I think all of this feels more natural to people who are immersed in the fine art market, or the market for rare limited-edition sneakers, etc. (I am not!) These are markets in which scarcity by design is a huge part of the fun, and that’s not true for all, or even most, markets for creative work. (I’m thinking of the market for, say, streaming TV... See more

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."

Quantity and atomization build YouTube’s business; power laws are important to the creators, but replicable quantity is the platform’s beating heart. This is not true for a streamer where hits are the beating heart, and where power laws impact the company’s bottom line, not just the creatives whose shows and films appear.

Podcasters are islands in... See more