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.

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.

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.

There are three stakeholders in a promotion-based monetization model: creators, audience members, and advertisers. Each party pays with a different currency.

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.

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

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

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.