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.

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.

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.

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

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... See more

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.

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 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... See more

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