The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class

The real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock, ... See more

Ball and Enjeti are not immensely popular influencers earning many millions of dollars from a vast audience of followers. But they’re also not toiling away on a show that’s effectively a nonprofitable side hustle. They instead fall into a middle ground that Lanier despaired didn’t exist for creative professionals. The total budget for “Breaking Poi... See more

The recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind. Services such as Patreon and Kickstarter are j... See more

A more pessimistic prediction is that the current True Fan revolution will eventually go the way of the original Web 2.0 revolution, with creators increasingly ground in the gears of monetization. The Substack of today makes it easy for a writer to charge fans for a newsletter. The Substack of tomorrow might move toward a flat-fee subscription mode... See more

In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their ... See more

Some creative professionals can get by without even having to sell anything in particular to their 1,000 True Fans. Maria Popova, for example, makes a living publishing essays on literature, art, and science on her site, the Marginalian. Most of Popova’s income comes from asking fans to help support her work directly, without expecting anything ext... See more

If you’re lucky, perhaps something you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The winner-take-... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more

Kelly’s vision depends on an evolution of the Internet in which the vast tangle of possible one-on-one connections partition into countless small cliques—each one a fandom or a mini community revelling in the discovery of others who share their quirks. Instead, the social-media giants effectively rerouted these connections through a small number of... See more