With better infrastructure, creators may be able to reward and incentivize their community financially. If focused on the upside — giving 20% of future earnings back to the audience after a certain threshold is met, for example — creators would align incentives without upfront costs.

We all seek a sense of belonging. It's what inspires our desire to seek out groups of like-minded people. Once that fit is established, there's status in being a community leader. The most direct example here is Reddit: the moderator of a particular subreddit holds status to those engaged in the community. Even a contributor that writes a popular c... See more

Creators that build wealth by investing in startups add a stakeholder to the mix: the company’s founder. This model can be leveraged in conjunction with those listed above, or independently. Isolated, creators buy ownership from founders with money and audience attention. The agreement they make is that they will expose the founder to their audienc... See more

This is a symbiotic relationship, up to a point. Each party benefits, though no money is earned. Advertisers solve that problem. They buy the attention accumulated by the creator and pay with money.

Creators pay with effort. They put in the work to create a product in the hopes the audience consumes and engages with it. Audience members, on the other side of this interaction, pay for this effort with attention.

Though we may not always realize it, every piece of content involves a series of transactions, a string of exchanges.

This form of anointment is not common in creator circles. There are no awards for listening to the Masters of Scale podcast every week; no accolades for reading Stratechery.

As it stands, there’s no comprehensive tools that allow writers, podcasters, and streamers to identify and reward their most loyal fans.

There are three stakeholders in a promotion-based monetization model: creators, audience members, and advertisers. Each party pays with a different currency.