Sublime

The subscription access business model results in a creator’s dilemma. If their best content is paywalled, how will they demonstrate the value of subscribing to new readers? If their best content is paywalled, subscribers have no way of accurately assessing the quality of a creator’s work.

The creator economy has not done well in courting readers. It "cares" about readers, but only in two dysfunctional ways:

• Turning them into creators ("you, too, can make money doing this")


• Aggressively tracking (and monetizing) their activities

But readers are the largest cohort and the value they provide is the entire value of the scene. There is no v... See more

And one of the biggest lies that internet culture tells us is that something is only important and interesting if it is new. As someone whose day job is at a nonprofit newsroom, I have a front row seat to the consequences of that lie. Convincing anyone to read a story that is more than a week old is an uphill battle, the ideology of which is clear:... See more