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The Creator Economy

https://pencircle.com/posts/372/the-creator-economy

Is patronage the future of content monetization on the Internet? Maybe the best way to solve the problems plaguing digital media today is to bring back an old idea and reinvent it for the modern age.

(Yup, the name of the article matches the name of the group! Perfect product-market fit xP)

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    Back in those day they didn't put them into a system either, just remember the people that were important to the creator for whatever reason

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      Yes, but now we have the means to systematize that patronage so that those top patrons can be recognized and remembered by others as being associated with a particular creator. Wouldn't you say that's an improvement?

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        I'd say that's a view point of an engineer building and optimising like everyone is a machine when in reality a human has no problem with it

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          Who has this problem? How much does it hurt? How frequent?

          You have some nice writing and story telling skills but you need to find a bigger more core story to focus on IMHO

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            Any creator who's trying to make a living from their work has this problem (which is a majority of all creators). It doesn't make sense that one needs an audience in the millions to make a sustainable living. Instead if they could make the best use of a handful of super-invested fans, that would be enough. Building a system which allows them to identify and use those true fans effectively would be really helpful IMO.

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              That's why patron systems started gaining popularity from Patreon, to Kickstarter with GitHub coming into it npm, youtube itself started, twitch...

              What I think is the problem with your focus on evil platforms and ads...

              I'd describe it in reverse, it's that distributing a written word used to have a cost, even if one cent per patron, the internet has lowered it like a million times. So there is much more supply. Meaning worded content is way less valuable in a way cause it has so much competition.
              Papers also had multi income patron+ads and also did clickbait, but the format focused the clickbait only into the front back, and center pages.

              If you're trying to make money from the most supplied, most accessible, cheapest medium, you're going to have issues. But it's not to blame the ad systems. If you want to find high-value writing move to high-value niches like finances.

              If you look at most internet marketers, the text is used as a marketing venue, they would give you diamonds of text just to bring you in, but then would create a sale on something more valuable even if it's a better package for the text like books or courses, something that has a bigger perceived value and higher creation/distribution "cost"...

              Create higher value offers, you'd need fewer patrons.
              Making Patrons feel 0.5% better won't change how much money they would put in much.

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                Hmm ok, good point, I get what you're saying. It does sound a bit like I'm trying to compete with mainstream advertising platforms.

                What I'm trying to say is that the ad-driven model forces many creators to switch to more mainstream content and large audiences even if they aren't very good at it. And content made for virality generally lacks quality.

                Instead they can cater to a niche with more focused, high-quality content and use patronage as a way to fund that. And I think that the patronage models in existence today can be improved upon. That's all I really wanted to say in that article, maybe it doesn't come out that clearly.

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