This doesn't sound as dire to me as the author makes it out to be.
I think it sounds totally reasonable that you need 20,000 or even 100,000 engaged followers to be able to make it full time off creating content. I don't see how, even with advertising or sponsors, a smaller number of followers could ever pay a livable salary (out of 20,000 people, how many of those mattresses are you really going to sell?).
It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.
Indeed. People need to look at the numerator and the denominator. How many millions of content creators are there out there? How much disposable income do fans really have?
The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans.
> Eventually, her viewers were asking for more recipes, more elaborate productions, and fancier kitchen gadgets to review. Suddenly, she needed some serious cash to keep it all going. She started taking on sponsors, then product placements, then brand deals. I watched her churn-out videos, just ads for knives, mixers, or meal kits. And I could see the light going out of her eyes a little.
Nobody "made" her do this: she was working for herself. And, as her own boss, she drove herself to work harder to the point of burnout.
It's almost directly analogous to opening a restaurant. You buy kitchen equipment and ingredients and hope to turn a profit from satisfying the desires of the public. Quite often it doesn't work out; most restaurants close within a year or two of opening.
It's not a career, it's more like being in a band. Everyone who is visible doing it, looks like a success. We don't see the 1000 failures.
My advice with all creative pursuits is: don't. Put it to one side and create the next one. If it keeps nagging at you despite your attempts to leave it behind, then you can give it some attention. Only go all-in when you're left with no other choice.
I saw Tim Schafer at Double-Fine express similar thoughts about their Amnesia Fortnight game jams. Even if an idea seems great; don't force yourself to pursue it, take a step back and see if it pursues you.
The couple who make the best pizza in my city opened a (pizza) restaurant but they eventually decided that running a restaurant wasn't part of what they enjoyed, so they're back in a van outside of a pub. The pizza never really changed, a wood fired pizza oven fits inside a vehicle or a restaurant kitchen the same, and beyond that it's about the skill and judgement of the person making the pizza.
If you want to do what you love, and it makes enough money to live on, turning that into something you don't love but which makes more money is a grave mistake. We are mortal, this is all temporary.
> How many millions of content creators are there out there?
So many that the scales of things have changed beyond recognition. The democratisation of tools and access to audiences has made things explode.
I read recently that there is more music recorded in a week these days than was recorded in the entire 1970s. With that amount of content being created, the vast, vast majority of creators aren't going to find a way to make themselves stand out and get paid.
>The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans
I don't know, most people it seems block ads nowadays, and if you ask them how they compensate creators, they bend over backwards talking about how much they love Patreon.
So either people are either greedy and lying, or Patreon is actually pretty viable.
> It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.
That is somewhat US pov. Small countries with small populations did and still do domestic content all the time and hitting even 100s of thousands viewers is absolutely massive if your population is in single millions. Sure it’s not game of thrones budget, but if you look something like hit danish tv it’s clearly as professional and high quality.
Subscription services like Patreon are the only way I give people money unless they sell a product I want. I'm not going to watch commercials, and I'll skip sponsored videos or segments every time. If the idea is that not enough people use Patreon for you to make money, then go ahead and run advertisements, I'll just move on down the road to someone else. If the idea is that Patreon in particular is bad—that it takes too big of a cut, or doesn't have enough features—then tell me what other service to use. But the model where many fans directly support creators they like via small contributions on a recurring basis, that's the one we need to work if there's going to be a creator or artist economy in the future, so we should probably figure out how to make it work rather than tossing it out. The alternative of just more and more advertisements being shoved into everything is not the world we want to live in, so let's make the better option work.
Reality is the vast majority of people will absolutely refuse to pay content creators. Even legit newspapers with large staffs can’t get people to subscribe. Most people are ok with ads though. Your best bet is some sort of split where a small niche try’s to go subscription because there’s no chance of a widespread content creator subscription service that can replace ads.
All of your assumptions - and the article's - are rooted in this profoundly unequal society. The very worst of us are making billions on our collective suffering, and will gladly keep murdering millions to keep it that way. That's the context missing from tfa.
Universal basic income, as an example, makes debates like this irrelevant. There may be other ways to run things that also make these arguments look like the anachronism they ought to be.
I believe a world with 99% less advertising is not only possible, but necessary.
And I believe a world where creators can create, without having to sell their souls, is not only possible but necessary.
And we best make that world manifest fast, before our window closes.
People will gladly buy physical books off you, but they won't pay for articles. There seems to be a mental barrier between those two. A physical book in your hand probably feels more real, though the total amount of work isn't that different (to a series of articles).
How about, for example, delaying content releases until certain funding milestones have been reached? This will act as an incentive for people to pay for the content. If they want it released even earlier, they should pay more?
I think the issue with Patreon, and a lot of similar services is that they are too focused on the "creator > consumer" relationship. I think the biggest value that a content creator is creating is acting as a beacon that people can rally behind regarding a specific niche and facilitating "consumer > consumer". Their biggest value add is as a curator. It's often difficult, especially for smaller niches to find a dedicated community around it if not for a content creator creating content and promoting it. In many cases, a content creator becomes synonymous with the niche.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.
Most Patreons I've seen use discord to fill that specific social gap, but I've always found it a little odd that they didn't try to fill that niche themselves.
Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.
And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.
Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.
Patreon also takes VC funding on a regular basis; if you ask Jack Conte what his plan is for when they come back around looking for profit he will just blow a bunch of sunshine up your ass about how all these investors are just totally great people who believe in supporting the arts.
> Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.
Huh? So does Paypal by taking a cut of payments. It does not work by people donating to Paypal. Does that mean Paypal doesnt work? The proposition does not make sense...
> And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.
More than that, I don't think Patreons will ever be able to compete in a world where Netflix/Max/Disney exists just by making content.
For example, if you consider the $10 tier of The Command Zone[1], you'd have to weight that in against something like the Disney+ catalog, which I think is even cheaper and definitely has a lot more content?
I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything.
When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me).
Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it.
Patreon is great in theory, but as soon as sponsors start inquiring, you realize Patreon is a lot more work for less revenue.
I see the same few sponsorships constantly: Skillshare, Brilliant, Nebula, Hello Fresh, BetterHelp, Raid: Shadow Legends. I like to guess which one it's going to be when the creator starts telling a made-up story that leads into the sponsorship segment. The fact that it's the same ones, over and over again, across a wide spectrum of channels, makes me think that sponsorship is not yet a proven reliable source of income in the long term. A seemingly small number of companies are trying it out and it seems like they could easily pull out at any time. Patreon may be harder but it feels like a more dependable source of income than sponsorships.
Also PCBWay (mostly for "maker" videos) and VPN providers.
Paradox Interactive's relationship with the comedy sketch group Door Monster is also pretty nice to see. It seems clear that's not strictly a business relationship, but also someone at Paradox being genuine fans.
I think there's actually a bit of a sliding scale between personal patronage and corporate patronage. Local businesses sponsoring local plays, concerts or sports events is another example of sponsorship which isn't likely income-generating.
Nebula is bit weird on that list as my understanding is that it is somehow creator owned and controlled, but rest yeah... I also wonder how long this model will operate, the advertising spend on these products must be significant and I wonder if it is sustainable in long run. Specially with these interest rates or in possible recession...
One in that list is not like the others. Nebula sponsorships are for creators that are already a part of their network trying to move viewers to their platform.
That's not a diss on Nebula. I think, among all the others, nebula is the most likely to be sustainable. It is creator owned and operated and the pricing model model seems like it is able to make decent money for the people on it.
No affiliation to Nebula, just a happy, paying customer.
Its a two sided marketplace and companies only care about the conversion they get from different channels. If demand dries up, it will be reflected in more attractive pricing - I don’t think it’s likely that the entire market pulls out.
FWIW - it seems like the campaigns are working. You seem to be familiar with the brands and someone below chimed in on how one particular brand is great. Multiply that by the viewership - that’s definitely a win.
Some quick (unverified) research tells me that YouTuber marketing pays somewhere in the range of 30-70 CPM. You can pretty easily calculate that against google AdWords with reasonable conversion assumptions to decide if it’s worth it.
It really depends. My niche is in software and lots of brands allocate budget towards advertisements towards influencers. You might be right, long term it might dry up, but it’s been 2 years for me now and hasn’t slowed down
It's quite informative to look/listen to old videos and podcasts, and see who the sponsors are.
So many of them are now-dead VC-backed startups, but here and there you find a sponsor that still exists (Squarespace, for example).
The food related ones are always the most amusing because you know it's all fake bullshit and the host doesn't actually use the product, because nobody does.
I think sponsorships work better for more niche products on niche podcasts / YT channels. One great example I can think of are the sponsorships on the Syntax Podcast[1]. IIRC LogRocket was a sponsor a few years ago, I gave it a try based off their ad and I've been a happy customer ever since. Other products they rep are things like Sentry and Sanity and I think those companies are definitely seeing an ROI because they keep coming back.
The problem with the sponsorships you mentioned is they are all broad scale B2C where "everyone" is a potential customer. So you end up with channels that have nothing to do with the product promoting the product and it just comes up as disingenuous. When the hosts of Syntax are telling me that I should try out Sentry, Sanity or any other product in the web dev space, I'm much more confident that it's a legit endorsement based on experience rather than just reading the script.
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content.
I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
When you say sponsor do you mean a 1 minute advertisement in a 10 minute video where you say "Today's video is sponsored by ABC Corporation, they make this useful product to do XYZ" or do you mean a video where you got a free product and paid money to do a promotional video about the product?
I've seen both and I don't mine the advertisement style but when someone makes an entire video about a product that they got for free they seem like a shill. Usually their enthusiasm level is off and the whole things seems fake and I don't like watching them.
As for Patreon being a lot more work, I am wondering how? Every month Patreon charges me $12 for the various creators I support. Some of them create videos full time but many have full time jobs. The Patreon money lets them buy old computers, toys, or games to review. I'm nostalgic about my 1980's childhood.
Patreon seems really easy when they say for 10 seconds "If you would like please contribute to my Patreon account"
It’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s similar to the 1 minute section like you mentioned. I integrate it within my video. Not sure if this is what you’re referring to, but if someone doesn’t disclaim that something was sent to them or paid to say it. Highly illegal.
Reason I say Patreon is a lot more work is because usually you need to build an incentive with Patreon as well (community, BTS, extra content).
getting a product for free translates to $0 in your bank account. It's not sponsored, its just been given or lent to you. You can't feed your family with free items.
That interesting since several YouTube creators I follow on Patreon (ok, so it's a self-selecting group) say the opposite. They've done sponsors a few times, but the sponsors are so much work to collaborate with (they take too long to approve videos, they want pointless changes done, etc) that they gave up on it and rely on Patreon instead where they can just create the videos they want to on their own schedule without interference.
How much extra work is Patreon if you don't offer any extras to people who sponsor on there?
Most sponsored content is either completely orthogonal to the channel and its contents which is quite iffy if the creator is positioning themselves a someone with judgement their audience can trust (non-gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, or non-tech channels advertising NordVPN), or actively make me lose respect for the creator (gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, tech channels advertising NordVPN, or anyone with BetterHelp after all the shit they pulled).
Of course there are exceptions, like content creators posting on Nebula being sponsored by them or anything Josh Strife Hayes does.
It depends. I have a large following across short form platforms like TikTok and Instagram too. Usually for an integration (basically 1-2 minute ad) it ranges between 8-14k. For a short form video usually around the same.
The best streamers don't get into it because of money. In any case, 500 average viewers seems to be the magic number for a lot of people to start really considering going full-time.
There is also a deeply worrying trend to "milk" creators, in "controversial" topics, by banning them and taking the income for the company.
It allows for unholy alliances of company revenue, controversial topics, and state driven brigading.
My primary guess would be that it's easier to earn your first dollars with fans vs. with B2B sponsorships (or even with retribution from platforms like YouTube). Also, I don't really understand the term illusion in the image if someone could help. 5% conversion from content consumer to "paid fan" does not seem that low
I also struggle with understanding the image. It starts out as a flow chart depicting the conversion funnel. In the end it somehow is a state diagramm of the feeling of the creator. I get the points that are spelled out in the text, but the image is a mistery for me.
Readit News
I think it sounds totally reasonable that you need 20,000 or even 100,000 engaged followers to be able to make it full time off creating content. I don't see how, even with advertising or sponsors, a smaller number of followers could ever pay a livable salary (out of 20,000 people, how many of those mattresses are you really going to sell?).
It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.
The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans.
> Eventually, her viewers were asking for more recipes, more elaborate productions, and fancier kitchen gadgets to review. Suddenly, she needed some serious cash to keep it all going. She started taking on sponsors, then product placements, then brand deals. I watched her churn-out videos, just ads for knives, mixers, or meal kits. And I could see the light going out of her eyes a little.
Nobody "made" her do this: she was working for herself. And, as her own boss, she drove herself to work harder to the point of burnout.
It's almost directly analogous to opening a restaurant. You buy kitchen equipment and ingredients and hope to turn a profit from satisfying the desires of the public. Quite often it doesn't work out; most restaurants close within a year or two of opening.
It's not a career, it's more like being in a band. Everyone who is visible doing it, looks like a success. We don't see the 1000 failures.
My advice with all creative pursuits is: don't. Put it to one side and create the next one. If it keeps nagging at you despite your attempts to leave it behind, then you can give it some attention. Only go all-in when you're left with no other choice.
I saw Tim Schafer at Double-Fine express similar thoughts about their Amnesia Fortnight game jams. Even if an idea seems great; don't force yourself to pursue it, take a step back and see if it pursues you.
If you want to do what you love, and it makes enough money to live on, turning that into something you don't love but which makes more money is a grave mistake. We are mortal, this is all temporary.
So many that the scales of things have changed beyond recognition. The democratisation of tools and access to audiences has made things explode.
I read recently that there is more music recorded in a week these days than was recorded in the entire 1970s. With that amount of content being created, the vast, vast majority of creators aren't going to find a way to make themselves stand out and get paid.
I don't know, most people it seems block ads nowadays, and if you ask them how they compensate creators, they bend over backwards talking about how much they love Patreon.
So either people are either greedy and lying, or Patreon is actually pretty viable.
That is somewhat US pov. Small countries with small populations did and still do domestic content all the time and hitting even 100s of thousands viewers is absolutely massive if your population is in single millions. Sure it’s not game of thrones budget, but if you look something like hit danish tv it’s clearly as professional and high quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_%26_Clark:_The_New_Advent...
Deleted Comment
Universal basic income, as an example, makes debates like this irrelevant. There may be other ways to run things that also make these arguments look like the anachronism they ought to be.
I believe a world with 99% less advertising is not only possible, but necessary.
And I believe a world where creators can create, without having to sell their souls, is not only possible but necessary.
And we best make that world manifest fast, before our window closes.
People will gladly buy physical books off you, but they won't pay for articles. There seems to be a mental barrier between those two. A physical book in your hand probably feels more real, though the total amount of work isn't that different (to a series of articles).
Deleted Comment
I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.
And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.
Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.
As in they are also funded by donations, or do the creators themselves pay for entry?
> How is Liberapay funded? Are there fees?
> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.
https://liberapay.com/about/faq
Huh? So does Paypal by taking a cut of payments. It does not work by people donating to Paypal. Does that mean Paypal doesnt work? The proposition does not make sense...
More than that, I don't think Patreons will ever be able to compete in a world where Netflix/Max/Disney exists just by making content. For example, if you consider the $10 tier of The Command Zone[1], you'd have to weight that in against something like the Disney+ catalog, which I think is even cheaper and definitely has a lot more content?
[1] https://www.patreon.com/commandzone
When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me).
Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it.
Patreon is great in theory, but as soon as sponsors start inquiring, you realize Patreon is a lot more work for less revenue.
Paradox Interactive's relationship with the comedy sketch group Door Monster is also pretty nice to see. It seems clear that's not strictly a business relationship, but also someone at Paradox being genuine fans.
I think there's actually a bit of a sliding scale between personal patronage and corporate patronage. Local businesses sponsoring local plays, concerts or sports events is another example of sponsorship which isn't likely income-generating.
That's not a diss on Nebula. I think, among all the others, nebula is the most likely to be sustainable. It is creator owned and operated and the pricing model model seems like it is able to make decent money for the people on it.
No affiliation to Nebula, just a happy, paying customer.
FWIW - it seems like the campaigns are working. You seem to be familiar with the brands and someone below chimed in on how one particular brand is great. Multiply that by the viewership - that’s definitely a win.
Some quick (unverified) research tells me that YouTuber marketing pays somewhere in the range of 30-70 CPM. You can pretty easily calculate that against google AdWords with reasonable conversion assumptions to decide if it’s worth it.
So many of them are now-dead VC-backed startups, but here and there you find a sponsor that still exists (Squarespace, for example).
The food related ones are always the most amusing because you know it's all fake bullshit and the host doesn't actually use the product, because nobody does.
The problem with the sponsorships you mentioned is they are all broad scale B2C where "everyone" is a potential customer. So you end up with channels that have nothing to do with the product promoting the product and it just comes up as disingenuous. When the hosts of Syntax are telling me that I should try out Sentry, Sanity or any other product in the web dev space, I'm much more confident that it's a legit endorsement based on experience rather than just reading the script.
[1]: https://syntax.fm/
I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
And if you have android:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
Cheap entertainment is getting boring.
I've seen both and I don't mine the advertisement style but when someone makes an entire video about a product that they got for free they seem like a shill. Usually their enthusiasm level is off and the whole things seems fake and I don't like watching them.
As for Patreon being a lot more work, I am wondering how? Every month Patreon charges me $12 for the various creators I support. Some of them create videos full time but many have full time jobs. The Patreon money lets them buy old computers, toys, or games to review. I'm nostalgic about my 1980's childhood.
Patreon seems really easy when they say for 10 seconds "If you would like please contribute to my Patreon account"
Reason I say Patreon is a lot more work is because usually you need to build an incentive with Patreon as well (community, BTS, extra content).
Business sense is really important when dealing with this.
Most sponsored content is either completely orthogonal to the channel and its contents which is quite iffy if the creator is positioning themselves a someone with judgement their audience can trust (non-gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, or non-tech channels advertising NordVPN), or actively make me lose respect for the creator (gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, tech channels advertising NordVPN, or anyone with BetterHelp after all the shit they pulled).
Of course there are exceptions, like content creators posting on Nebula being sponsored by them or anything Josh Strife Hayes does.
I don't think most of these people expect to live off of the income. Most people seem well aware the odds of that happening is low.
Remember that tons of content was created before YouTube was paying anyone anything. They just wanted to share it.
https://nebula.tv/videos/tomnicholas-the-rise-and-fall-of-pa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw.