[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/
If you take it a few steps further, e.g. online abdominal surgery courses, the point becomes more clear.
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...?
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.
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.
You need to create valuable calls to action and
continuously produce content in order to maintain
their attention.
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.
The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - 'I gave you money, now deliver this'.
The article describes customers not fans. The VC'ing of 1000 true fans.
Nevertheless it's great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.
Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.
As a sentence this just fills me with dread. And it's hard to say why because I know, for example, that a writer making a living from selling their books could be said to be "monetizing what they love" OR engaging in the "Passion Economy".
But if I was to try and get to the heart of it it's simply that I don't want to monetize what I love. I want it to be the one part of my existence not dominated by money. And I don't want an actual passion (awful word really) to form part of an economy.
You can have a better, more rewarding and fulfilling career, sure. But never expect it not to feel like a chore a lot of the time.
This comes up a lot when making indie games. That your work is somehow less pure or you had to compromise on your creative vision because you had to monetize it. As a creator you have to make a ton of tradeoffs all the time anyway, since you have a finite amount of time and resources. What if monetizing it actually allows you to achieve the vision you had in mind? Or it helped you understand what your audience cares about and make something more relatable or moving (or go the other direction, disturbing or meant to role them up etc) Why isn't monetizing just another trade-off? What's so special about it?
The answer to me: culturally monetizing/greed in art has been seen as making art impure and it's a stigma we need to get over.
If the thing you truly love can make a lot of money then I would say one should do that but reflect on how not to start hating it. Even hobbies require discipline, but you don't see them as forced on you.
Career choices to me are more a process of elimination than choosing, especially if you have many things that you are interested in.
I didn't see it this way until now, but when I rewind this is exactly how I came to study CS. Thanks for the insight.
There are many criticisms of this economy that we currently have, and the creeping monetization of the last vestige of private life in which we don't need to currently sell, those hours after work and before sleep.
"Why exclude this?", as you ask, simply shows you think that there is no space to resist the totality (I would sometimes go as far as to say tolatitarianism) of "the economy". No space is free, because we have given up resisting it.
I assume you're being purposefully terse, but just in case ... can you see how one might want to do an activity without considering 'could I charge people [more] to enjoy this with me, could I end this activity with less opportunity cost lost' and instead just be generous with something one loves and free with ones use of time when having fun?
Creators create not to meet some sort of quota or "monetize" but because they need to create. It's the same for artists. True art exists because it has to come out no matter what. Monetization doesn't come into it at all. This is an important point that the passion economy vultures don't seem to grasp. What we see today is monetization becoming THE purpose and overriding everything else.
The idea that everything has to be about the hustle is toxic and entirely insane.
As a developer, you are better off to go work for a monopoly: they pay well. (Google, Facebook, etc).
(This does not mean I do not have a passion project ('indie game'), I just know that the chance that it can replace my day-job is quite low.)
Things are different now. People consume much more media, which is much more diverse than ever before. Thank population growth and the iPhone. Today, there are YouTube channels that only write video essays about The Simpsons, webcomics about engineering, blogs about crystal healing, and cartoon porn; you name it, there's probably a significant audience for it these days. The number of audiences and their sizes only get bigger with population growth, whereas an artist only needs a certain number of sponsors to sustain them, whether it's 100 or 1000.
The real obstacle is monetization, which primarily comes down to the business skills of the artist/producer, as well as competition between fungible alternatives (why pay $20 to watch a video when I can watch it on YouTube for free) and other external factors.
At the high end of the transition region people can make a good living, at the low end they can significantly augment their day job.
But I don't see any problem with 6 figure Engineers working competitively.
Is that not enough money?
However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!
For the average person this is not the case assuming you as a creator are trying to extract similar value. That means you're pushing out a new release every year. That either means the new release invalidates the old one or is so enticing every time that people keep buying it without skipping releases as they think about it or are reminded unlike a subscription which can be automated.
I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).
There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it's like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it's more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you.
That's without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It's especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.
Network economy matches userland economy.
We should henceforth refer to billionaires as "whales".
What doesn’t work is to cut your prime value out just to those who pay. Then you can’t build momentum and the large fan base.
having a couple blogs/influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works)
> As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love
it's simply fun growing a brand/discovering new communities/creating one/watching the engagement and metrics
Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus volatile, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they'll replace him/her with whatever else is out there, and that's 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons.
Very risky for making a living, IMO.
A couple animators on our platform have extremely dedicated fans making up the majority of the donation revenue.
I feel like the comments here cover the main issues with this article. I kept flip-flopping between appreciating the article and disagreeing with it. The two main issues I have with it are:
1. $1000/year to provide value is a business, not a "passion" in the true sense. 2. Highlighting the outliers of a given platform discredits the concept as something that many people can achieve.
"These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product." - yes, that would be a business transaction.
This article could be rewritten to say that if you want to create a life-style business, make sure to generate enough value for someone (or a business) that they would be willing to pay $1000/year for your product. This will make profitability/success much easier.
Yes, the original author of 1,000 True Fans retracted his original views after hearing from musicians, but the general concept/framework doesn't seem to be broken even if the numbers have to be adjusted. The main idea is that you don't need millions of people paying you $1 to have success.
Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother's consent and/or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.
But the idea of "whales" is nearly universal in all lines of business, and there's nothing unethical about it unless your business is already operating in some kind of ethical gray area.
If you are lucky enough to have customers at all, you will have some that spend 10x or 100x as others.
The most obvious example would be a neighborhood restaurant or food truck. Most people in your town might visit once or twice per year, if at all. But then you have your regular customers that you see a few times per week. Somebody who stops by twice a week is spending 100x as somebody who visits once a year.
Same with a department store. Most people buy nothing, some just want a pair of socks, and some will drop $2,000 on a new business wardrobe.
Something worth considering: if your business is one that inspires passionate fans, do you have any options for these folks to spend more? If not, are you kinda leaving a bunch of money on the table and hamstringing your fledgling business? Probably. Of course, this is something that takes ethical consideration and good judgement.
The whale term was invented by casinos wasn't it? Where there's no upper limit to how much you can lose.
This is more true for some people than others. A decent number of YouTubers I know have their patreons set up to only charge customers after they put out a video, so if several months go by without any new content they aren't just pulling a salary from patrons. This model is only really relevant to YouTubers who put effort into fewer videos released farther apart, rather than those with weekly or even daily releases of vlog content, but still it feels like a fair way of doing things where they are essentially being paid for releasing something and not like begging.
Contrast this with some people I see on twitter who have a patreon... just for tweeting? Occasionally there is a spin put on it about being a minority or disabled and taking donations, but this definitely feels much more like e-begging, even though I guess you could try and make the argument that tweets are just as valid "content" as youtube videos.
Best paradigm busting advice in business after "If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you'll have 5 milion customers" and "Always remember: profit is revenue minus expense".
But let's call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as "Passion Economy", which sounds a lot more noble than "overcharging random strangers on the internet".
I'm also surprised that "whales" went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.
It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the gain in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: http://free.eco .
There is no such thing.
"Don't be snarky."
I’d hate to think that in this forum, just because a comment is short and succinct - what I thought to be a daily clear response, meaning “the authors live in a bubble of experience and expectations” - it is somehow lesser value that a comment that is long winded and without a clear opinion.
TLDR. I hope HN doesn’t confuse clear and succinct with snarky and sarcastic.
And then they present the idea of selling what your customers want to buy as new ^_^
give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc.
i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he/she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his/her passion position in life but most of us should/must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time...
prize tag is for goods not for people...