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The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
In his “1,000 True Fans” essay, Kelly explains that he wasn’t as excited about this new economic model as others seemed to be. “The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people: a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers,” he writes. “But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators.” If... See more
Cal Newport • 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
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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... See more
Cal Newport • 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.
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
“Breaking Points” is currently supported by around ten thousand paying subscribers spread over the various payment tiers. This is a factor of ten more than in the 1,000 True Fans model proposed by Kelly, but it remains a good case study of his model in action: a strong but modest-sized community, discovered and served by using the Internet,... See more