6 ms·

The creator economy is failing to spread the wealth

51 points by laurex 5y ago

stevenalowe 5y ago
millions of people making hundreds of dollars - you know, like the music industry
- winternett 5y ago
  I'm not even sure that most are making hundreds... I know a lot of musicians, and they can't even afford to rent the usual props for music videos any more... :/
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Income equals expenditure; they are one and the same. People are paying less and less for music now. A Spotify or Apple Music subscription gives you access to 75 million songs for $10 a month. That would cost me $100,000,000 in CDs or cassette tapes.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    But you never would have spent $100,000,000 on music. According to this [0] random blog, a cassete album cost about $8 in 1980, which translates to about $25 in today's dollars. You would need to buy a new album every 2 or 3 months to spend more than maintaining a streaming service. I'm sure that a lot of people did do so. However, I suspect that most people were like me (who grew up in the days of CDs) and just had a few that we owned and would reuse. [0] https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/how-much-did-cassette-tapes-cost-in-the-80s https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/how-much-did-cassette-tap...
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      There are only ten songs on a CD. I don't listen to 75 million songs, but I probably listen to around 1000 different tracks per month.
      - gizmo686 5y ago
        But would you listen to 1000 different tracks per month if they cost $2.50 per track?
        missedthecue 5y ago
        No, so I'd say that streaming has improved my quality of life.
SMVS 5y ago
You know whose wealth we could all benefit from a bit of sharing in? Billionaires. Theirs is the only wealth worth sharing
sharemywin 5y ago
The algorithms seem to favor popularity instead of discovering new options. Anything where you have followers/reviews will favor established players.
- vannevar 5y ago
  This is true of human nature as well, not just the search algorithms. As long as people have even a slight preference for the more popular option, you have the basic ingredient for a rich-get-richer market with power law distribution of sales.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Put differently, algorithms favor satisfying viewer over discovering new options. This favors the established players, but this is because the average viewer is more likely to be satisfied with the most popular option than a random option.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    I don't know. There's been randomized controlled experiments showing that providing information on popularity distorts choice to favor those who are already popular, so it's not just that people refer the more popular options. What you say is true, but it's complicated because most viewers are not the average viewer, by definition, so providing them with the average viewer preference could lead to most viewers being less satisfied. I do think there's some kind of feedback loop that plays into this system. I don't think it's unique to social networks or new but I do think the process of matching any kind of consumer with content will run into this. It's more of a regression to the mean problem in prediction (which is maybe what you're saying I suppose). I have this weird experience when I try to go to YouTube in a temporary container in Firefox without realizing it, and I'm served what the average visitor would see. It's so different from my usual homepage it's like a different world. Even so, I seem to run into these local minima in recommendations where I end up getting recommended the same stuff over and over and over again. Eventually I'll learn about some content from someplace else and it breaks out of that local minima and starts spinning new recommendations, but it's like I know there's other stuff out there I'd like, but it's not getting to me because the recommendation system only has information on things it's collected information on, which means things that have been viewed, which means more popular content. That's not even getting into issues like bands and artists being "rediscovered" decades after they were producing most of their music. Sometimes I feel as if these discussions devolve into this tug between "less popular is less popular because it's lower quality" versus "less popular is less popular because it doesn't get visibility" when the truth is in between. I suspect there's a lot of content out there that could get more exposure but doesn't because there's no match with the right audience, but if you're not really appealing to many people you'll never get anywhere. But then again, people change, and what's popular changes, and changes differently among different people... I think it's a really complicated issue involving feedback loops, discovery, information, and so forth. It's not just like finding some static gold needle in the haystack, it's like if the perception of what a gold needle is changes from person to person, and from time to time for the same person, and seeing another needle also changes that perception. How this maps onto the distribution of reimbursement? Not sure, but I suspect there's a disconnect between some ideal optimum situation and what's out there.
Barrin92 5y ago
as the article points to by namedropping Shirky, this is the natural result of offering choice among many diverse options, which tends to create power law distributions, the idea that the free-wheeling nature of platforms produces equal outcomes was always, based on the nature of social networks, impossible. The Verge had a good and sobering article about what that means in practice: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers-zero-viewers-motivation-community https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers...
winternett 5y ago
This is a very timely issue that not many are discussing. Once a creator becomes popular, they often become sponsored, and a lot of the gear they use (which also sets them apart from regular creators) is given to them through sponsorships. It's not an unfair advantage to the sponsored creator, but it does prove to be an unfair advantage to their competitors when you consider they are displayed on each site. Think about an independent film producer competing against a major studio produce a film.. This kind of ecosystem completely destroys the value of independent artists and favors big industry every time. There are literally thousands of talented people creating content totally for free over many years because of the myth of an eventual payoff that is the very basis of modern-day creator funds. These platforms don't have separate categories for content creators based on their funding and content to fairly display everyone as equals, or among people operating on each level of ability/funding, why? because platforms favor proven earners and big industry -- Thy also don't want unknown creators to potentially replace chosen creators as well in a lot of cases. Money/Profit drives platforms, not content, and not a concern for discovering new talent, but platforms want independent content contributed without providing opportunity and without paying independent creators for it (of course). Platforms create the dream of discovery and work hard to lure independent creators with the ideal that they can grow on them purely as fish bait to cover the fact that most already engineer their featured content heavily to be pre-determined and fixed. Don't get me wrong, occasionally new talent slips through, but it's very rare in frequency. Because top creators make so much, there's an entire network built around them, where platforms promote them and where algorithms keep them on top of everyone else, by featuring top streamers and earners on repeat, and by featuring them on front pages, while unknowns stay buried, without even an occasional mention on a featured page. If you look at black hat forums, there are hundreds of people paying and faking their way in order to become popular and successful, and even some scammers are making more money off of fake music and streaming than really talented independent artists in music and video production. The current state of social media algorithms is not based on discovering talent, it is based on making companies money, and in covertly limiting user options for choices in featured content to make platform revenue stable. A better way to look at the process of creating things as an independent artist is to focus on building locally, and in not trying to emulate nor compete with big industry, because the burnout is real, and the chances of growing, lasting, and thriving in massive creator-based ecosystem now are very very slim. Create your own web site, and own your own platform, because if you're an unknown or independent artist, major platforms aren't promoting you as well as a more dedicated online presence can.
tengbretson 5y ago
How many times must we discover a zipfian distribution and pretend to be shocked by it?
Havoc 5y ago
> small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic [..] even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome, Except the all mighty algorithm of course. This isn’t really an issue with creator economy per se but rather the way all the major platforms work.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
What is the creator economy? What does it mean to "democratize media"? And why was this creator economy supposed to have done such a thing? Services that stream videos and give you a small cut of the ad revenue (or similar schemes) lowers the bar for a person to be in a position where they could in theory get some money from people who like watching their videos. Actual earnings of course is going to be highly concentrated among a tiny minority of the most popular ones. Surely nobody ever supposed or expected otherwise. As far as I can see, creators can "run for office", and the people vote with their clicks. Seems pretty democratic to me.
shannifin 5y ago
We don't make media consumption decisions in a vacuum; naturally we want to talk about what we watched, read, bought, etc., and/or understand what others are talking about. So we will naturally be more inclined to choose what is already popular, and thus make it even more popular. The "algorithm" is in the human brain because social potential is part of its decision process. This will inevitably be reflected in wealth distributions. Regardless, I never thought of "democratizing media" in terms of wealth distribution, but rather in terms of who gets to even try; less gatekeeping = more opportunity, even if the overall popularity / wealth distributions remain similar.
AndrewKemendo 5y ago
This just in, power law/pareto principle applies to basically everything.
nbzso 5y ago
I fail to understand the idea. If creator economy is proving something to me is that objective quality of the product is useless, the "winners" are click-bait, gossip, exploitation, consumerism and outright kitsch. Platforms are the real winners, the one percent of "successful" are serving as a bait for wishful thinking and expansion. As a result the rest of "creators" are competing for the fraction of shattered user attention span, repeating "best exploitative practices" and "marketing tricks". It is a sad picture. Really. And since when "spreading the wealth" is prerogative of capitalism? Or someone is talking about communistic ideals without realizing the absurdity of the argument? My problem is quality of the production and low IQ of creations, and I blame Everything as a service model. If this is the future we are creating, mediocrity is upon us big time.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> New tipping and micropayments features will hopefully make it easier for smaller creators to get paid. But for now, much of the creator economy is still supported by pricier subscriptions, forcing consumers to be selective. The primary reason smaller creators aren't "getting paid" isn't because technology is impeding it. It's because the number of people who actually see fit to pay them anything is very limited. Consumer content is largely a commodity. There's an almost infinite supply of it, and the bar to it having any meaningful monetary value is very high and increasing constantly. Even content that has decent entertainment or informational quality is often close to worthless commercially because there is so much of it. If everyone had a browser-based digital wallet and could easily "tip" creators nominal amounts with one or two clicks, I believe very few creators would see a lift in their earnings. This is really no different than street performers, except the performances are available online. Lots of people will stand by and watch a street performer do something cool, but most put nothing into the tip jar and the number of street performers who earn a respectable wage from their performances is close to nil.

51 points by laurex 5y ago

stevenalowe 5y ago

millions of people making hundreds of dollars - you know, like the music industry

winternett 5y ago
I'm not even sure that most are making hundreds... I know a lot of musicians, and they can't even afford to rent the usual props for music videos any more... :/
missedthecue 5y ago
Income equals expenditure; they are one and the same. People are paying less and less for music now. A Spotify or Apple Music subscription gives you access to 75 million songs for $10 a month. That would cost me $100,000,000 in CDs or cassette tapes.
- gizmo686 5y ago
  But you never would have spent $100,000,000 on music. According to this [0] random blog, a cassete album cost about $8 in 1980, which translates to about $25 in today's dollars. You would need to buy a new album every 2 or 3 months to spend more than maintaining a streaming service. I'm sure that a lot of people did do so. However, I suspect that most people were like me (who grew up in the days of CDs) and just had a few that we owned and would reuse. [0] https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/how-much-did-cassette-tapes-cost-in-the-80s https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/how-much-did-cassette-tap...
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    There are only ten songs on a CD. I don't listen to 75 million songs, but I probably listen to around 1000 different tracks per month.
    - gizmo686 5y ago
      But would you listen to 1000 different tracks per month if they cost $2.50 per track?
      - missedthecue 5y ago
        No, so I'd say that streaming has improved my quality of life.

SMVS 5y ago

You know whose wealth we could all benefit from a bit of sharing in? Billionaires. Theirs is the only wealth worth sharing

sharemywin 5y ago

The algorithms seem to favor popularity instead of discovering new options. Anything where you have followers/reviews will favor established players.

vannevar 5y ago
This is true of human nature as well, not just the search algorithms. As long as people have even a slight preference for the more popular option, you have the basic ingredient for a rich-get-richer market with power law distribution of sales.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
Put differently, algorithms favor satisfying viewer over discovering new options. This favors the established players, but this is because the average viewer is more likely to be satisfied with the most popular option than a random option.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I don't know. There's been randomized controlled experiments showing that providing information on popularity distorts choice to favor those who are already popular, so it's not just that people refer the more popular options. What you say is true, but it's complicated because most viewers are not the average viewer, by definition, so providing them with the average viewer preference could lead to most viewers being less satisfied. I do think there's some kind of feedback loop that plays into this system. I don't think it's unique to social networks or new but I do think the process of matching any kind of consumer with content will run into this. It's more of a regression to the mean problem in prediction (which is maybe what you're saying I suppose). I have this weird experience when I try to go to YouTube in a temporary container in Firefox without realizing it, and I'm served what the average visitor would see. It's so different from my usual homepage it's like a different world. Even so, I seem to run into these local minima in recommendations where I end up getting recommended the same stuff over and over and over again. Eventually I'll learn about some content from someplace else and it breaks out of that local minima and starts spinning new recommendations, but it's like I know there's other stuff out there I'd like, but it's not getting to me because the recommendation system only has information on things it's collected information on, which means things that have been viewed, which means more popular content. That's not even getting into issues like bands and artists being "rediscovered" decades after they were producing most of their music. Sometimes I feel as if these discussions devolve into this tug between "less popular is less popular because it's lower quality" versus "less popular is less popular because it doesn't get visibility" when the truth is in between. I suspect there's a lot of content out there that could get more exposure but doesn't because there's no match with the right audience, but if you're not really appealing to many people you'll never get anywhere. But then again, people change, and what's popular changes, and changes differently among different people... I think it's a really complicated issue involving feedback loops, discovery, information, and so forth. It's not just like finding some static gold needle in the haystack, it's like if the perception of what a gold needle is changes from person to person, and from time to time for the same person, and seeing another needle also changes that perception. How this maps onto the distribution of reimbursement? Not sure, but I suspect there's a disconnect between some ideal optimum situation and what's out there.

Barrin92 5y ago

as the article points to by namedropping Shirky, this is the natural result of offering choice among many diverse options, which tends to create power law distributions, the idea that the free-wheeling nature of platforms produces equal outcomes was always, based on the nature of social networks, impossible. The Verge had a good and sobering article about what that means in practice: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers-zero-viewers-motivation-community https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers...

winternett 5y ago

This is a very timely issue that not many are discussing. Once a creator becomes popular, they often become sponsored, and a lot of the gear they use (which also sets them apart from regular creators) is given to them through sponsorships. It's not an unfair advantage to the sponsored creator, but it does prove to be an unfair advantage to their competitors when you consider they are displayed on each site. Think about an independent film producer competing against a major studio produce a film.. This kind of ecosystem completely destroys the value of independent artists and favors big industry every time. There are literally thousands of talented people creating content totally for free over many years because of the myth of an eventual payoff that is the very basis of modern-day creator funds. These platforms don't have separate categories for content creators based on their funding and content to fairly display everyone as equals, or among people operating on each level of ability/funding, why? because platforms favor proven earners and big industry -- Thy also don't want unknown creators to potentially replace chosen creators as well in a lot of cases. Money/Profit drives platforms, not content, and not a concern for discovering new talent, but platforms want independent content contributed without providing opportunity and without paying independent creators for it (of course). Platforms create the dream of discovery and work hard to lure independent creators with the ideal that they can grow on them purely as fish bait to cover the fact that most already engineer their featured content heavily to be pre-determined and fixed. Don't get me wrong, occasionally new talent slips through, but it's very rare in frequency. Because top creators make so much, there's an entire network built around them, where platforms promote them and where algorithms keep them on top of everyone else, by featuring top streamers and earners on repeat, and by featuring them on front pages, while unknowns stay buried, without even an occasional mention on a featured page. If you look at black hat forums, there are hundreds of people paying and faking their way in order to become popular and successful, and even some scammers are making more money off of fake music and streaming than really talented independent artists in music and video production. The current state of social media algorithms is not based on discovering talent, it is based on making companies money, and in covertly limiting user options for choices in featured content to make platform revenue stable. A better way to look at the process of creating things as an independent artist is to focus on building locally, and in not trying to emulate nor compete with big industry, because the burnout is real, and the chances of growing, lasting, and thriving in massive creator-based ecosystem now are very very slim. Create your own web site, and own your own platform, because if you're an unknown or independent artist, major platforms aren't promoting you as well as a more dedicated online presence can.

tengbretson 5y ago

How many times must we discover a zipfian distribution and pretend to be shocked by it?

Havoc 5y ago

> small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic [..] even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome, Except the all mighty algorithm of course. This isn’t really an issue with creator economy per se but rather the way all the major platforms work.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

What is the creator economy? What does it mean to "democratize media"? And why was this creator economy supposed to have done such a thing? Services that stream videos and give you a small cut of the ad revenue (or similar schemes) lowers the bar for a person to be in a position where they could in theory get some money from people who like watching their videos. Actual earnings of course is going to be highly concentrated among a tiny minority of the most popular ones. Surely nobody ever supposed or expected otherwise. As far as I can see, creators can "run for office", and the people vote with their clicks. Seems pretty democratic to me.

shannifin 5y ago

We don't make media consumption decisions in a vacuum; naturally we want to talk about what we watched, read, bought, etc., and/or understand what others are talking about. So we will naturally be more inclined to choose what is already popular, and thus make it even more popular. The "algorithm" is in the human brain because social potential is part of its decision process. This will inevitably be reflected in wealth distributions. Regardless, I never thought of "democratizing media" in terms of wealth distribution, but rather in terms of who gets to even try; less gatekeeping = more opportunity, even if the overall popularity / wealth distributions remain similar.

AndrewKemendo 5y ago

This just in, power law/pareto principle applies to basically everything.

nbzso 5y ago

I fail to understand the idea. If creator economy is proving something to me is that objective quality of the product is useless, the "winners" are click-bait, gossip, exploitation, consumerism and outright kitsch. Platforms are the real winners, the one percent of "successful" are serving as a bait for wishful thinking and expansion. As a result the rest of "creators" are competing for the fraction of shattered user attention span, repeating "best exploitative practices" and "marketing tricks". It is a sad picture. Really. And since when "spreading the wealth" is prerogative of capitalism? Or someone is talking about communistic ideals without realizing the absurdity of the argument? My problem is quality of the production and low IQ of creations, and I blame Everything as a service model. If this is the future we are creating, mediocrity is upon us big time.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

> New tipping and micropayments features will hopefully make it easier for smaller creators to get paid. But for now, much of the creator economy is still supported by pricier subscriptions, forcing consumers to be selective. The primary reason smaller creators aren't "getting paid" isn't because technology is impeding it. It's because the number of people who actually see fit to pay them anything is very limited. Consumer content is largely a commodity. There's an almost infinite supply of it, and the bar to it having any meaningful monetary value is very high and increasing constantly. Even content that has decent entertainment or informational quality is often close to worthless commercially because there is so much of it. If everyone had a browser-based digital wallet and could easily "tip" creators nominal amounts with one or two clicks, I believe very few creators would see a lift in their earnings. This is really no different than street performers, except the performances are available online. Lots of people will stand by and watch a street performer do something cool, but most put nothing into the tip jar and the number of street performers who earn a respectable wage from their performances is close to nil.