Audience and Wealth, Part II

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

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.

With better infrastructure, creators may be able to reward and incentivize their community financially. If focused on the upside — giving 20% of future earnings back to the audience after a certain threshold is met, for example — creators would align incentives without upfront costs.

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.

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.

We all seek a sense of belonging. It's what inspires our desire to seek out groups of like-minded people. Once that fit is established, there's status in being a community leader. The most direct example here is Reddit: the moderator of a particular subreddit holds status to those engaged in the community. Even a contributor that writes a popular c... See more

Creators that build wealth by investing in startups add a stakeholder to the mix: the company’s founder. This model can be leveraged in conjunction with those listed above, or independently. Isolated, creators buy ownership from founders with money and audience attention. The agreement they make is that they will expose the founder to their audienc... See more

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.

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.