The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class

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

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.

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

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

Though “Breaking Points” makes some money from podcast and YouTube ads, the bulk of the revenue comes from a premium-subscription model. If you subscribe at a cost of ten dollars a month, or a hundred dollars for a full year, you gain access to an uncut version of each episode, free of ads, in both audio and video formats.

Changing attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have expressed skepticism about these pl... See more

In the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, these attitudes radically shifted. For different reasons, both sides of the political spectrum began to immensely distrust the platform monopolies. The algorithmically curated streams that had once seemed so futuristic suddenly became Orwellian. Today, it’s not only acceptable to move more of your... See more

Perhaps Dixon is right that Web 3.0 will play a role in the future of online creative careers, but it’s also clear that Ball and Enjeti, Hilton Carter, Maria Popova, and any number of successful podcasters didn’t depend on a technological breakthrough of this magnitude to put Kelly’s theory into practice right now. The key to their success seems in... See more

Perhaps Dixon is right that Web 3.0 will play a role in the future of online creative careers, but it’s also clear that Ball and Enjeti, Hilton Carter, Maria Popova, and any number of successful podcasters didn’t depend on a technological breakthrough of this magnitude to put Kelly’s theory into practice right now. The key to their success seems in... 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