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The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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
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, directl... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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.
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 pl... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
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
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 ext... 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 in... 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 opt... See more