1. The article shows a pyramid and it's important. In order to get a few "true fans" (people prepared to pay dearly for what you produce), you need a large amount of "distant fans" (people who like what you do, as long as it's free). The key word is conversion, and, regrettably, it's not present once in the post [0]. It's probably in the 1 to 0.1% range.
[0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first.
2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?
Good points. Based on my experience with whales in f2p games you will get outsized income from 0.1% of whale users, reliable income from 20% of hobby users, and one-off spend here and there from the rest.
When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.
Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.
The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.
You described the business model of Ludwig van Beethoven. One of the first independent artist in his profession. He had a few whales which gained status through personal inscription of his works and paid him to stay in Vienna. But he was massively popular in Vienna before he gained whales.
I quite like and agree with the numbers here - you could be getting 10k / year before your first whale, so it does not make much economic sense to only focus on a 100 biggest fans.
The phrasing and contextualising in the article is all over the place. It's referred to as a 'shift', but also shows how the basic business models for 100 x $1000 and 1000 x $100 are completely different. They are examining a new different type of business using similar platforms, not a general trend of existing relationships changing in character.
Those trainers selling courses aren’t selling their $1000 courses to the same dedicated group of 100 course crazy training junkies every month, year in year out. Maybe someone will sign up for a series, or for special 1-1 sessions for a while, but then they will have got what they wanted and leave. That’s got very little in common with my long term relationship with a handful of people on Patreon for a few dollars each a month. There might be a very few, very wealthy patrons that do support a guru for large amounts every month, but that's yet another business model again and also has little similarity with the actual relationship people like me have with the people we support. Wealthy people supporting gurus has been a thing ever since there have been wealthy people.
From the article it sounds like part of it is going after the same sort of business as Ramit Sethi [1] [2] He seems to mainly sell courses on how to create and sell courses. I don't know how comfortable I would feel doing that. Maybe that's just me.
Interesting point with the pyramid, a podcaster (Sam Harris) recently turned his free podcast into a "freemium" model where you get half of each episode for free. I imagine this is going to completely kill his following, as it did for me.
Freemium is actually being charitable, it's more like shareware.
It's going to kill his following among people who want to follow him for free, but by definition they don't bring him any money. If you have enough paying users, meaning your business gained momentum, you don't really care about free users anymore.
You think people who currently pay will stop paying?
Like, it's some sort of virtue signalling?
If he's changed to that model presumably he doesn't care about his following but instead wants to make a living (or make himself rich, depending how things are for him).
In fairness, he does continue to support a charity model as well. He clarifies very often that if you can't support the podcast due to financial reasons, you can simply email his team and get free access, no questions asked.
Gwynneth Paltrow's personal online store. People get annoyed because she's into alternative health stuff but it's really just a store for people who have the same taste as Gwynneth Paltrow.
IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world.
This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time.
This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing.
I don't think Ninja is a particularly good example because (1) he is operating at a scale where the normal rules don't apply (2) his rise was equally fast and volatile (3) twitch requires a constant presence more than other content platforms.
Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans"
The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans.
maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base.
At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
Ninja is the most visible example, but the same pattern holds true at virtually any audience size (within the range of what is typically monetizable). This pattern is actually more extreme on platforms like Patreon because the audience is expecting something for their money. They are closer to a customer than a typical viewer.
The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match.
Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin.
To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
Patreon is quite a bit of work and requires constant upkeep to maintain a steady income flow. It's really no different from Twitch subscriptions in that regard. It does a better job of monetizing primarily because of the easily customized tiers, and secondarily because the platform specifically caters to paid content rather than free.
That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
Twitch counts it as a subscription if you use the free "subscription" from Amazon Prime. The thing is that it has to be manually applied every month. So if he's off for a couple days, very few people will resubscribe if they're not on his channel -- because he's off. It's not like 40k cancelled a subscription at once, their gift ran out and most re-upped as soon as he was back on a couple days later.
Yep, I subscribe to a couple of podcast patreons.. for $5 a month for 5-10 hours of good content it's a no-brainer... Patreon.com/redscare It's basically just 2 women mouthing off, it's funny though. They do well out of it.
It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction.
Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well.
Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.
It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.
You need to create valuable calls to action and
continuously produce content in order to maintain
their attention.
Recurring subscription models help with this, as "letting the subscription continue" then becomes the easiest thing to do.
Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums.
There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
> Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone.
> ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort
I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
What would you prefer it to be called? We can change the words around to suit our social sensibilities but at the end of the day, we're still talking about convincing people to spend some money. Nobody bats an eye if you ask for more money from your boss, but many people are under a lot of pressure not to try to be compensated fairly for consumer-facing work.
Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year.
The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense.
I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income.
Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.")
I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.
My first thought was how ridiculously out of touch with the economic reality of the 99% this author was. Even if you love an artist and are willing to spend some amount of money to support them, that amount is not going to be anywhere near 1k. This author is deeply ensconced in her elite Bay Area bubble. It is embarrassing, tbh.
The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit.
The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
> The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).
Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.
I agree that this can be very attainable as a B2B developer. The main challenges are both knowing and understanding the problem and solution and then attracting the audience. It's doable and is being done. We hear more about the unicorns. But there is still a lot of room for the little guys.
Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.
People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.
Just because you can draw a parallel between the two doesn’t necessarily make it exploitative. Most of the time I’m sure both sides win, the creator gets to follow their passion, the viewer gets to feel they had a part in it by paying some money. There is certainly a potential for exploitation and indoctrination, but that’s really only in extreme cases.
Well when I was young I spent about $1k/year on little thingamajigs called cd's. That was perhaps "stupid" in a pure economic sense but I did it. And if I were young these days I can't say I wouldn't give that amount to some random "content creator" who could give me the same joy as we 80's kids got from sitting quiet and listening actively to music albums from beginning to end.
But me now is like "why the hell would I give that kind of money to some rando on the internet that stream games?". My patreon career is limited at giving a podcast creator $10/month and that was hard to justify for myself.
It needs to be direct engagement at that price point. No one is going to pay Rachel Ray 1000/year for blog access. Someone may pay her 1000/year for access to Skype cooking lessons. High end prostitutes are a nontech example of where they should focus on a small number of Whales. Also people who get paid to do keynote speaches at 20-50k a pop could have long term engagements with 100 fans paying 2k/year.
You can sell software development services, and your fan may be a graphic designer who uses you every time to build out the back-end for the beautiful designs they make. You do a good job, you're their go-to person, they are your "fan".
This is a "think piece" and not based on any research or data. In reality, I'm seeing lots of relatively small entertainers do the 1000 Fans Thing on Twitch and it really works because each subscriber pays 5 USD per month.
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix!
One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living.
That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace.
A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.
> Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix!
The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services.
But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.
I pay $75 per week to my personal trainer and where I live trainers are cheap. People routinely pay hundreds per week in places like LA.
I’m not sure I’d pay that for an online trainer but if there are probably things a step or two away from workouts where I would pay for an internet mitigated version.
But that’s not being a fan, that’s buying a service.
I have seen people drop over $1000 dollars in gifted subscriptions/coins over the course of a single stream where a guy is just playing a video game. I'll admit that this kind of thing isn't common, and you definitely aren't going to find 100 people with that level of disposable income for your following, but there are plenty of people who blow what seems like an unreasonable amount of money just so a stranger on the other side of a screen will notice them.
So what you're saying is this is just a restatement of the original article, but by someone who actually does earn $1k in a single day and so doesn't realise that's not a reasonable amount to spend.
So this is the problem with "starbucks coffee daily" argument - you are assuming people spend money logically/rationally, most people don't. That is why folks don't have any problem dropping $4 every single day at Starbucks (their coffee isn't even that good), but they won't spend $5 per month for something as important as email and depend on free email like GMail.
$84 is more than I pay monthly for Spotify, Netflix, the local newspaper, my broadband connection and occasional magazine buys combined. $1000 is more than I spend yearly on my biggest hobby - and that includes air travel and hotel fares. I have a really hard time coming up with any kind of content that'd be worth that much money.
Problem is, you can only drink so many fancy starbucks coffees per day. There are many more content creators around.
What will the customers do when everyone wants a starbucks coffee per day? Pay one? Pay no one?
Also don't forget that not everyone is living in the HN well paid tech ivory tower. Even in the US, there should be a lot of people who can't afford a starbucks coffee per day...
The problem with the "passion economy", which was alluded to in another comment, is that it strengthens the already too-prevalent assumption that everything can and should be monetizable. Markets are useful but they don't need to be involved in every aspect of existence.
Sure, you don’t need to participate in Patreon to make stuff, but the trend seems to be toward relying on consumer market forces to fund culture. Tying the livelihoods of creators to the approval of their fans will lead them to censor themselves and consequently you aren't going to get anything that really pisses people off or challenges them in a countercultural way, at least enough to stop buying your stuff.
The idea of basic income seems like a better path forward, in terms of preserving artistic integrity (i.e. not "make money" or "please your fans" as the motive for making things). Everyone will get enough money to survive, no matter how much your ideas go against the zeitgeist.
Yeah, this is a tragic outcome for culture in general but free content isn’t sustainable either, people need to pay for rent, food, and other expenses. Im still waiting for the micropayments system to spring into existence..
I think there's a bit of confusion here in the way the author frames these 100 people. At this level they are not fans. They're not supporting you out of some sort of emotional attachment. They are giving you $1000 a year because they believe that the service or product you provide is worth that much. They're customers and that's all.
The "whale" archetype is just a modern version of what has always existed with MLM and self-help gurus where they pray on rich and emotionally vulnerable people. It's an absolutely tiny group of people that will never translate to a widespread economy.
Conflating the 1000 true fans concept with this is a mistake in my opinion.
> On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years.
22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it.
> Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.
Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential.
Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.
Readit News
[0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first.
2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?
When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.
Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.
The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.
Those trainers selling courses aren’t selling their $1000 courses to the same dedicated group of 100 course crazy training junkies every month, year in year out. Maybe someone will sign up for a series, or for special 1-1 sessions for a while, but then they will have got what they wanted and leave. That’s got very little in common with my long term relationship with a handful of people on Patreon for a few dollars each a month. There might be a very few, very wealthy patrons that do support a guru for large amounts every month, but that's yet another business model again and also has little similarity with the actual relationship people like me have with the people we support. Wealthy people supporting gurus has been a thing ever since there have been wealthy people.
[1] https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/about/about-ramit/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramit_Sethi
If you take it a few steps further, e.g. online abdominal surgery courses, the point becomes more clear.
Deleted Comment
Freemium is actually being charitable, it's more like shareware.
I noticed they mentioned an extra special interview at the end for paid subscribers. Seemed like a fair thing to do to me.
You think people who currently pay will stop paying?
Like, it's some sort of virtue signalling?
If he's changed to that model presumably he doesn't care about his following but instead wants to make a living (or make himself rich, depending how things are for him).
Having trouble understanding how "private coding classes for kids" is preying on people's vulnerabilities...?
Deleted Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goop_(company)
This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time.
This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing.
[0] https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking...
Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans"
The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans.
maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base.
At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match.
Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin.
To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
I'd think the trick is to find the right niche- if you're too generic, you're up against the big personalities.
That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
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Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.
1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory
Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums.
There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
> ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort
I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense.
I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income.
Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.")
I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.
The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).
Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.
Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.
People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.
But me now is like "why the hell would I give that kind of money to some rando on the internet that stream games?". My patreon career is limited at giving a podcast creator $10/month and that was hard to justify for myself.
You can sell software development services, and your fan may be a graphic designer who uses you every time to build out the back-end for the beautiful designs they make. You do a good job, you're their go-to person, they are your "fan".
One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living.
That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace.
A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.
The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services.
But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.
I’m not sure I’d pay that for an online trainer but if there are probably things a step or two away from workouts where I would pay for an internet mitigated version.
But that’s not being a fan, that’s buying a service.
And its a steal.
Problem is, you can only drink so many fancy starbucks coffees per day. There are many more content creators around.
What will the customers do when everyone wants a starbucks coffee per day? Pay one? Pay no one?
Also don't forget that not everyone is living in the HN well paid tech ivory tower. Even in the US, there should be a lot of people who can't afford a starbucks coffee per day...
Amazing right? 500 is less than 1000 and 200 isn’t that much more than 100.
Feel free to take down the OP and put this comment up instead
Sure, you don’t need to participate in Patreon to make stuff, but the trend seems to be toward relying on consumer market forces to fund culture. Tying the livelihoods of creators to the approval of their fans will lead them to censor themselves and consequently you aren't going to get anything that really pisses people off or challenges them in a countercultural way, at least enough to stop buying your stuff.
The idea of basic income seems like a better path forward, in terms of preserving artistic integrity (i.e. not "make money" or "please your fans" as the motive for making things). Everyone will get enough money to survive, no matter how much your ideas go against the zeitgeist.
Yeah, sounds really trivial.
The "whale" archetype is just a modern version of what has always existed with MLM and self-help gurus where they pray on rich and emotionally vulnerable people. It's an absolutely tiny group of people that will never translate to a widespread economy.
Conflating the 1000 true fans concept with this is a mistake in my opinion.
22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it.
> Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.
Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential.
Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.