Audience and Wealth, Part II

Every ad is a tax of attention levied on the audience, misdirected towards a cause the audience has not consented to. The less relevant the ad, the greater the tax. Within this model, creators and audiences find their kinship interrupted.

Creators pay with effort. They put in the work to create a product in the hopes the audience consumes and engages with it. Audience members, on the other side of this interaction, pay for this effort with attention.

By banding together, creators have the chance to change this, forming effective, high-signal syndicates. In doing so, they solve a critical issue for startups: distribution. By aggregating audiences, they can serve new companies to a large pool of consumers and businesses.

This is a symbiotic relationship, up to a point. Each party benefits, though no money is earned. Advertisers solve that problem. They buy the attention accumulated by the creator and pay with money.

Depending on who we are, and the model used, we pay with some combination of four currencies: effort, attention, money, or ownership. Below, we make sense of this concept within the framework of the three wealth-building models identified last week.

Returning to the example above, the creator could (and should) highlight those contributors that worked to create the product or engage with the community on a regular basis. By doing so, they share attention. Within the confines of a particular community, that attention can grant status.

As it stands, there’s no comprehensive tools that allow writers, podcasters, and streamers to identify and reward their most loyal fans.

This form of anointment is not common in creator circles. There are no awards for listening to the Masters of Scale podcast every week; no accolades for reading Stratechery.

Though we may not always realize it, every piece of content involves a series of transactions, a string of exchanges.