Media Marketplaces and the Future of Digital Media

In the past few years, startups like Substack, Patreon, and Shopify have created alternative ways for creators to build businesses online through direct transactions, rather than advertising. This shift exposed a simple fact: in an ad-driven world, creators were generally under-monetizing their audiences.

The lack of payment infrastructure is the reason why so much of the internet is monetized via advertising. Rather than requiring users to pull out a credit card and type their information into a website, users could be monetized frictionlessly and indirectly, paying not with their money but with a different asset: their attention. That precipitated... See more

In media, the main driver for revenue is both subscriptions and advertising. These two means fund the growth of media on the web and are platform specific. That means, when someone subscribes or advertises to something, they do so on the platform rather than the individual. The platform holds the reputation, and the individual leverages the platfor... See more

Independent internet-native creators leverage the internet’s frictionless content creation and distribution, but they’re still trapped by traditional business models like subscriptions and advertising.

A subscription model is based on the promise of the production of future gated content. A publication or creator is paid to continue production, not ... See more