked to](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...) uses this definition: > In our analysis, “middle-income” Americans are adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size. And they seem to use "middle-income" and "middle-class" interchangeably. Note that this definition is quite different than what may have been used in your history/economics classes in school/college.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Example: 18/20 active Youtube indie musicians that I looked at with more than 100,000 subscribers in one Gen Z demographic are middle-class/wealthy. All have gone full-time in music, even if they finished a non-music university degree. But the remaining two have the most talent, and will do fine regardless of finances. Because killing it. :)
ghaff 6y ago
>Ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published his “Long Tail” theory in 2004, the idea has been endlessly reinforced, contradicted, and debated. He argued that the internet’s removal of physical limitations (local audiences, scarce shelf space) would empower niche products and creators to flourish. I'm not sure that's what Anderson argued (though I would have to go back and read his original piece). Collectively, the long tail is large even while a power law distribution means that a relatively small amount of content captures an outsized amount of attention. But that doesn't mean individual content creators in the long tail capture much attention (and compensation). Otherwise, I guess the author is arguing that platforms should adopt strategies to create a gentler power law distribution so that more creators are in the knee of the curve because that would create a healthier environment for more people. I guess I don't really disagree with that although I'll note that most creators will still be in the long tail. [ADDED: And ultimately it's really the users that determine the distribution even if the platform can influence it.]
- e2e4 6y ago
  Good point about the distribution aspects. I think what the author has tried to argue for is heavy/fat tail.
dnautics 6y ago
The article fails to account an important fundamental fact: attention is rivalrous and time is scarce. We don't want to settle for mediocre content or muddle through mediocre search results. If searching fails us, we will use side channels like sharing, and the accrual of readership may self-sort into the same aggregation patterns anyway. Or, move to a new platform.
- ghaff 6y ago
  If a platform wants to steer me towards things I may not know about to help me discover previously unknown content I may well be interested in, that's one thing. But I don't want a platform to "spread the wealth" by steering me to less interesting stuff because it's good for the platform or just "fairer."
  - purple-again 6y ago
    Sorry citizen, Game of Thrones has reached its download limit. May we suggest The Wheel of Time of Sword of Truth instead? Quite the dystopia you paint. More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.
- DennisP 6y ago
  If the only strategy were to focus more attention on mediocre content, that would be a problem. Hence the second strategy, "serve heterogeneity in user preferences & empower niche." E.g. I'm subscribed to a bunch of obscure, specialized subreddits that would be deadly boring to most people. But my reddit is far more interesting to me than the reddit I see when I'm not logged in, where posts have thousands of upvotes instead of dozens.
overton 6y ago
How about instead of fetishizing ascendance to the middle class we start building a society where working class people can live in dignity too?
- x3c 6y ago
  They aren't mutually exclusive
- whatshisface 6y ago
  That means putting them in the middle class. Middle class means you have income from both labor and capital, it includes plumbers with healthy retirement savings. The only way to be lower class is to have severely insufficient savings.
hairofadog 6y ago
I have long felt this way about movies, books, and music. I don’t have data to back it up, but it feels like there was a lot more quality, middle-budget content in the arts a few decades ago, vs. recent years in which everything seems to be a blockbuster or a flop. People dream of striking it rich, not of making a respectable living. It’s like startup culture has infiltrated nearly everything; if it’s not going to make you a billionaire, it’s not worth spending time on. Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)
- kace91 6y ago
  It's an issue with engagement culture, more than startup culture I think... All the big players in media nowadays are fighting for a piece of your attention. The consequence is that the public is forced to filter way more who gets to have their free time, and make the conscious choice of checking out old preferences way less. I remember years ago it was a usual thing for me to find myself bored and start checking out authors I liked (writers, singers, movie directors, whatever). I'd then find out what they've been up to and check out their new stuff. Nowadays I very rarely do that, because I always have an ever increasing pile of media to consume I can barely keep up with, so I don't go out to find new things. In such an environment an artist can't choose to build an audience very slowly over decades because there's no retention. The only way to succeed is to explode virally and then keep pushing content constantly to remind people of your existence for as long as you can surf the wave.
  - daxfohl 6y ago
    The other thing is that what indie creators do now is different from what they used to. Blogs, Instagrams, YouTube clips, tweets, apps, games, etc. Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.
thomas 6y ago
Quite a flawed article. To think you can shape people's watching behavior towards second-rate content is to be confused about how people actually spend their scarce time. Sure, people can use help finding things they like, but how were these large yet new creators discovered in the first place? Clearly there are mechanisms for rising to the top in each category... but perhaps there is just too much stickiness at the top? Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this. edited: for typos
- meagher 6y ago
  I think you’re right, but your assumption that people won’t consume “second-rate content” assumes that “first-rate content” wins on the big platforms. The platforms make kings and the quality of the content isn’t always “first-rate”
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  'confused about how people actually spend their scarce time' Nothing in your post back this up with experience or some data But the bigger problem is that you have a circular argument - you already assumed spme content is second-rate before anyone has viewed it or reviwed it. Sony's 23'rd remake of spiderman and endless marvel movies are allegendly first-rate content, despite having zero emotinal intelligence, relevant issues or plot. Meanwhile there is probably some great plotwriting languising somewhere, waiting to be discovered
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it. The major issue WRT Hollywood is that everyone is playing it mega safe, fixating on a genre or niche for years before changing tack. Before superheroes we had zombies, rom-coms, 3D, to name a few. Superheroes is mostly only notable because it has made so much money for such a long time, but it will eventually peter out; I’m not the only person I know who thinks there are too many supe movies to catch up with.
FpUser 6y ago
Here is a simple math. How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life? I suspect that the answer starts at a 1000 at least. And the creator is not alone. Others will compete for that short amount of time an average person can spare. Also people have other things to do rather than watching youtube/whatever so the chances that the creator finds that 1000 people are getting really thin. I think it is safe to assume the dilution factor is 100 at least. Then add some statistical distribution of market share each creator has, the ability of people to gravitate to already existing communities and suddenly you will discover that the world can not support too many creators at all. Of course I've pulled the numbers out of my own ... but I think it is reasonable assumption.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life?" I don't think the question makes sence - like what does it actyally mean, obviously we aren't talking about food. Is it perhaps better phares as: If average amount of money people are willing spend on entertainment, how many creators can a million people support? But what about people who make repair tutorials, etc, are they included? Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? Are game developers i cluded in this?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? And time. For a given person, I think it roughly is. I'm probably going to spend about the same time (and money) watching video somewhat independently of the quality of content available (within reason). Preferences may shift over time--I spend more time reading things online relative to reading books than I did 20 years ago. But broadly, more or better entertainment options won't really shift my total time and money budget.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I am a writer and commentator (in the Czech Republic). I have about 3500 people on my mailing list and about 10 thousand occasional readers. I can make reasonable money by selling my books online, having my own e-shop is great, because there is no need to pay various middle men. 2020 was a good year and my total revenue from this business is comparable to what a Google software engineer makes here in Prague. I used to code for living, this is a much less stressful way of life. But the total amount of supporters necessary exceeds 1000 by a large margin. Even if 1000 people bought two of my books yearly, I would struggle financially.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shams93 6y ago
The technology of recording itself is a lot to blame for the near total loss of the creator economy. For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century. Creators are being destroyed by the wealth of available content. Why should someone listen to my music even if its extremely creative when they have the entire cannon of Duke Ellington available for free from their $9.95 per month?
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century" Technically true, but changing moods and fashion mean that relatively few contemporary people will spend their life listening to Fats Domino. Only the very best of the past has even chance to be heard.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  Because they dislike Jazz? I had a fit once and put on some Glen Miller. I won't say it wasn't very good, but it wasn't something I am interested in at the time. If anything, modern music is more spread out than ever allowing more subcultures to have their favorite music niche, something that wasn't possible in the sixties.
booleandilemma 6y ago
For YouTube and TikTok at least, a "creator middle class" isn't possible. People become popular on these platforms not so much for what they do but how they look. Pokimane, for instance, doesn't have 6 million subscribers because she plays video games. She has 6 million subscribers because people find her attractive. The content she produces is incidental. As long as the content produced involves the creators themselves, the most attractive people are going to bubble towards the top and take the largest slices of the creator pie, and that can't be changed.
- Avtomatk 6y ago
  I think there are different niches, pokimane belongs to the niche of teen simps (to which most of the internet consumers belong). But there are also other niches: comedy, travel, music, gameplays, competitive gameplays, funny gameplays, politics, science, etc. Where looks aren't everything... In other niches, you can grab the public's attention with attractive thumbnails.
- dugditches 6y ago
  While this may be partly true, there are several 'talking hands' creators that do very well, at least in more 'informative' content(AvE, This Old Tony, etc)
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
I think the public is assailed by so much content that it unconsciously protects itself against it. One way is the star system, which is what we are seeing here.
bwhiting2356 6y ago
I think it’s definitely true that there's some undiscovered talent out there. But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world. Many people create art for the wrong reasons. Their goal is to be the center of attention, but they don’t have anything interesting to say, haven’t put in very much work, haven’t really considered why what they created is in the best interest of the audience, not just in the best interest of the artist. If a platform goes too far in recommending content that isn’t very good, and taking resources away from its successful creators and redistributing them to its less successful, their viewers and talent will leave for another platform. For most of the long-tail creators, their best chance at a middle class income will be a day job off the platform, or in a job as support system for a successful creator that hires staff (crew, marketing, props, editing).
- CM30 6y ago
  > But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world. Hmm, as someone working in the media in some fashion, I'd say there's a huge number of creators that deserve an audience and income who aren't getting it now. Those 6 or so lists of underrated gaming YouTubers I posted in the last few years should be evidence of that to some degree (though many of the people included did take off afterwards). Every week or so I come across at least one creator who I believe should be much more successful than they currently are.
- zanny 6y ago
  picarto.tv is an art streaming site. If you looked at the top hundred streams there the artists are all probably studio grade, but maybe a tenth of them actually make a living off their art. A lot of people are making a lot of good stuff for free online and making pennies on it because in practice its not talent that is scarce, its eyeball access and virality. Your average webcomic artist today does not have the resources to exploit the psychology of target demographics the way Disney will for their next streaming show or the war chest to shove ads for it down throats until it reaches a critical self perpetuating mass of popularity. That doesn't make the stuff they make less worthy of being enjoyed, though. They just can't spread the message by themselves.
kvetching 6y ago
How do you become a successful creator if the search algorithm has changed into a social engineering / propaganda / corporate shill experiment? See this new video today by an independent creator. He may be a satanist but I believe satanists deserve to have their voices heard also. "Youtube Has Basically Shadowbanned All Independent Political/News Commentary" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s
rmason 6y ago
She's got it all wrong about the music business. It used to be that artists made most of their money from records. They toured merely to create more fans that would buy their music. Now it's flipped 180 degrees. Musicians make all their money from touring. They release records to find new fans who will buy tickets to their shows. We live in a golden era for the little guy. Before the Internet if you didn't own the means of production no matter how talented you might be you made money for those who did. Now you can start a SaaS company and bootstrap your way into a living because the means of production have become ridiculously cheap. A musician can release music on the Internet and go from a local following to a regional one and if they're good enough a national one. I well remember it taking Bob Seger ten years to go from a Detroit artist to a regional success and another ten years until he was 'discovered' and overnight became a national one. Bruce Springsteen did it faster because he was on the east coast and got a Time magazine cover. The only difference now is that the young want success overnight and that is rare. Are you committed enough to work for ten years or more to reach the level of finding a thousand fans? Sometimes that means taking a lesser paying job to learn. Or to have the time to code or play gigs on the weekend. Thing about the Internet is you find your true talent level fairly quickly and you might not always like what you learn;<). Do you want to know Vine's biggest problem? They were owned by Twitter! There is room for only one product to succeed there despite its best efforts to continually sabotage themselves. FYI I do like Twitter.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > Musicians make all their money from touring Until this year, when that income source has been largely obliterated.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    And, at least for EDM, seems to have been replaced by Twitch. I'd never used Twitch for more than a minute before this year. But now I'm on there all day (I'm watching right now in fact) because you can pretty much find a music artist streaming at any time of day, any day of the week. I'm watching someone from Germany right now. She's a bit unique in that she publishes her real time subscriber number. If you do the math you can see she makes about $25,000/mo just from subs, and that doesn't include bits during hype trains.
carapace 6y ago
I think that the end game (we should be working towards) is food forests and robo-factories. Institute UBI. We create a system where our needs are met automatically, by design. Then the economic question fades away. Part of the problem I have with this sort of thing is that it seldom addresses the "other half" of personal finance: how you spend your money. I can't write a big long thing about it right now, but check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/about https://earlyretirementextreme.com/about
- Avtomatk 6y ago
  Robots are more efficient at work, they are easy to specialize (they do not need studies, just a program and its parts are made to measure for the job) and they consume less energy than human beings, so that should really be our future, intellectual humans and worker robots. Food forests would be a quick early solution, the long-term solution would be the creation of vitamin supplements that contain all the necessary nutrients at a low cost and faster compared to what it takes to grow plants. > "and let others determine if it is working or playing" (quote in your web page) I do not distinguish between play and work when I do research in mathematics, but I have to work as a programmer because mathematicians are starving in Latin America (It is a phrase to say that they do not earn much, for those dumbasses who do not understand the joke and downvote me) and worse someone like me, 19 years old, without work experience nor university degree.
lelandbatey 6y ago
I have had my perspective challenged a great deal, not by this article, but instead by checking my assumptions against the numbers using the Graphtreon[0] site linked in a sub-article[1] to the parent article. I'd assumed that there was a solid, or at least "quiet but present", middle class of content creators. I believed this because I felt like I follow a set of content creators which where pretty far outside the "mainstream", since I didn't observe them having "superstar" numbers, nor did I ever see them casually mentioned outside of their own content. Looking at the data, all of them are in the top 2,000 Patreon users and most of them are in the top 1,000. Here's a compacted list: | Creator Name | Patreon Rank | Estimated Monthly | | | | Income (Patreon) | |---------------------------|--------------|-------------------| | Well There’s Your Problem | 108 | $11,196.00 | | LoadingReadyRun | 411 | $14,772.00 | | Jay Foreman | 995 | $2,620.00 | | Summoning Salt | 1478 | $2,026.00 | | Wendover Productions | 1684 | $2,220.00 | | Practical Engineering | 1872 | $1,600.00 | The creator that stands out most is the #1 spot holder, the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, each recounted in a very irreverent and roundabout style. I primarily watch this podcast through YouTube, and their YouTube content gets what I'd consider very "acceptable" view rates, on the order of 50k - 90k total views. From that, I would have expected them to fall more in the ~$1,000 tier of monthly Patreon income, but instead they're enjoying wild success. I have to assume their success comes from them doing well on platforms outside of YouTube, and their consistent marketing of Patreon rewards (additional content for Patreon subscribers). Goes to show that there's more than one way to find success, though the number of paths still seems pretty constrained. [0] - https://graphtreon.com https://graphtreon.com [1] - https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/02/patreon-content-creators-monthly-minimum-wage/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/02/patreon-content-...
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
Techno-club.net was built for this purpose. It's artists who normally residence in clubs and instead play their sets live on the site on the weekends. It's growing rapidly. Check them out if you are a techno fan. Edit: this was meant as a reply to a comment below. Apologies.
Ericson2314 6y ago
This is a sort of milquetoast piece: no serious social scientist should be using political hack jargain like "American Dream" and "Middle Class" as if they describe real material phenomena and aren't just memes (in the original scene). The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. That said, glad they close out with UBI. If we can't quota the views per video from above, we can at least provide a revenue floor. We're a non-society with with centralized media: increasingly atomized associated people transfixed by the machine. Only in rebuilding society in meat space forces the sparsely connected graph that coupled with technology allows heterogeneity to really shine.
- absolutelyrad 6y ago
  > The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. Interesting observation.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    On second thought, "dissemination" / "distribution" would have been clearer. Don't think it matters so much how much money is blown in the recording studio.
- wmf 6y ago
  The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. Why? Isn't that a function of "the algorithm" which can be changed?
  - absolutelyrad 6y ago
    Someone like TikTok, yes, but TikTok is the exception, not the norm. Maybe this works when the content quality difference is limited between top and bottom creators. Instagram could pull off what TikTok did, but not YouTube.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
Thorentis 6y ago
The problem with capitalism isn't that there are too many capitalists, but that there are too few.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
The middle mentioned about great deal etc. whilst important I cannot help to notice if we cannot allow minor to work, the immediate example of 14 something to become a big star would not happen. Of course she might be forced to do child Labour for tiktok or YouTube. But that kind of mismatch of underlying superstar economics vs we need a salary for all is a problem cannot be solved by the new platform. The winner take it all is an issue. This is totally different from the issue of top 1% controlling the politics and finances in the old (finance based) economy. Solution needed but not hers.
meheleventyone 6y ago
The creator economy is just an outgrowth of celebrity culture. I think in that regard it’s pretty interesting in that it does have something of a middle class. Or at least micro celebrities making a middle class living in their niche. But it all follows a power law distribution and there isn’t much I can see that will improve that. It’s always going to be the preserve of the few. The real middle class in the creator economy is with all the people supplying these celebrities. Working on building tools, platforms, content like games and providing services and so on.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Let me quote one old guy not this all new person https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr... I do not think he will survive in the older days. Bit in the new economy and have a few hundreds Patreon he got enough to live by in USA. Not much just write an article a day or two and filter and react to fan comment. Not sure he saved enough as USA has no health and he lived alone. When he stopped writing for 2 days without saying it, I really started to worry. ... USA is so harsh in this aspects. But guess that is a reality. Still read him everyday. And he is sixty something.
estreeper 6y ago
I might add a #11 on to this: ensure that the financial incentives of your platform align with those of your creators. I think that a lot of problems arise for creators when these are not aligned, for instance, in many advertising-driven models. YouTube, which has received a lot of creator backlash, will always be pressured financially to serve the needs of advertisers first, since they are the ones putting money into the system. YouTube doesn't want to do things that are bad for creators, but creators are not their primary customers. Another example of misalignment is the case of Spotify, who sold significant stakes to the major record labels to bring them on board. CEO Daniel Ek says (probably sincerely) that they want to help one million artists live off of their art. Spotify renewed its deal with Universal Music Group in July, and Ek, in a podcast [1] last year, in spite of repeating the one million artists goal, went on to discuss their desire to provide additional services to the labels, which would seemingly run counter to this in favor of preserving existing power structures. Some of this must also be a scale problem: once you reach a certain size and have made deals with big existing players to get there, you need to serve their interests because the risk of losing them is too great. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/
benlivengood 6y ago
11. Creators could move to countries with very cheap cost of living (outsource themselves). 12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size. 13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts. The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month. About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained. What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets. I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.
dehrmann 6y ago
I'm not sure if this can ever exist in a world with scarcity. > a recent study of kids ages eight to 12 found that nearly 30% aspire to become YouTubers People will always want to go out there, do their own thing, and get paid a middle-class wage for it. The problem is there's a surplus of these people, most actually aren't talented enough to achieve that, and for those who don't have a natural market fit with what they do, they'll have to compromise their vision. It reminds me of artists getting priced out of a gentrifying urban center. It takes away the character of the neighborhood, but who is to say their art is good, worth fighting for, and that they're more deserving of their apartment than someone with enough money to afford the apartment. Basically, I don't want to subsidize someone's hobby/lifestyle. I completely support them doing what they want, I just don't want to hear complaints that there's no money in it.
- afterwalk 6y ago
  I wonder what percentage of kids age 8-12 want to become a professional athlete. I bet it's at least 100-1000x than the amount of job opening at the "can make a full time income" level. In that case it's mostly the parents that subsidize the lifestyle up until college level.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    I have a high school classmate who played pro football for a couple of years. I never got the impression his parents did that much for him to subsidize foodball; it's not like rich parents trying to train their kids to be world-class squash players. It still could have been a $500-$5,000 per year subsidy, though.
- harimau777 6y ago
  I don't know if this is accurate or romanticized, but my perception is that in the past people who wanted to live as artists were able to do so as long as they were willing to give up some material comfort. For example, maybe they could work a day job (stereotypically waiting tables) and still make enough money for a studio in a bad part of town. It doesn't seem like that's the case today. Unless you have a profession or work multiple jobs (both of which prohibit having enough time to seriously pursue art) you are completely priced out of America's cosmopolitan cities.
stemlord 6y ago
There's something wrong with a society that conflates the arts with the entertainment industry.
Animats 6y ago
Arguably, the middle class was the result of economic friction. If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners. Historically, distance was a big source of economic friction. This make local retailing and manufacturing a profitable enterprise. As shipping became cheaper and more reliable, local retailing and manufacturing became economically impractical. Another source of economic friction that generated a middle class was the need for a large number of middle managers and clerical staff to operate a large enterprise. This had two effects. One, it employed large numbers of people. Two, the cost of operating the organization scaled faster than linearly, and this prevented organizations from scaling to planetary scale. Computers have eliminated both those obstacles. Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.
- mjfl 6y ago
  > If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners. There is technically no contradiction between the existence of a middle class and the existence of a small number of big winners. > Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever. are software engineers the upper class then or are they part of the proletariat? What about doctors and lawyers?
  - burlesona 6y ago
    The upper class, without a doubt.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Historically, the upper class was a class of rentiers who didn't have to "work" as such. Programmers would rather be part of the same class as rich merchants in the past.
      - meheleventyone 6y ago
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
The creator economy creates an exponential distribution of wealth, not a normal distribution.

168 points by elsewhen 6y ago

'The missing creator middle class' is funny because so many of these creators come from the middle class in the first place! That's because middle class teens have the time to make videos, not needing part-time jobs, and have the money to buy good cameras to record with, nice homes to record in, and holidays to glamorous locations to vlog about There was a debate recently about how working class people are underrepresented and it's all middle class children at private schools and teens at elite universities. That definitely seems to be the case for the YouTubers my daughter is interested in - they're very nice people but they are a bit relentlessly middle class.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Any discussion of middle class should start by defining middle class. Otherwise, it always seems pointless since no one is talking about the same thing.
- meagher 6y ago
  ^ this. I’d venture a guess that the concept (“Middle Class of the Creator Economy”) was thought of before any backing was found.
- aij 6y ago
  The [Pew Research article they linked to](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...) uses this definition: > In our analysis, “middle-income” Americans are adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size. And they seem to use "middle-income" and "middle-class" interchangeably. Note that this definition is quite different than what may have been used in your history/economics classes in school/college.
deleted 6y ago
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redis_mlc 6y ago
Example: 18/20 active Youtube indie musicians that I looked at with more than 100,000 subscribers in one Gen Z demographic are middle-class/wealthy. All have gone full-time in music, even if they finished a non-music university degree. But the remaining two have the most talent, and will do fine regardless of finances. Because killing it. :)

ghaff 6y ago

>Ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published his “Long Tail” theory in 2004, the idea has been endlessly reinforced, contradicted, and debated. He argued that the internet’s removal of physical limitations (local audiences, scarce shelf space) would empower niche products and creators to flourish. I'm not sure that's what Anderson argued (though I would have to go back and read his original piece). Collectively, the long tail is large even while a power law distribution means that a relatively small amount of content captures an outsized amount of attention. But that doesn't mean individual content creators in the long tail capture much attention (and compensation). Otherwise, I guess the author is arguing that platforms should adopt strategies to create a gentler power law distribution so that more creators are in the knee of the curve because that would create a healthier environment for more people. I guess I don't really disagree with that although I'll note that most creators will still be in the long tail. [ADDED: And ultimately it's really the users that determine the distribution even if the platform can influence it.]

e2e4 6y ago
Good point about the distribution aspects. I think what the author has tried to argue for is heavy/fat tail.

dnautics 6y ago

The article fails to account an important fundamental fact: attention is rivalrous and time is scarce. We don't want to settle for mediocre content or muddle through mediocre search results. If searching fails us, we will use side channels like sharing, and the accrual of readership may self-sort into the same aggregation patterns anyway. Or, move to a new platform.

ghaff 6y ago
If a platform wants to steer me towards things I may not know about to help me discover previously unknown content I may well be interested in, that's one thing. But I don't want a platform to "spread the wealth" by steering me to less interesting stuff because it's good for the platform or just "fairer."
- purple-again 6y ago
  Sorry citizen, Game of Thrones has reached its download limit. May we suggest The Wheel of Time of Sword of Truth instead? Quite the dystopia you paint. More importantly I wanted to watch Walking Dead and Game of Thrones not on their own merit but preciously because they entered some kind of cultural flashpoint where all the people I cared about were watching these things. It was more important to me to be able to talk to them about the show we were watching than it was for me to enjoy the content. It’s the same for the music I chose when I was young (in my old age music had become background noise, something 15 year old me never would have believed). I am willing to bet this phenomenon both already has a name and is majorly responsible for the power laws we see in content creation domains.
DennisP 6y ago
If the only strategy were to focus more attention on mediocre content, that would be a problem. Hence the second strategy, "serve heterogeneity in user preferences & empower niche." E.g. I'm subscribed to a bunch of obscure, specialized subreddits that would be deadly boring to most people. But my reddit is far more interesting to me than the reddit I see when I'm not logged in, where posts have thousands of upvotes instead of dozens.

overton 6y ago

How about instead of fetishizing ascendance to the middle class we start building a society where working class people can live in dignity too?

x3c 6y ago
They aren't mutually exclusive
whatshisface 6y ago
That means putting them in the middle class. Middle class means you have income from both labor and capital, it includes plumbers with healthy retirement savings. The only way to be lower class is to have severely insufficient savings.

hairofadog 6y ago

I have long felt this way about movies, books, and music. I don’t have data to back it up, but it feels like there was a lot more quality, middle-budget content in the arts a few decades ago, vs. recent years in which everything seems to be a blockbuster or a flop. People dream of striking it rich, not of making a respectable living. It’s like startup culture has infiltrated nearly everything; if it’s not going to make you a billionaire, it’s not worth spending time on. Some recent exceptions that make me feel hope for the middle class of the arts: Etsy, Netflix & Hulu, the world of podcasting. In all three of these places you can see people trying out ideas and making a living. It’s true that the businesses themselves – Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, etc. – are decidedly not middle class, the content creators on their platforms seem to be. (I can’t think of equivalents in books or music... SoundCloud? I got nothing for books.)

kace91 6y ago
It's an issue with engagement culture, more than startup culture I think... All the big players in media nowadays are fighting for a piece of your attention. The consequence is that the public is forced to filter way more who gets to have their free time, and make the conscious choice of checking out old preferences way less. I remember years ago it was a usual thing for me to find myself bored and start checking out authors I liked (writers, singers, movie directors, whatever). I'd then find out what they've been up to and check out their new stuff. Nowadays I very rarely do that, because I always have an ever increasing pile of media to consume I can barely keep up with, so I don't go out to find new things. In such an environment an artist can't choose to build an audience very slowly over decades because there's no retention. The only way to succeed is to explode virally and then keep pushing content constantly to remind people of your existence for as long as you can surf the wave.
- daxfohl 6y ago
  The other thing is that what indie creators do now is different from what they used to. Blogs, Instagrams, YouTube clips, tweets, apps, games, etc. Making a whole movie, writing a whole book, nobody takes time to consume those things anymore, much less produce them.

thomas 6y ago

Quite a flawed article. To think you can shape people's watching behavior towards second-rate content is to be confused about how people actually spend their scarce time. Sure, people can use help finding things they like, but how were these large yet new creators discovered in the first place? Clearly there are mechanisms for rising to the top in each category... but perhaps there is just too much stickiness at the top? Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this. edited: for typos

meagher 6y ago
I think you’re right, but your assumption that people won’t consume “second-rate content” assumes that “first-rate content” wins on the big platforms. The platforms make kings and the quality of the content isn’t always “first-rate”
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
'confused about how people actually spend their scarce time' Nothing in your post back this up with experience or some data But the bigger problem is that you have a circular argument - you already assumed spme content is second-rate before anyone has viewed it or reviwed it. Sony's 23'rd remake of spiderman and endless marvel movies are allegendly first-rate content, despite having zero emotinal intelligence, relevant issues or plot. Meanwhile there is probably some great plotwriting languising somewhere, waiting to be discovered
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it. The major issue WRT Hollywood is that everyone is playing it mega safe, fixating on a genre or niche for years before changing tack. Before superheroes we had zombies, rom-coms, 3D, to name a few. Superheroes is mostly only notable because it has made so much money for such a long time, but it will eventually peter out; I’m not the only person I know who thinks there are too many supe movies to catch up with.

FpUser 6y ago

Here is a simple math. How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life? I suspect that the answer starts at a 1000 at least. And the creator is not alone. Others will compete for that short amount of time an average person can spare. Also people have other things to do rather than watching youtube/whatever so the chances that the creator finds that 1000 people are getting really thin. I think it is safe to assume the dilution factor is 100 at least. Then add some statistical distribution of market share each creator has, the ability of people to gravitate to already existing communities and suddenly you will discover that the world can not support too many creators at all. Of course I've pulled the numbers out of my own ... but I think it is reasonable assumption.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"How many people are needed to feed a single creator into a decent life?" I don't think the question makes sence - like what does it actyally mean, obviously we aren't talking about food. Is it perhaps better phares as: If average amount of money people are willing spend on entertainment, how many creators can a million people support? But what about people who make repair tutorials, etc, are they included? Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? Are game developers i cluded in this?
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Is tbe amount of money people spend on entertainment fixed? And time. For a given person, I think it roughly is. I'm probably going to spend about the same time (and money) watching video somewhat independently of the quality of content available (within reason). Preferences may shift over time--I spend more time reading things online relative to reading books than I did 20 years ago. But broadly, more or better entertainment options won't really shift my total time and money budget.
inglor_cz 6y ago
I am a writer and commentator (in the Czech Republic). I have about 3500 people on my mailing list and about 10 thousand occasional readers. I can make reasonable money by selling my books online, having my own e-shop is great, because there is no need to pay various middle men. 2020 was a good year and my total revenue from this business is comparable to what a Google software engineer makes here in Prague. I used to code for living, this is a much less stressful way of life. But the total amount of supporters necessary exceeds 1000 by a large margin. Even if 1000 people bought two of my books yearly, I would struggle financially.

deleted 6y ago

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shams93 6y ago

The technology of recording itself is a lot to blame for the near total loss of the creator economy. For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century. Creators are being destroyed by the wealth of available content. Why should someone listen to my music even if its extremely creative when they have the entire cannon of Duke Ellington available for free from their $9.95 per month?

inglor_cz 6y ago
"For example when you make music you are competing with every song ever recorded in the 20th century" Technically true, but changing moods and fashion mean that relatively few contemporary people will spend their life listening to Fats Domino. Only the very best of the past has even chance to be heard.
tomjen3 6y ago
Because they dislike Jazz? I had a fit once and put on some Glen Miller. I won't say it wasn't very good, but it wasn't something I am interested in at the time. If anything, modern music is more spread out than ever allowing more subcultures to have their favorite music niche, something that wasn't possible in the sixties.

booleandilemma 6y ago

For YouTube and TikTok at least, a "creator middle class" isn't possible. People become popular on these platforms not so much for what they do but how they look. Pokimane, for instance, doesn't have 6 million subscribers because she plays video games. She has 6 million subscribers because people find her attractive. The content she produces is incidental. As long as the content produced involves the creators themselves, the most attractive people are going to bubble towards the top and take the largest slices of the creator pie, and that can't be changed.

Avtomatk 6y ago
I think there are different niches, pokimane belongs to the niche of teen simps (to which most of the internet consumers belong). But there are also other niches: comedy, travel, music, gameplays, competitive gameplays, funny gameplays, politics, science, etc. Where looks aren't everything... In other niches, you can grab the public's attention with attractive thumbnails.
dugditches 6y ago
While this may be partly true, there are several 'talking hands' creators that do very well, at least in more 'informative' content(AvE, This Old Tony, etc)

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

I think the public is assailed by so much content that it unconsciously protects itself against it. One way is the star system, which is what we are seeing here.

bwhiting2356 6y ago

I think it’s definitely true that there's some undiscovered talent out there. But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world. Many people create art for the wrong reasons. Their goal is to be the center of attention, but they don’t have anything interesting to say, haven’t put in very much work, haven’t really considered why what they created is in the best interest of the audience, not just in the best interest of the artist. If a platform goes too far in recommending content that isn’t very good, and taking resources away from its successful creators and redistributing them to its less successful, their viewers and talent will leave for another platform. For most of the long-tail creators, their best chance at a middle class income will be a day job off the platform, or in a job as support system for a successful creator that hires staff (crew, marketing, props, editing).

CM30 6y ago
> But I think this article goes a bit too far in assuming that a significant number creators deserve an audience and an income that aren't getting it now, enough to create a creator middle class. I wish that was the case, but in the time I spent working in arts and entertainment I can’t support that view of the world. Hmm, as someone working in the media in some fashion, I'd say there's a huge number of creators that deserve an audience and income who aren't getting it now. Those 6 or so lists of underrated gaming YouTubers I posted in the last few years should be evidence of that to some degree (though many of the people included did take off afterwards). Every week or so I come across at least one creator who I believe should be much more successful than they currently are.
zanny 6y ago
picarto.tv is an art streaming site. If you looked at the top hundred streams there the artists are all probably studio grade, but maybe a tenth of them actually make a living off their art. A lot of people are making a lot of good stuff for free online and making pennies on it because in practice its not talent that is scarce, its eyeball access and virality. Your average webcomic artist today does not have the resources to exploit the psychology of target demographics the way Disney will for their next streaming show or the war chest to shove ads for it down throats until it reaches a critical self perpetuating mass of popularity. That doesn't make the stuff they make less worthy of being enjoyed, though. They just can't spread the message by themselves.

kvetching 6y ago

How do you become a successful creator if the search algorithm has changed into a social engineering / propaganda / corporate shill experiment? See this new video today by an independent creator. He may be a satanist but I believe satanists deserve to have their voices heard also. "Youtube Has Basically Shadowbanned All Independent Political/News Commentary" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuq9-pGdWo&t=710s

rmason 6y ago

She's got it all wrong about the music business. It used to be that artists made most of their money from records. They toured merely to create more fans that would buy their music. Now it's flipped 180 degrees. Musicians make all their money from touring. They release records to find new fans who will buy tickets to their shows. We live in a golden era for the little guy. Before the Internet if you didn't own the means of production no matter how talented you might be you made money for those who did. Now you can start a SaaS company and bootstrap your way into a living because the means of production have become ridiculously cheap. A musician can release music on the Internet and go from a local following to a regional one and if they're good enough a national one. I well remember it taking Bob Seger ten years to go from a Detroit artist to a regional success and another ten years until he was 'discovered' and overnight became a national one. Bruce Springsteen did it faster because he was on the east coast and got a Time magazine cover. The only difference now is that the young want success overnight and that is rare. Are you committed enough to work for ten years or more to reach the level of finding a thousand fans? Sometimes that means taking a lesser paying job to learn. Or to have the time to code or play gigs on the weekend. Thing about the Internet is you find your true talent level fairly quickly and you might not always like what you learn;<). Do you want to know Vine's biggest problem? They were owned by Twitter! There is room for only one product to succeed there despite its best efforts to continually sabotage themselves. FYI I do like Twitter.

pjc50 6y ago
> Musicians make all their money from touring Until this year, when that income source has been largely obliterated.
- jedberg 6y ago
  And, at least for EDM, seems to have been replaced by Twitch. I'd never used Twitch for more than a minute before this year. But now I'm on there all day (I'm watching right now in fact) because you can pretty much find a music artist streaming at any time of day, any day of the week. I'm watching someone from Germany right now. She's a bit unique in that she publishes her real time subscriber number. If you do the math you can see she makes about $25,000/mo just from subs, and that doesn't include bits during hype trains.

carapace 6y ago

I think that the end game (we should be working towards) is food forests and robo-factories. Institute UBI. We create a system where our needs are met automatically, by design. Then the economic question fades away. Part of the problem I have with this sort of thing is that it seldom addresses the "other half" of personal finance: how you spend your money. I can't write a big long thing about it right now, but check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/about https://earlyretirementextreme.com/about

Avtomatk 6y ago
Robots are more efficient at work, they are easy to specialize (they do not need studies, just a program and its parts are made to measure for the job) and they consume less energy than human beings, so that should really be our future, intellectual humans and worker robots. Food forests would be a quick early solution, the long-term solution would be the creation of vitamin supplements that contain all the necessary nutrients at a low cost and faster compared to what it takes to grow plants. > "and let others determine if it is working or playing" (quote in your web page) I do not distinguish between play and work when I do research in mathematics, but I have to work as a programmer because mathematicians are starving in Latin America (It is a phrase to say that they do not earn much, for those dumbasses who do not understand the joke and downvote me) and worse someone like me, 19 years old, without work experience nor university degree.

lelandbatey 6y ago

I have had my perspective challenged a great deal, not by this article, but instead by checking my assumptions against the numbers using the Graphtreon[0] site linked in a sub-article[1] to the parent article. I'd assumed that there was a solid, or at least "quiet but present", middle class of content creators. I believed this because I felt like I follow a set of content creators which where pretty far outside the "mainstream", since I didn't observe them having "superstar" numbers, nor did I ever see them casually mentioned outside of their own content. Looking at the data, all of them are in the top 2,000 Patreon users and most of them are in the top 1,000. Here's a compacted list: | Creator Name | Patreon Rank | Estimated Monthly | | | | Income (Patreon) | |---------------------------|--------------|-------------------| | Well There’s Your Problem | 108 | $11,196.00 | | LoadingReadyRun | 411 | $14,772.00 | | Jay Foreman | 995 | $2,620.00 | | Summoning Salt | 1478 | $2,026.00 | | Wendover Productions | 1684 | $2,220.00 | | Practical Engineering | 1872 | $1,600.00 | The creator that stands out most is the #1 spot holder, the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, each recounted in a very irreverent and roundabout style. I primarily watch this podcast through YouTube, and their YouTube content gets what I'd consider very "acceptable" view rates, on the order of 50k - 90k total views. From that, I would have expected them to fall more in the ~$1,000 tier of monthly Patreon income, but instead they're enjoying wild success. I have to assume their success comes from them doing well on platforms outside of YouTube, and their consistent marketing of Patreon rewards (additional content for Patreon subscribers). Goes to show that there's more than one way to find success, though the number of paths still seems pretty constrained. [0] - https://graphtreon.com https://graphtreon.com [1] - https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/02/patreon-content-creators-monthly-minimum-wage/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/02/patreon-content-...

nosmokewhereiam 6y ago

Techno-club.net was built for this purpose. It's artists who normally residence in clubs and instead play their sets live on the site on the weekends. It's growing rapidly. Check them out if you are a techno fan. Edit: this was meant as a reply to a comment below. Apologies.

Ericson2314 6y ago

This is a sort of milquetoast piece: no serious social scientist should be using political hack jargain like "American Dream" and "Middle Class" as if they describe real material phenomena and aren't just memes (in the original scene). The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. That said, glad they close out with UBI. If we can't quota the views per video from above, we can at least provide a revenue floor. We're a non-society with with centralized media: increasingly atomized associated people transfixed by the machine. Only in rebuilding society in meat space forces the sparsely connected graph that coupled with technology allows heterogeneity to really shine.

absolutelyrad 6y ago
> The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. Interesting observation.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  On second thought, "dissemination" / "distribution" would have been clearer. Don't think it matters so much how much money is blown in the recording studio.
wmf 6y ago
The fact of the matter is that any media platform where the cost of production is minimal is going to have shit power laws. Why? Isn't that a function of "the algorithm" which can be changed?
- absolutelyrad 6y ago
  Someone like TikTok, yes, but TikTok is the exception, not the norm. Maybe this works when the content quality difference is limited between top and bottom creators. Instagram could pull off what TikTok did, but not YouTube.
- Ericson2314 6y ago

Thorentis 6y ago

The problem with capitalism isn't that there are too many capitalists, but that there are too few.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

The middle mentioned about great deal etc. whilst important I cannot help to notice if we cannot allow minor to work, the immediate example of 14 something to become a big star would not happen. Of course she might be forced to do child Labour for tiktok or YouTube. But that kind of mismatch of underlying superstar economics vs we need a salary for all is a problem cannot be solved by the new platform. The winner take it all is an issue. This is totally different from the issue of top 1% controlling the politics and finances in the old (finance based) economy. Solution needed but not hers.

meheleventyone 6y ago

The creator economy is just an outgrowth of celebrity culture. I think in that regard it’s pretty interesting in that it does have something of a middle class. Or at least micro celebrities making a middle class living in their niche. But it all follows a power law distribution and there isn’t much I can see that will improve that. It’s always going to be the preserve of the few. The real middle class in the creator economy is with all the people supplying these celebrities. Working on building tools, platforms, content like games and providing services and so on.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Let me quote one old guy not this all new person https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr... I do not think he will survive in the older days. Bit in the new economy and have a few hundreds Patreon he got enough to live by in USA. Not much just write an article a day or two and filter and react to fan comment. Not sure he saved enough as USA has no health and he lived alone. When he stopped writing for 2 days without saying it, I really started to worry. ... USA is so harsh in this aspects. But guess that is a reality. Still read him everyday. And he is sixty something.

estreeper 6y ago

I might add a #11 on to this: ensure that the financial incentives of your platform align with those of your creators. I think that a lot of problems arise for creators when these are not aligned, for instance, in many advertising-driven models. YouTube, which has received a lot of creator backlash, will always be pressured financially to serve the needs of advertisers first, since they are the ones putting money into the system. YouTube doesn't want to do things that are bad for creators, but creators are not their primary customers. Another example of misalignment is the case of Spotify, who sold significant stakes to the major record labels to bring them on board. CEO Daniel Ek says (probably sincerely) that they want to help one million artists live off of their art. Spotify renewed its deal with Universal Music Group in July, and Ek, in a podcast [1] last year, in spite of repeating the one million artists goal, went on to discuss their desire to provide additional services to the labels, which would seemingly run counter to this in favor of preserving existing power structures. Some of this must also be a scale problem: once you reach a certain size and have made deals with big existing players to get there, you need to serve their interests because the risk of losing them is too great. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/

benlivengood 6y ago

11. Creators could move to countries with very cheap cost of living (outsource themselves). 12. Creators could invest in machine learning to lower the marginal cost of generating content. GPT-# will probably work well on music and video. It's mostly a matter of model size and training set size. 13. The U.S. could greatly increase funding for the national endowment for the arts. The fundamental problem with entertainment as a career is that it's a zero-sum game. People have finite time, can rarely consume more than one piece of entertainment at a time, and most have a fixed budget for entertainment per month. About the only thing that's been unexplored on a large scale is participatory entertainment which is the only growth space left and is slightly positive-sum; if the entertainment coexists with economy then it can grow a bit bigger. The best example I can think of is dance/music festivals (Dickens Fair as an example in the bay area) where entertainers are paid directly by ticket proceeds and a temporary market exists creating additional value for anyone willing to participate: In theory it's open to a large number of participant-vendors who can sell their own goods and service and be entertained. Any sort of community entertainment economy can benefit like this by creating value in both directions between entertainers and the entertained. What would that look like on a large scale? I have no idea. But all the giant Internet media markets are very unidirectional. Cash flows to the market via advertisers (also zero-sum without external growth in the economy) and purchases/subscriptions and some passes on to the entertainers. Any value creation in the other direction has to be made in separate markets. I think what the article doesn't address is that for the middle class to exist it has to create a significant amount of value; at least as much as it consumes. If it can't, then it requires UBI to continue to exist (which is suggested as option 9 in the article). But most of what the middle class consumes isn't produced by the rest of the middle class, unbalancing the economics.

dehrmann 6y ago

I'm not sure if this can ever exist in a world with scarcity. > a recent study of kids ages eight to 12 found that nearly 30% aspire to become YouTubers People will always want to go out there, do their own thing, and get paid a middle-class wage for it. The problem is there's a surplus of these people, most actually aren't talented enough to achieve that, and for those who don't have a natural market fit with what they do, they'll have to compromise their vision. It reminds me of artists getting priced out of a gentrifying urban center. It takes away the character of the neighborhood, but who is to say their art is good, worth fighting for, and that they're more deserving of their apartment than someone with enough money to afford the apartment. Basically, I don't want to subsidize someone's hobby/lifestyle. I completely support them doing what they want, I just don't want to hear complaints that there's no money in it.

afterwalk 6y ago
I wonder what percentage of kids age 8-12 want to become a professional athlete. I bet it's at least 100-1000x than the amount of job opening at the "can make a full time income" level. In that case it's mostly the parents that subsidize the lifestyle up until college level.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I have a high school classmate who played pro football for a couple of years. I never got the impression his parents did that much for him to subsidize foodball; it's not like rich parents trying to train their kids to be world-class squash players. It still could have been a $500-$5,000 per year subsidy, though.
harimau777 6y ago
I don't know if this is accurate or romanticized, but my perception is that in the past people who wanted to live as artists were able to do so as long as they were willing to give up some material comfort. For example, maybe they could work a day job (stereotypically waiting tables) and still make enough money for a studio in a bad part of town. It doesn't seem like that's the case today. Unless you have a profession or work multiple jobs (both of which prohibit having enough time to seriously pursue art) you are completely priced out of America's cosmopolitan cities.

stemlord 6y ago

There's something wrong with a society that conflates the arts with the entertainment industry.

Animats 6y ago

Arguably, the middle class was the result of economic friction. If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners. Historically, distance was a big source of economic friction. This make local retailing and manufacturing a profitable enterprise. As shipping became cheaper and more reliable, local retailing and manufacturing became economically impractical. Another source of economic friction that generated a middle class was the need for a large number of middle managers and clerical staff to operate a large enterprise. This had two effects. One, it employed large numbers of people. Two, the cost of operating the organization scaled faster than linearly, and this prevented organizations from scaling to planetary scale. Computers have eliminated both those obstacles. Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever.

mjfl 6y ago
> If there are no barriers to scale, eventually there are a small number of big winners. There is technically no contradiction between the existence of a middle class and the existence of a small number of big winners. > Perhaps the middle class was merely an artifact of the period between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, and is now gone forever. are software engineers the upper class then or are they part of the proletariat? What about doctors and lawyers?
- burlesona 6y ago
  The upper class, without a doubt.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Historically, the upper class was a class of rentiers who didn't have to "work" as such. Programmers would rather be part of the same class as rich merchants in the past.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

The creator economy creates an exponential distribution of wealth, not a normal distribution.