The Era of Paying for Content

Silicon Valley accelerates its investment in products and services for individual creators. Platforms explore new ways to let creators monetize their audiences directly, while taking a cut for themselves. Still, a gulf begins to appear between those who pay for content and those who do not. Subscription fatigue will turn out to be real. And perhaps... See more

Behind these conversations is a fundamental change of the digital age that applies to essentially every creative field: in the past, consumers bought and collected physical editions of creative work, creating a direct value exchange between fans, artists, and producers. Today almost all creative work is digitized and essentially rented — lowering

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Earning is way more powerful than getting likes. If those two elements can be interwoven into the fabric of a network, it will mean people can make money from their time in new ways. Today, the bluntest tool in social is where you build an audience and then try to sell to it. We are going to see so many new experiments around paying people for cont... See more

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. [The platforms] have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the... See more

-Most importantly, by creating pathways for creators to own not just the content they produce, but the platforms themselves

But just as the gig economy mode of work brought about negative consequences, strong parallels are emerging between the gig economy and creator economy, rooted in the commoditization of work and erosion of worker leverage. For online creators today, a handful of large social media platforms serve as gatekeepers for finding and connecting with audie... See more