For Creators, Everything is for Sale

Paywall for individual contributors: This is an area with the most innovation over the last five years as creators look to get paid. If Patreon is a digital tip jar, Substack is a Stratechery-in-a-box.

Today, content creators monetize their social presence through advertising or sponsorships, but these limited methods are often unstainable. That’s why creators are turning to solutions like Superpeer, Patreon, and Gumroad to monetize their audiences. While these solutions help monetize creator time and content, they don’t always allow creators or ... See more

The final and most recent piece of the creator triad is monetization. Being a creator is hard and often unforgiving work. One study found that reaching the top 3.5% of YouTube channels—which means about 1 million views each month—only nets you $12,000 to $16,000 a year, around the federal poverty line.

“Everyone’s already a creator,” said Li Jin, a general partner at Variant Fund and an ex-partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re all creating content on the internet. I think this binary divide between who’s a creator versus who’s a consumer – it doesn’t really exist. Everyone is creating something of value on the internet.”