Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Where's The Money In The #CreatorEconomy?

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

Poking some holes in the Metaverse hype and also examining the financial realities of the Creator Economy. Simon Owen's Media Newsletter Zealous.app The Charlie Warzel leaving substack essay we discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome, everybody, to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. Today is November 3rd, 2021. Today, Brian and I are going to be joined by a few guests talking about the creator economy, monetization, what's happening there, what's not happening there.

But first, Brian, we are supposed to talk about what, meta or snark or OK boomer or Zoom. I don't know. Where do you want to start? Well, first of all, I have the hardest time already, calling Facebook meta. Does anybody else have that problem? I mean, look, everyone still calls

Alphabet Google for the most part. But at least in that instance, they were the first to do it maybe, and it was more plausible because it's like we're doing these other bets, and so were this,

at least they made the argument that were this company that has all of our fingers and all of these pies, it wasn't that it wasn't a PR move that was like you know what we're gonna we're gonna move to ping pong because we're we want to be a ping pong company it it wasn't a PR move you know so today was the first day that I literally had to call meta meta I heard that man it was it it was annoying. Did you know somebody pointed this out to me recently I don't know and I feel like it's like so

I'm so daft, but like, that alphabet was about alpha bets, you know, like making bets that were pre-beta. Well, also, I mean, look, there's that. And then there was, in theory, I heard one time that there's all these different, if you, if you go through, remember because Google Venture became GV? So, like, there literally was an alphabet of things that they were. Oh, it totally made sense. And, like, in a very Googly way, it was sort of like, I don't want to say at their apex,

but they were in a very, like, strong position. The brand was good. Like, there wasn't all this, like, shudden for it about, like, you know, how evil the company was. And this could be a head fake. They didn't do it as a PR move. They did it as a Googly, sort of weird. It didn't make a lot of sense, but it wasn't, like, done out of, you know, I will, I say there was like one thing, though, especially that I worked on or was near. When Google was building its social network, it was originally called Google.

dot me. And I remember that there was like this sort of like weird moment where it's like there's like Google Wave and all the other kind of like Google blank and then noun type of names. And then we ended on Google Plus, no, which obviously pluses are very, you know, in vogue now. You guys were way ahead of the curve. But the fact that you just like drop the thing if it didn't work out, on the one hand was super hedging its bets and saying, well, you know, maybe Google Plus eventually is just Google. And so that actually, I think, worked out in their favor. In this case, this really is. And we talked about this on the show with Alex a couple weeks ago about how this renaming, at least, you know, I take it more as a bet the company type of effort. Like it is a massive

signal internally into the market about what that company is focused on. And yes, there's a media, you know, brand aspect to it. But I think, I don't know, like there's a timing of it where there's, there's resetting expectations. And there's a generation that will grow up that, you know, will not have been on Facebook or where Facebook is like this distant memory like an AOL or a MySpace. And the further we get away from that, the more that we think of this company as, you know, what Zuck seems to aspire for it to be thought of as. So let's get into meta as a move towards a metaverse, what they want us to be thinking of, because then this will transition us into...

everything else we want to talk about. So you and I have been talking offline and you're like, well, let's talk, Brian, about your skepticism about the metaverse. And I don't know that that's necessarily true, except for the fact that what we're about to talk about for the next 10 minutes is going to be me being skeptical about. But if you listen to today's show, Microsoft had their event yesterday

Of course, the Metaverse was a big part of it. So everybody, Metaverse, it's like, if you remember that Simpson's episode about the Monorail, Monorail, Monterell, it's Metaverse, Metaverse. My problem right now is that it has become so, hello fellow kids, it's become so boomery to talk about the Metaverse because all of these giant corporations have jumped in and claim. that they're, we're a Metaverse First Company. I mean, name any sort of cringy sort of, you know, going back the last 20 years of any sort of media where it's like, you know, if it's Silicon Valley, if it's, you know, a 30 rock sketch or something, it's like, oh, we're a Metaverse First Company.

Like, come on. This is, at this point, even if you were bullish on the Metaverse, you want everybody to shut up. because it's so cringy right now. It's like saying mobile first. Yes. Now, okay. And you and I have talked about this offline.

And I've said this a thousand times. Everything is a buzzword that people want to invest in, that companies say to their stockholders that they're a ex-first company until it becomes the thing that actually turns. Until it becomes like a liability. No, no, until it becomes a reality. Oh, okay, same, same. I mean, what I'm saying is, like, if someone pitched you and they said that they're mobile first, now it's a liability because you're like, wait, you're not like, it's obvious.

You should already be there. And in the same way that, like, video on the web was something that I heard about forever until YouTube made it happen, that social media was something that I heard about forever and ever until finally it was solved. And so, of course, I get that. But it's so, it's so cringy right now. It was already cringy. Archie, stop, stop that. It was so cringy already in terms of like, this is the next thing that everybody wants to invest in. This is what all the VCs are.

Why is it cringy to you? Like, in the sense that it's just overplayed, it's talked about too much. It's too high-level abstract. It's oversold. all of the above, and no one actually knows what it is. And, okay, so this is putting on the history hat, which again, I hope I don't go too long on this, but it is like the Information Super Highway, you know, I researched this a lot for my book. You know, Microsoft and the cable companies and, you know, Time Warner and all sorts of people back in the early 90s.

Everyone knew that digital was going to be a thing, that the Internet in some form was going to be a thing, but no one actually knew what it was going to be. But they all used the buzzwords and they all said that they got it. And it's literally like out of an episode of succession. And so right now, the problem with it is, is number one, no one knows what it is, but they're using the buzzword. And then the fact that all of the incumbents, it reminds me of when, you know, Time Warner and Microsoft and, you know, Rogers and everyone were going to give you the information superhighway, except for the fact that because they were incumbents, because they didn't know, they all had their incumbency sort of biases. So they thought it was going to come via the TV. They thought it was going to be, it was going to come in the early 2000s when broadband came and things like that. Meanwhile, if the Metaverse actually happens, it's not going to, it's not going to be stupid fucking avatars in an office meeting with a virtual whiteboard.

I just, the cringe thing to me not only is that it's these huge incumbents with their boomer energy. And it's also that all of their demos are, well, guess, What? Look, we can, you don't have to be in a Zoom anymore. You can be in a, you can put on your, your VR glasses and you can be in a virtual Zoom meeting with a virtual whiteboard. Okay, let me, let me pause you, because I think I, I think I'm getting at or understanding like what's going on for you. So, or maybe I'm wrong, but maybe why it's not so cringy, like for me in the same way it is for you is because of the degree to which it seems like, At least in this case, you know, Zuck is trying too hard. Like, those who are incumbents shouldn't be essentially trying to like take the sandbox away from like the kids if, you know, you're the adult, you know, like you kind of let the kids like have the thing.

And throughout like all of Facebook's history, it's always been about stealing the thing that the young kids are doing and then sort of planting the Facebook flag on it and claiming credit for it. So this feels a lot like that, and it was essentially a race to who was going to be able to claim to be the first and mostest metaverse company. And by changing the name, like Zuck gets to christen this era and, I mean, in many ways, like own it in almost like an end run around Microsoft. The dynamics between meta and Microsoft are going to be very interesting in this because Zuck did mention in his keynote that they're working with people at Microsoft. And Zuck looks up to admires Bill Gates. And yet for all the sort of standardization or open platform aspects of what Bill Gates did with Microsoft, Zuck has always wanted to do the same thing, but for the social web and to then own the social internet. So this feels like a number of different things playing out that if you step away from your initial kind of throw up in your mouth kind of reaction to it,

and get over the fact that it's trying too hard to sort of force something or to will something into existence before people are ready, I think you have to interpret it from a different lens, you know, which is kind of like a direction towards the future, not aimed at the present. And I get that, I get that, but you're still using terms like force and we don't use the term information super highway. That's something that is in the dustman of history. I do think that it's too early and it is too forced and the thing that it will become. And I use that quote today on the show that if the Metaverse happens, it will happen on the blockchain, which I don't know that that's true. I have skepticism about crypto stuff as well.

But there's a ton of energy there that is not in the hands of the incumbents. Yeah, but I think that's exactly what Zuck wants to capture. You know, the fact that he brought up NFTs and talked about the blockchain. and working with some of those things and the whole interrupt conversation about bringing skins or, you know, shoes that you buy in one part of the Metaverse to another part of the Metaverse, speaks to some of those ideas and is putting those ideas in the minds of whether it's the advertisers or the brands that, you know, work with Facebook slash Meta. Yeah.

Four developers. Oh, and developers and game designers and et cetera and so forth. So I don't, I guess, maybe. maybe I've been drinking far too much of the Web 3 N of T Kool-Aid because to me it seems self-evident that something like the Metaverse is, it's already here. Yeah, but if I was, if I was as pilled as you are about Web 3, I would be more skeptical than even I'm being right now because it's, it just sounds so thirsty to me. Like the thirst is literally dripping off of every word in that.

video, right? You know, I don't, look, look, listen, I haven't seen it because I haven't been in Manhattan, but there's the huge NFT conference going on right now in New York City. Like, that wasn't, Facebook didn't make that happen. And, you know, look, okay, I am being a little too grumpy right now. But I am saying that if Mark Zuckerberg announced that there was going to be a Metaverse conference in Manhattan next month, I don't think you'd have the same sort of energy. I think that's a great point. But I think it feels similar to when Instagram, you know,

took on Snap's stories and essentially saw energy that was happening elsewhere and tried to neuter it at the source. Now, it didn't work. It turns out that you can have a couple platforms, maybe not Twitter, that have stories and that actually works out just fine. In this case, I got to imagine that Zuck was like lusting after all the energy that's going into Web 3 and NFTs and some of the values around Interop. And so he's able to cherry pick the words that will resonate for that audience in a certain way while absolutely still be 100% focused on, you know, owning or having a great deal of influence over that space. So I, it just, it feels like it's different. It feels like he doesn't have the ownership that, I don't know, maybe renaming the company implies, but it does suggest

a very clear direction that he's pointing the sort of Facebook bazooka at and firing a meta missile towards. And that's where the whole company is going. Okay, so we've gone down this path. I think we can beat this horse like a lot more, especially if it's a virtual metaverse horse. But we have some very important guests here that are going to talk about a different part of, and not just specifically Zuck's presentation about the metaverse, but about what's going to be a very important guest. going on in the creator economy in general. One of the things that Zuck spent a lot of time talking about in his Metaverse keynote was about how creators should get paid and how they can make money.

And in fact, they brought or they had Vishal up there, who was formerly head of some part of Instagram product, I think it was head of product or something over at Instagram talking about an influencer who's creating sort of a virtual butterfly gallery in the metaverse. I don't know. It was a little lost on me. but that Vajal is now head of Metaverse, I guess product at Instagram. So Instagram is becoming a Metaverse company as well.

And the whole point of this was to say to creators, again, a very broad definition of creators. And we should probably unpack that concept as well, that the only way that this whole thing is going to work is if creators are getting paid and creators are making money. And so we've got two folks here today to join us to talk about that. We've got Greg and we've got Simon. If you guys want to introduce yourselves and let us. us know your interest in the space. That would be great. Sure, happy to go first. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, hi, everyone. I'm Greg. I'm currently the co-founder of a company called Zellis,

which is a live streaming modernization platform for creators, but been working in creator space since clout way back when. With a K, right? With a K, who some people just threw up and some people were like, oh, I remember that. And yeah, I've been building tools in this domain for a while and, you know, recognize the creator class is sort of an emerging class of SMBs. And I, you know, I support entrepreneurs and all stripes and excited about helping them, you know, step into that role. I'm going to go grab your tweet thread, actually, and pin it to this channel, just so

folks can sort of see, like, because you've been writing a lot and thinking a lot about the space, and obviously you have a business in the space. And I think that just some of the things that you've been pointing out have been super valuable and useful. Before we get into that, Simon, you want to, you know, introduce yourself? Hello, I'm Simon Owens. I host a podcast called The Business of Content. It's kind of like a media industry podcast, but it features everything, you know, everybody from, you know, top executives from companies like the New York Times, but then I also, I, you know, interview a lot of people within the creator economy, people

who have bootstrapped, you know, really popular newsletters on Substack, really successful accounts on Patreon, huge YouTube stars, huge podcasters. So I, I really, I really really love kind of featuring, you know, so-called creator economy, successful entrepreneurs on it. I also have my own substack, where I also, you know, leverage my journalism skills to publish case studies on bootstrapped media businesses. And let me, let me highly recommend Simon's substack, because it's one of the ones that I read religiously to keep on top of, especially the, the substack space, but also the whole creator space in general. So let me tee this up because, again, I'm going to do it in a cynical way.

But one of the things that Chris and I have been talking about is, as far as we can tell, what everybody in tech is going after right now is Metaverse, crypto, and the creator economy. And like, those are all of the feces. If you're a startup, you're trying to fit into one of those buckets. If you're a venture capitalist, you're trying to invest. and companies in these buckets. But also, like, that's where all of the energy is. And one of the things that Chris and I have been kicking around about is, at least thus far, does the creator economy make money?

And does it make money for the creators? Does it make money for the platforms? If all of the huge tech platforms have gotten to this point, they've gotten to this point because they're essentially advertising support. They're basically, your attention is being sold to advertisers, right? And so I love the idea of the creator economy because it's a different model that's not that. It's not as stupid as that. but I don't know, Chris, if you want to bring up some of the data points that we've been thinking about,

but we're starting to wonder if the early returns in the creator economy are not good or weak or something? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess like at a high level, maybe one would have framed this conversation. And I think, you know, Greg's perspective and Simon's perspective, especially on different media types and different, maybe, I don't know, fan engagement or fan interactions and the monetization opportunities in those spaces would be really interesting to unpack and to consider. But it feels like, you know, just as software has been eating the world for quite a while, we're really starting to see the economy be eaten by software and that opportunities for people to, you know, essentially have fractional work,

fractional labor, working for fractional bosses, which may include themselves, doing fractional things related to all sorts of stuff, is part of what's happening. And then you have the creation of these scarcity tokens that allow you to sell your time or your experience or your artwork or things like that that, that capture and store that value and then allow you to charge for it over time is interesting. And then all the payments and stuff like that that's happening on the internet are also enabling people to barter and exchange and do peer-to-peer, I don't know, economic exchange in a way that just was like too hard even a couple years ago. And now you have a generation that's growing up with this stuff where they take for granted the ability to. to send digital payments to anybody, anywhere, without interchange fees, and a different type of financial literacy in the space leading to a set of different assumptions about how to participate in the economy and how to earn money and how to, I don't know, just do stuff. So maybe that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it feels like there's just a, the way in which we conceived of work in the industrial revolution no longer seems to apply. and we're in the middle of figuring out what it will look like going forward.

And some of it maybe these, I don't know, having a sub-stack on the side, having or doing a live stream, and some of it maybe is, you know, working for Uber, Lyft or whatever else. I don't know, but maybe you guys can, like, give us a sense for what the work of a creator kind of looks like today and whether there will be, as Lee Jin sort of demands, a middle class. And if that even makes sense economically. Yeah, and I think you're right, Chris, though, that economics is sort of the driving like sort of forcing function, right?

Or shifts in economics, right? And so, you know, from my point of view, I think, like, what we see is diversification away from, you know, sort of like one stagnant, a stagnant model, right? And so, yes, advertising, I think, and specifically, like, brand-related dollars. But, you know, like, much like even with the substack universe, it's moving away from employment in one case.

But I do think, like, we are seeing creators fan out to diversify their income. The idea or concept of multi-skew creators has actually been around for quite some time, but it tended to be an opportunity afforded only to sort of like the largest creators who were able to put together resources and teams that could actually let them take advantage of sort of all these bits and pieces. Let me actually ask you quickly to unpack that. When you say multi-skew creator, this is like Hunter Walk's conception of someone who has a lot of different ways of making money, my question would be giving your experience with live streamers or folks who are multi-skew creators.

Are they solo acts? Do they have teams? Like, I feel like we, or at least I imagine, creators to be largely solopreneurs. But the larger creators, the one that are making, you know, millions of dollars tend to have teams. They tend to be basically like old school media brands who happen to use social media effectively. And so I think, at least when I think about the creator, I think about people who are self-trained and sort of figuring out this stuff out for themselves. They're kind of isolated on their own. There are, of course, like launch houses and stuff like that that's going on to aggregate some of those folks. But, I guess I'm trying to understand.

I think that's absolutely right. And I think they were to template probably, right? Like, you know, you could argue that like the $4 to $4 billion raised, you know, for a creator economy companies, the bulk of them are still chasing the same 200,000 people, right? Yeah. Like 200,000 creators. Yes, 200,000 creators kind of the 1% at the top, which decreasingly look like individuals and increasing look like media companies, right?

So those multi-skews are anything from partnerships. ambassador deals all the way down to like programming and educational content and all kinds of things in between. What I do think is there's an emergent trend where there are technologies and platforms arising that are saying, hey, all of these skews that existed, we could refactor them into bite-sized versions that give everybody access to them, but not necessarily the same economic scale. But that economic scale is still significantly be greater because we're removing sort of the constraints of the previous systems, right? So the taxes and the burdens that came with being on a platform, et cetera, like are, we can askew them to some degree, right? And so we're now looking at new monetization and revenue

opportunities coming out of community, crypto, CRM, like all these other spaces and and sort of approaches that the larger creators were always taking advantage of, but no one wanted to build tools to service, you know, someone with a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, because traditionally, as, you know, I think you guys have both pointed out, you're still largely dealing with an average, like 70, 80 percent of the revenue, I think is still actually, let's put it this way. I think there's like $10 billion in creator income or revenue generated, but there's like $15 billion in, um, influence or marketing revenue generated like in the same year, right? So that, that's a pretty quick catch up, relatively speaking. Um, but, you know, but,

that's sort of the disparity still, right? And what we are seeing, I think, now is not, you know, Chris, you and I, like, we've been on this Twitter forever, right? Yes. You know, in the early days, like early adopters got large following. We saw that happen on Clubhouse. We saw it happen all these other places, right? But the reality was that in the past, you had to be big to do this, like, near full time, right? I don't think that that's the same reality that most people are walking out and into this field with the expectation of, right? Like I think folks are saying, hey, I can try. I could actually start to make money on day one or I can make money like, you know,

within three months of starting, right? And I think the big fundamental mental shift that is happening on the creator side, not the builder's side or anything else is you really have two transitions. One is to sort of customer bases as opposed to just audiences and followers. And the second is to communities, which is in lieu of audiences and followers, right? Now, those are big leaps because, like, as soleopreneurs, everyone here knows, like, just maintaining a Twitter account is a huge pain in the ass. Right? Like, it's a whole other thing to have an engaged community, and it's a whole entirely different thing to have a customer base that you support.

And folks are still learning how to deal with those pieces. And Simon, you wrote recently literally about this. I'm not going to quote your whole piece, but at the end of your recent piece, you said that if there are, 22,000 YouTube channels right now with at least a million subscribers. If each of those channels employs an average of five people, which you go into in your piece, why that could be plausible, that's 110,000 jobs. So even if we're only talking about the top 1%, you're still saying there's a whole economy here with real people making real money. Yeah. And so I think that's why, like, you see a lot of these stories about how there's no creator economy middle class

because they have these statistics that show X amount of money is going towards the top 1% of creators. But yeah, that's something, you know, as Greg was pointing out, like a lot of these creator businesses are actually employing sometimes dozens of people. Like, if you look at, you know, the operations of Mr. Beast, he owns multiple warehouses. He has camera people. He has full-time editors. He has people who are building his sets for him. He has, you know, a huge business employing dozens, if not hundreds of people. And so I think YouTube recently put out a study in which it claims that just in the U.S. alone, it is contributing to the full-time jobs of 400,000 different people. So I think that's one way that those statistics some kind of get misconstrued a little bit. Another way,

that they get misconstrued is that when you're looking at that 99% of people who aren't making a lot of money, a lot of those people who are just starting out on platforms like YouTube or substack, maybe they've only produced like four or five videos before getting aboard, their heart's not really in it, you know, or they just haven't put in the work yet and they still plan to. And so because the barrier is so low to enter the creator space, you're going to have this huge number that isn't really representative of the people who are actually working on their YouTube channel or their substack 40 hours a week. And so one thing that I've proposed is trying to do studies that only hone in on people who have created at least 100 pieces of long-form content. And in order to weed out all those people who are just starting out or who are just not that.

serious about it. And I think that you'll find that, you know, still a lot of the money is going to the very top, but it's a little bit better distributed in that sense. Yes, but one way to think of it is, and I hear you, because a lot of us talking right now have done this where it's like you just do the work and it's like a snowball rolling downhill and eventually you have a business or whatever. But at the same time, when you talk about someone that does five substacks or five podcasts and then gets bored of it, one of the issues would be, and when we're talking about a middle class, it's also like if you start and you're only making pennies, like it's still a 1% issue if you can't get the traction, if you put in all the work.

for a year and you're still, and you've only made a hundred bucks. Do you know what I mean? Like, so is one of the issues that the economy is not there for not a middle class, but for someone to start and like, oh, look, I, you know, I didn't pay my rent this first month of doing a substack or a podcast, but, you know, I made 100 bucks this month. That's, that's nothing to sneeze at. Like, is, is the economy still sort of skewed in the way that it's hard, to start out to get that traction going. I mean, I don't think it necessarily should be. Think about being like a lawyer.

Like, you don't get to make $100 a month in your first year of law school. Like, you really have to go through all three years of law school before you make your first dollar. Same thing if you're going to be a doctor or anything like that. I think there needs to be somewhat of a barrier of entry to the first dollar. And it really is about putting in the time and having that upfront sweat equity, that upfront investment of your time before you make that first dollar. And I don't think we're ever going to live in a world where you're like just

starting out and you're suddenly making like, you know, $200 a month, a month or two in, no matter what kind of tools you build to make things more equitable. Yeah. I would probably say that the place where I disagree with Lee the most is probably just fundamentally in the framing of what creators are. I think Simon hit on it a lot closer to how I feel about it. I view every creator is an entrepreneur. And I believe if you look at it from that point of view, no business has the right to survive.

They earn the right to survive, right to survive, right? And so the notion of a middle class is to some degree stating somehow that an external force should be guaranteeing everyone's success. But there's a finite amount of attention that we can actually sell. And so, like, I actually look at the platforms and all the parts of the ecosystem today that we kind of like, you know, want to crap on most of the time. you know, I look at the middle as a lead gen or sort of as part of the process of building a business. And so I think like once you stop framing it from a, hey, why is someone doing that to me versus how am I going to get from A to B?

I think the economic opportunity is there, right? Like you can make money as a consulting expert, passion, economy. Like, you know, one of the links I have done there lists like four different economic models. There's four different kinds of ways to make money as a quote unquote creator. and you can use all of them. It just depends on which ones you're willing to employ and deploy on time, right? And so I think like if we stop thinking about it as just this sort of thing that's supposed to happen and understand it from an entrepreneurship point of view, then it's something you make happen through will and effort. And I think as Simon said, there's a steep curve usually to success, but some businesses also just take off randomly for no apparent reason. You know, there were pet rocks. Well, no, I don't know why, right, but people got them, right? And then, And there were also real businesses that were a slog and took 10 years to get the profitability. That's a reality I think that every entrepreneur is always faced. And I know every time I started a company, you know, I said, you deserve a paycheck.

No one's ever said that to me once. I think this raises like some very interesting questions about maybe like the time that we're in in terms of both technology and migrating from different massive media sort of consolidated entities that worked over consolidated media empires, mostly raised. radio and television to the disaggregation of the internet and giving everybody essentially a voice and then allowing a bunch of voices that previously were sort of undisclosed or were, you know, unable to reach, you know, their intended audience, I suppose, to actually get some exposure. And then through that exposure and repetition, build up people who cared about what they were saying. And then to find a way now we're in the era of being able to compensate those folks. I think the things that you guys are bringing up is very interesting.

the word or the concept of a creator, I think does belie all the energy and effort and work that goes into becoming entrepreneurial, to building a business, to knowing how to charge for things, to know what your worth is, and to operate in a space that has largely been able to, you know, one, exploit your kind of capital and your contributions for years. I mean, you know, Greg and I have been on this hellscape of Twitter, you know, since 2006 or something in 2005, 2006. And, you know, I hate to go check this now. But I were my tweets.

I don't even know where the count is anymore. I feel like I'm over 100,000. I've got a lot of tweets. I've said a lot of things on Twitter. Twitter has basically like paid me bumcus. You know, they've had this whole effort to provide a way to, I guess, get creators paid on the platform this year. And, you know, the last time there was an article about it, they've spent, or they

put out like $6,000 or whatever to all of their creators, which is just patently insane. You know, I'm not... Wait, wait, wait. Underline that. $6,000 in total to everybody that's signed up for... To become monetized, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's a very small amount. Maybe that amount has increased since then. My point is the amount of money that Twitter makes from ads versus the amount of money that they're then deploying to those of us who produce content on the platform is completely ratio to put it one way. And it seems like there's nothing innate about the metaverse or about these coming platforms that will necessarily change the way in which we exchange value in those environments. So, you know, I think one of the things that actually prompted Brian and I to have this conversation was noticing that there are some folks who are migrating off of substack.

You know, there was obviously like a clamor about it maybe a year ago when everyone was excited and they were going to make six or seven figures writing an email newsletter. And then there was like this flurry of people, you know, doing what we did on Clubhouse too, talking about the platform, talking about substack, saying, oh, I'm going to make a million dollars on substack. And then like three people did. And it brought a bunch of people over there. People migrated their fan base and their readers.

And it turned out that a total of like three people have made like a million dollars or more on substack. It's just like Twitch. It's just like all of these other platforms that end up with a power law distribution where most of the revenue goes to a very, very small number of craters. And it never, I mean, one, it doesn't really trickle down because what is the mechanism by which a creator who is super successful then trickles down their income to other creators in the platform, except, of course, if they hire them. And the platform itself, like one of the things that, you know, I've sort of glibly brought up is the idea of a universal creator income. Because frankly, it doesn't seem like those who are in those early innings, whether they're producing their 50th substack newsletter or their 75th, you know, YouTube video. are really making meaningful money that allows them to go and, you know, become, well, maybe not even a full-time creator, but like a part-time creator. You know, $100 a month a month is nice, but it doesn't help.

Please go on this, especially on the substack thing, especially with like the Charlie Wurzel thing. Yes, exactly. If you want to like tell that story a little bit, that would be helpful too. Yeah. I mean, you know, well, let me just respond to the one part you said about, you know, the going towards the top and how it's just like really harsh economics, you know, for these, these, these, substack writers. And I'm not going to deny that. I'm running my own substack. I know how harsh the economics are. And that's why I'm seeing as kind of like the crater economy 2.0 is it's acting more like, you know, almost like Silicon Valley startups. Like, you know, one of the famous things about Y Combinator is they encourage you to go and find a co-founder or multiple co-founders so that you can take on more of the burden so you can take on multiple roles.

And I see more and more of these new companies that are launching it, both on substack and off substack, are lots of writers who are teaming up so that they can basically scale more quickly. They can share, they can cross-pollinate their audiences, things like that. So these writer collectives, like every. Every dot two, yep. Yeah, like every dot's like a defector, like the discourse blog, like Brickhouse, I could probably name like three or four more off the top of my head. And what's great about that is, you know, and this is the hardest thing about being a sub-stack writer is just content production. Like creating enough free content to get people in the top of your funnel, but then also creating enough paid content to lure those people at the top of your funnel into actually converting into subscribing. It's just so freaking hard.

And by having other writers join up in these writer collectives, you know, that's, that makes it, that lessens the burden on everyone. and you can actually see some economies of scale as a result of that. Okay, I'm happy to talk about Charlie Wurzel, but I'll pause right there unless they want to respond. Can I just add one thing about the thing that I think gets glossed over the most, though, is, well, I'll just call the sort of a total cost of ownership for owning your own platform. And I feel like we take for granted, you know, like when you work for a newspaper, you work for a place that has like a publishing side of the house and an editorial side, There's someone selling, right? There's someone doing all of these other activities. Yeah, totally.

This is the problem with like libertarian idealism where it's like, oh, I do need roads and oh, I do need like common infrastructure. Oh, I actually don't really want to do that stuff. Huh. I should invent a government that'll take care of those things. Oh, how do we pay for it? Oh, we should have taxes. And the cycle repeats.

If you remember that one. But that's the point, right? It's just that I think like what a lot of creators who rushed out, and I think because they were oversold the promise that you can just do these things on your own. It's time. You can be your own person. Well, it turns out that being your own person the way you were somewhere else, unless you're willing to take a massive pay cut and readjust your life, means having all those other supporting functions and services still providing the structure and the infrastructure that was helping you be successful there. And I think, like,

for us to have an honest conversation about how to move forward, and that's why I think what Simon's pointing out is happening is you see people coming together because it gives them, you know, a place to rally together to sort of like fight together to win, right? And that gives them a way to pool resources and sort of, you know, all these other, even if it's not Dow's and things like that, just even cooperating together gives us and unlocks more potential for us because strength and numbers. What was, by the way, Simon, I want you to tell the, the, um, Charlie story in a sec, but is one of the reasons why this has happened is because there was an assumption that software would do more of that sort of supporting work and that that was the thing

that was going to change it that allows individuals to become creators and then become their own solopreneurs and run it all themselves. And it turns out that like that overhead is, you know, if not 30%, way more than 30% of where your mental space goes. I mean, I know that like running my own business over the last year, I was having to do all this stuff that took away so much of my time that I would have spent doing just creator oriented stuff. And I was willing to do it, I suppose, at the time. But for people that don't have any exposure to this stuff or haven't done it before, that's a huge learning process that, I don't know, it just feels like it just weighs on you over time. Yeah, and people complain about the 10% cut that Substack gives, but I've talked to creators

who have switched over to Substack from running their own kind of like Tech Stack, and they say it's more than worth the actual price. It takes off so much of that burden. You know, I interviewed Richard Rushfield, who runs a really popular and successful substack called The Anchler. It's like a Hollywood industry substack. And for the first like two years before he joined substack, he was, you know, cobbling together like WordPress, MailChimp, Stripe. And he said that he was wasting, you know, 30% of his time just doing basic customer service stuff and technical troubleshooting and stuff like that.

And he said at the moment that, you know, he switched over to substack, all that went away. And now he's able to spend almost 100% of his time on writing. So people really underestimate. You know, substack gets a lot, gets clobbered a lot, and people are cynical about it, I think, because there was all this hype. But it really was a new product that did something really new, that no other product was doing to the full extent that did. It was the first product where you could have a newsletter that accept payments up and running within a few minutes. Tiny Letter had the chance to build that, but MailChimp messed it up by never implementing that for Tiny Letter. Review started to do that, but then once Substack pulled ahead, it became a paid product, and it only switched to free after the Twitter acquisition.

And really, for a long time, Substack was the only platform, at least the major platform that I knew of, that was really offering that. Simon, let me tee up the Charlie Wurzel thing. And I'll give a little bit of background. Former BuzzFeed writer went solo on Substack, is now going, I guess, back to the Republic, something he's going to do a newsletter for the republic. The Atlantic. Atlantic, Atlantic. Shutting down his substack to do that.

One of the things in his essay, if Chris wants to put it in the top here, I'll pull it up. One of the things that struck me about it is his take on why his substack didn't get the traction that he wanted.

And by the way, he admits that he was approaching six figures a year in an income or was going to surpass it if he had stuck with it. But one of the things that he said was he felt like to be a successful substack, you had to be a certain type of writer doing a certain type of thing. Be it, now, on the one hand, he said it was, you know, if you were sort of an industry newsletter where, you know,

it could be expensed by your employer, or you were in a very narrow niche where it was very obvious, the value you were providing that's easy versus what he was trying to do was more generalist didn't work. Or if you wanted to be someone that picked Twitter fights with people, that seemed to be the big

substackers were successful at that. Now, we're talking about substack, but it made me think of all of these things like the people on YouTube that are hugely successful do a certain type of thing. Like there's people that do like these sort of stunt things. The people that

successful on Twitch, do a certain type of thing. It's almost like each of these creator platforms, the people that are the 1%, there's a model to follow that gets you to that 1%. And it's almost like you kind of have to pick your platform and then fit yourself into that sort of glove that works. Well, it's like products, content fit, or maybe content, market fit. right yeah something like that well and i think oh sorry sorry simon i didn't mean a good job um i was just going to say i think that that speaks to kind of what i was saying before is that i don't know that doing what's popular matters as much especially as we continue to move forward because i you know i often use the example of ai right that someday ai is going to wipe out like half the jobs right

we will end up with something that looks like you know a universal basic income and the only thing left behind for people is going to be entertainment and education. And if you prefer a dork to teach you science or you prefer someone with a dry sense of humor to teach you math, you're going to be able to find whatever permutation and combinations of people to entertain in the metaverse.

That is, to some degree the metaverse, yes, right? But the reality is that that is where the opportunity is and so I think more people will be enabled to be who they want to be and we'll have, we're getting to the place where you can find the audience

to put together enough income to at least do it on the side until you get to displacement value. But that's not a trend that's that different than like every other founder who moonlights to the point that they can actually do their business full-time. Okay, but there's a calculation here that feels a little bit different. And I do think that like Galaxy Brain, which I just penned this way and Charlie moving from substack to the Atlantic, you know, represents something that's a little bit different, right? You sort of have an established writer or creator who's kind of looking out over the field and being like, you know, I can't really be exceptional in the scale that Substack offers. Whereas if I go to the Atlantic, they take care of all the bullshit that I don't want to deal with.

And I get just to like work on my craft and write the things that I really want to write without having to write the salesy stuff that Substack needs in order to grow my, you know, 15 or 1,600 members up to whatever, you know, Casey Newton has or something to me. make this really meaningful. That makes some sense, but that's someone who's already established. What you're talking about, Greg, I think it's a little bit different and is also a very important part of this conversation, which is, one, the set of expectations that people have about what the economy should do and how they should be served by the way that the economy is set up. I think also what I've been hearing a lot about is that we're in this really weird post-pandemic phase where pretty soon a lot of the surplus money that people have either saved or acquired through government stimulus.

and through just everything slowing down and people not spending money on travel and stuff like that is going to start to deplete. And people are going to have to make decisions about what they want to do. But right now, we're in this moment, which they're calling the great reconsideration, I suppose, where to your point, people are starting to think, you know, do I really want this, like, lame-ass job with this lame-ass boss doing this, like, lame-ass shit that, like, I don't really want to do? Because I could, like, die. There could be, like, five more pandemics in the next 10 years. And is this really how I want to spend my time? which then leads us into the question of the creator economy and the creator middle class if it's ever going to exist. And so do a lot of the folks that have that thought and have been doing and going through the great reconsideration actually have a shot at making a livable wage or income through pursuing their passions on the internet?

In other words, is there enough valuable attention left over to put money in their pockets to sustain themselves? And, you know, I mean, Greg, I think this is what your business is predicated upon, I think, unless you're selling picks and shovels to the folks that are rushing after that, what might turn out to be like a copper, well, a copper mine at this point would be pretty valuable. But, you know, like, I don't know, it's like a plastic heap or something. Like something that turns out to be far less valuable than we think it is right now. Yeah, I think it's interesting.

Like I, and by the way, I think I just, with the larger format, like, you know, the substack, you know, exiles, right? I think they were like sort of well-known folks in a different domain, likely had a different, you know, had a more like rigid take on journalism, right? Like, which I appreciate and value. And I think like they have, having the opportunity to do that more, like certainly makes sense to me, right? I think like, you know, we've seen this sort of de-escalation or shrinking down from the thousand true fans, so 100 true fans, you know, down to even smaller amounts. I think that that's possible and I do think if you can get now here's the part that I think is hard Chris

right is to get a dollar from someone is a whole different beast of work than to just make something for free and then let advertisers eventually support it right? That's that transition to being customer oriented that most creators honestly don't sort of embrace per se right like you'll see lots of large

as creators often get larger just due to the fact that they're by themselves they don't respond to their comments anymore they don't even look at the comments anymore because it sometimes becomes toxic. And so I do think it's possible, but you have to work it. And that work doesn't necessarily mean selling out, but it does mean working harder to win dollars and create value for their customers, which is your audience. And I think like unless we unhook sort of that mentality faster for creators, there won't be

a middle class because everyone will just be expecting everything to be spoon fed to them. And Chris, I think it's never going to be, we're never going to be. we're never going to be in a situation where someone quits their job, and then it's like walking into like a Walmart or Target and filling out a job application, and then they take you and interview you, and then suddenly you're a full-time creator in the sense of like having your own business. I think a lot of people will like come into it sideways. Like there's a really famous, you know, I'm forgetting his name,

but this is really famous Twitch streamer now. And how he kind of broke in is basically he was a college student and he applied to be an editor for Mr. Beast. and he became kind of like, you know, probably making, you know, $30,000, $40,000, you know, editing videos for Mr. Beast. And then the opportunity arose for him to actually appear as a contestant in a Mr. Beast video. And then he was able to be savvy about his appearance in that so that the fans would root for him. And then he started appearing in more Mr. Beast videos. And then he eventually kind of spun off and started his own channel.

And now he's one of the most popular users on Twitch. And I think as the creator economy matures, we're going to see more and more like that. Like people acting basically as apprentices who are getting paid by larger, more mature creators who have, you know, set and figure businesses until they can build up their own brands, basically, and then they can split off. But I don't think we're ever going to have that thing where someone, you know, to your point, quits their Wall Street job. And then suddenly a few days later, they're a full-time TikTok creator. Yeah. So I mean, I agree and I hear you. I think what I struggling with is the to some degree propaganda from the social media platforms and the solicitation

of the creator class to come and build and design and produce product for them that they can basically sell ads against. So I just pinned a tweet from somebody that Facebook launched today, Facebook for creators, soon to be, if not already, meta for creators, where they're talking about these bonuses. Now, the language bonus must be some legalistic thing. that you can just sort of like give out and it's not employment. You know, I mean, Uber got all sorts of criticism and critique for not actually hiring people, but I can't see how meta and Instagram are not doing the same thing with these bonuses. But regardless, essentially they're providing you with an incentive.

And I think this is very important for us to identify and look at these incentives and how long these incentives will last and whether or not the funnel that these platforms are putting creators through ultimately is a net benefit for the creators, for their creator economy, for the platforms themselves and for what is going on in these spaces where they're becoming much more commercial and much more transactional. So, for example, I ended up doing a series of Instagram Lives because they offered these bonus payments up to, I think, a thousand bucks or something if I did for Instagram lives over the course of a month or something.

And I was like, you know, I don't really want to do a live, but I'll try it. you know, I was still in the exploratory phase of, you know, the creator economy. I did them and I published them and I made, you know, 500 bucks or something because of technicalities. And then I never did another one. So I do think that it's interesting how these platforms are trying to motivate and incentivize people to create content in a way that they haven't done it before, especially video content, which is more monetizable. And Greg, of course, this is like your space. But, you know, when I see these, um, earned or estimate earning charts, which is, you know, Facebook put out there where they're saying you'll earn $1,000 in in this case six days, like that creates a set of expectations that seems way off base. That's just not realistic, at least, you know, until these bonuses expire. Uber did the same thing with drivers. So maybe you guys can like think out into the future and what these platforms are putting in people's minds in terms of the expectations of how this is going to go and how sustainable. it is. Simon, go ahead. I have thoughts here, but... Well, I mean, I think you're identifying like two different ways these major platforms are going in terms of basically trying to lure creators.

On the one side, you have platforms like YouTube and Substack, which are trying to help creators build actual sustainable revenue with repeatable, with the repeatable... Just one second. Sorry, my wife was in the kitchen. Sorry, with repeatable revenue, like YouTube and Substack. But then on the other end, you have, you know, like Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat, which are luring these, you know, these, are trying to launch these huge creator funds of, you know, a billion dollars or whatever. And, sorry, I lost my, my complete train of.

thought. And that latter group of platforms, like, it's good that they're putting money out there for creators to be able to make money. But I'm sorry, go, Greg. I completely lost my train of thought. I think I know where you're going to. And I would say, Chris, I think the better frame to think about these platforms and these actions is not because they care about creators.

It's just defense against, like, all. of these people leaving their platforms. Yeah, exactly. If folks do leave in mass, they actually will start to be able to demonstrate to other people that you could leave in a more meaningful way. And those people will form alliances. So you're saying that they're paying people to stay not to become creators? Absolutely.

And so the reason why you stay is because you could possibly make money. Yep. Yeah. I was going to make a similar point in the sense that, again, if I'm going to be skeptical Brian here, to what degree are these platforms doing this because they want to do an end run around the status quo? In Zuckerberg's video and all of the talk about the metaverse, he's talking about how unfair the status quo is because you have to pay Apple and Google the 30% Vig and things like that. He's saying that this is unfair to creators, but also it's unfair to him because he's not

getting his 30% Vig. So one of my skepticism about the creator economy is number one, does it scale enough that enough people can make a living from it? But number two, is it just something that a lot of platforms are doing because they want to take the chessboard and throw it in the air and have all the pieces fall down and have something new happen where maybe they will get a better piece of the pie versus the piece of the pie. versus the piece of the pie versus the pie right now

where there are only certain people that are taking a take of all of the creation that's happening right now. Consider this example. Instagram didn't pay creators one penny until like this year. Right? Yep, yep.

So when Zuckerberg wants to talk about what's unfair, right? Like there's like more than a decade of them not giving one crap about, you know, creators, right? Facebook was the same way, right? Like all of the modernization went to them. Look at it this way.

And this goes back to the broader argument I was making earlier, which is that one of the reasons why we won't have a middle class, and I believe this is fundamentally what everyone needs to be working on, is moving the data back to the edges so that it's all concentrated in one place. And so if you're a creator and you go live or you can do your host date on Instagram, whatever platform, they're going to give you back three data points, age, sex location. That's about it, right?

Yet, if you want to go by an advertisement on any of those platforms to reach my own audience, they have 40, 50, 500 different attributes that I can target on. The ad dollars will follow the attributes, right? And they will follow connectivity to the audience itself. And so the second we move that data back to the edges, the creators will actually own that. And that repatriate $50 billion a year in advertising dollars. They can actually go straight to creators with minimal interaction, right? And it doesn't take very much. Like, you know, this is what I've been working on. This is actually what our live stream platform is about to do is actually to gather data, to help you build an understanding of your audience.

But the reality is that you only need five or six questions to make a much more higher fidelity match to potential brands that you like and that can offer something meaningful to your audience. Yeah, I think that's the data thing. So one of the things that occurs to me, I have two thoughts, and then I'm going to bring Bernardo up.

You know, one is this question about knowing your audience sort of happens when you achieve a scale where kind of intimacy is lost. and in order to succeed in the creator economy, in some ways you have to sacrifice that intimacy because of all the different touchpoints and relationships that you need to have in order to distill some sort of economic reward. In other words, if I have those thousand true fans and let's say 150 or even like 50 of them are willing to pay for a monthly subscription, I might be able to make just enough money to sort of like get by.

So you have to be building for a larger number of relationships than normal. for RBR and Dunbar's number in order to make the economics actually work out, given the rate that people are typical to pay. The other thing that I was going to say, I guess maybe an answer to my previous commentary, was about the concept of participatory economics, or I should say, participatory capitalism. Now, that may seem redundant, but it seems that a lot of the grievances that people have about, you know, the economy is that one, the economy doesn't work for them and that capitalism is very exclusionary and creates a lot of like, you know, winners. and losers. And so what, you know, seems to be the case is that people want to not just kind of be present in social media and consuming it, but they want to be making it and they want to feel like they have a stake in it. And by giving people rewards, financial rewards, even if those rewards are more or less a pittance, it does, I think, great to your point, create a kind of stickiness

where you don't really want to leave because you're getting some benefit and maybe that benefit is enough of a signal, you know, to you or to your peers that there's some money to be made here. And if you just keep going, you'll eventually get to Mr. B's status or something. And that hope is enough to keep someone on the platform and unwilling to try something new because their economic livelihood is caught up in that. Anyways, so Bernato, coming up, I guess, Bernie, maybe you prefer. What would you like to contribute? So, hey, Chris, first of all, thank you for having this space.

And hi, everyone, Brian, Greg, and Simon. I was here listening you and I was thinking to myself that first, Chris, most of what you are telling about the financial upside of the created economy, so we can have a middle class as Jin Lin has written about. I think that most of all, you are speaking almost as if it was a Tao, you know. So what I think is wrong about the created economy right now is that most people are thinking through analogy because most of them, we are still thinking that the biggest platforms will drive distribution and the future for the created economy. I don't think it will come from there. So right now, as I see this, is like this. So we are in the 60s, 70s, 80s, where you have the birth of the personal computer. And you have both IBM and HP who had, they could buy both Apple and other companies,

but they didn't see the personal computer as a thing. And back then, something that you have a ton are a ton of articles written about that there won't ever be a market for personal computers and look to where we are today. So what I really think about the creative economy is that first, distribution is wrong. So I think the biggest players or the Facebooks of this world and YouTube's of this world, eventually they will start to fall on the creator's side because I believe that the biggest creators, they will be able to manage their fans, their followers outside of the platform. This is my first guess.

And the other thing that I think is that most people are looking for the high achievers, so the 1% of the creative economy as the norm, but they are not the norm. They are completely an outlier. So if we think on the average salary of an American, we are talking about, what, $35,000 to $50,000 a year, and perhaps this is too much. And making $35,000 to $50,000 a year as a full-time content creator is not necessarily that hard, you know, if you think through making educational content, making entertainment content from sub-stack newsletters to whatever. So you have a ton of small tools and vertical tools that already allows you to monetize from $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

So naturally, if we compare with salaries in San Francisco and New York or Wall Street and tech, it's not even comparable. But so to sum up my guess is first, there is a lack of ownership on the financial upside for the creator. And I don't believe the big, biggest platforms will be the ones to drive that financial upside. Second is, I think we are exactly at the same moment as we were back in the 80s with the birth of the personal computer when nobody. I want to unpack this. Are you saying that the Dow is the thing that the big platforms are not seeing? Or are they seeing what's going on with decentralized autonomous organizations and crypto and saying, oh, shit, like, that's going to completely disrupt us.

And so therefore, we need to neutralize it by starting to pay the creators directly ourselves so that they don't actually self-organize. Both of them, because DAO does allow you for tokenization so you can already give some financial website for creators. Okay. So let me pause you for a second because I think this is actually a very interesting thought and idea, which is the transactional nature of these payments, right? So if Twitter, you know, pays those of us who are on stage today because let's say that I sold, you know, tickets to this space, what I'm not getting our shares of Twitter to then actually vote on the business of Twitter. But if this were a Dow run space in hypothetical space, which, you know, is still somewhat speculative, then everyone who's here could, you know, receive some payment in crypto, which we could convert into fiat if we want or, you know, buy and sell amongst ourselves. And maybe we could also get some votes on what happens next in the organization. or features or whatever.

Exactly. And exactly that, Chris. So if you were able to create a... Who is doing this? Because I see a lot of people talking about DAOs and sort of like building scaffolding of DAOs, but when it comes to the actual governance and effectiveness, it feels like there's a lot of things that are being created

that are brand new. That, you know, I haven't seen a DAO that's like, you know, 30 years old yet or something. Yeah, no. It doesn't exist. Even yesterday, I was telling David, who is one of the biggest gurus about Daos right now here on Twitter. And I was telling him that we cannot start talking about Daozy without revisiting the birth of democracy.

You know, we almost have to go back. I don't disagree, but... Yeah, just because a doubt to me, it may seem completely absurd, but it's like if capitalism and communism make a son, you know? So theoretically, is really awkward to me to think about a Tao, because it means that almost everybody will have democratically a vote about the system and the vision of the infrastructure and their own. One thing that I want at the same time with a financial upside, a capitalization, you know. I don't mean to totally cut you off, but I do think it's going to be very interesting.

And I would actually apply Simon's test to Dow's, which is whether it's 100 pieces of content on that platform that will start to determine whether you have a chance of being successful as a creator on that platform. I would imagine that for DAOs, you have to have the participants vote at least 100 times to see if the DAO is actually going to have any viability. Because I do think that there's so many things that are attracting our attention. And financial upside, of course, is one way to get people to stay dedicated to a cause. But there's a lot of games now that are kind of like taking up our attention in time. And I don't know, like, you know, I'm probably doing it wrong, but I'm in like 35 or 40 or 60 different discords, all constructing these same organizations. and I'm trying to think about how I might vote in each. And I have a hard enough time like voting in my local elections.

So I like the idea. And I'm not, I don't mean to be skeptical. I think it is interesting to pit these things together and to take the point that you're making, which is that the DAO, or at least that structure and the creators in that side economy, in the Web3 economy, the decentralized economy, may be more of a threat to these big platforms in a way that they don't understand yet. Is that a good summary? I think that's right, Chris.

By the way, if I would add, I think it's not limited to a voice, though, ownership, and then I think also co-creation, right? So you know how we're speaking earlier about sort of managing, moderating, all these thousands of tasks that we have to replace in sort of creating our own platforms? Yes. Our community provides all of those tools. We don't necessarily have like financial compensation, but, you know, if they start to operate. When you say our community, like actually, you know, for Greg and Simon,

And I'd love for you guys to talk specifically about your audience and about some of your successes to make it a little bit more concrete. Like what are those interactions like and how much of the overhead? I mean, Greg, maybe it's a little bit different for you, but I imagine you're doing some of the creator stuff. How much are you able to delegate to members of your community? What does that feel like? How do you establish trust? Like how long do people stick around? How many people are you able to support with the kind of creator microeconomy that you've created around yourselves?

Yeah. And I think, you know, so I'll use the analogy of Twitch is probably the closest. Yeah. Presentation of kinds of things we do. Twitch has two currencies at any time, right? They have like channel points, which is a reflection of your enduring participation in the community, right? Yeah. And then they also have bits, which is like fiat-based currency, which allows you to do it.

Something like a third of Twitch's revenue, though, is actually gifted subs because people want other people to be part of the community, right? So there's like a massive opportunity Now inside of any Twitch ecosystem though you have like active moderators You have people who work on thumbnails You have people who are doing clips from your videos As they're happening You have people

You know reviewing new applications You know sorry this sounds a lot like an open source project but like applied to content Very much Exactly the analogy Right And I think you remember our friend Zavier de Mon he started

Open Collective Which was like open protocol kind of for funding open source projects. A lot of like what Dow's are doing, I think is basically an analog in the universe of like, how does a solo media business, like say with one property, 10 interests or expanding interests over time, involve create employees and then also more like a co-op almost, right? Right. You're like, dang, great, I'm going to do this.

And 5% of the revenue or profit sharing is going to happen back to all the participants in this thing, right, from this actual business. Yeah. I guess I'm asking you guys specifically if you have experience with this and operating this as opposed to what you've observed. Yeah, Simon specifically, again to come back to Charlie Wurzel's essay, he spoke to this about how he felt like, you know, if you sell out to advertisers, you're selling out to, you know, corporate interests that there's only a certain level of discourse that they will accept. but one of the things that he pointed out was that he felt like his audience, he felt maybe uncomfortably owned by his audience where he had to create a certain type of content that his audience demanded that they felt they had ownership over what he was producing. Specifically, Simon, for what you do, have you experienced that as well with your quote-unquote community?

Do you feel an obligation to produce a certain type of content that? your audience expects or demands? No, and I, and, you know, I've interviewed lots of substack creators, lots of people within the creator economy who have subscription-based business models like substack. And I've never really heard that. I think, like, most people understand that they're only kicking in $6 to $10 a month and that there really is, and they're one of, like, literally thousands of people, and there are no expectations there that they have any kind of control. So I was really, you know, surprised to hear that. Certainly, I definitely get feedback, but the great thing about

substacker of some of these other platforms is all they have to do is just hit reply on their email address, you know, on the newsletter, and their reply goes directly to my inbox. So I do get feedback that way, but no, nothing that, you know, resembled any kind of quid pro quo or somebody hanging their subscription over my head like that. So you feel free as a creator is what you're saying still. You still feel like you're your own boss. Yeah, certainly. And, you know, and I have a lot of experience working for mainstream media.

You know, I freelance firm everywhere from The Atlantic to New York Magazine. I was an editor at US News and World Report. You know, I really just did not like being edited. I love the freedom of basically, you know, being able to pick every single thing I'm going to write about and which week I'm going to write about and how I'm going to cover it. And I really feel like it's just complete 100% freedom. And that's what I love about it. So one thing just on that experience that, and I did pin the tweet with the Charlie

Warzel commentary about, I guess, the sort of, I don't know, like expectation that people who are paying for your work start to have expectations about, you know, that you work for them effectively for like $6 a month or some crazy amount. What do you think about the difference between, I guess, people who maybe worked in newsrooms or for, you know, larger media organizations and their accessibility to their audience by moving to a place like Substack or running their own newsletter? Because I would imagine that the, like, the artifice of these media companies actually protects and defends them against, you know, the thousand cuts from their fans. Like, once you're out there, like, you're kind of, it's open season and you've got to really develop a thick skin. And so if you're a writer that is not used to being criticized, you know, kind of on the open web, then that might feel a lot more, you know, caustic and sharp and biting than what you were used to before.

Yeah, I mean, but that's, you're not immune from that if you're, you know, working for a mainstream media company. I mean, case in point, Taylor Lorenz, she's, she's taking a hiatus from Twitter right now to write her book. But she's been subjected to, you know, a ton of abuse on Twitter. So I feel like journalists are certainly way more responsive, you know, to their audience today and to the point where I think it actually really influences their writing. You know, I think back when I was at U.S. News & World Report and running all their social media accounts, like we had comment sections, but I don't think there was a single journalist who worked there who ever actually looked at the comments. Well, you're not supposed to read the comments technically, so. Yeah. So I think, you know, especially with Twitter and how hyper reactive or how much journalists are Twitter, I think, you know, they are incredibly reactive and responsive to their audience now much more than any other point in history. If that's what you're asking. Yeah, no, I think that's a big part of it, right? And in terms of the creator economy and the interactions that happen there and the support that you get, you know, whether it's financial or whether it's emotional or, you're asking.

or whatever else. Like, there's just sort of a rawness and a, I don't know, type of connectivity that's very new. And we're still figuring out what type of, you know, meaning or value to transmit, you know, between those or through those connections, rather. Yeah, you know what's one cool thing that I get to do that most journalists don't do is like, I get on phone calls with my subscribers all the time.

Like, I'm not one of those star substack writers who have 10,000, you know, paying subscribers. And so whenever a new subscriber comes in and, it looks like they do something interesting. You know, they work in a field that I find interesting. Maybe they're, you know, I think they might be a potential guest on my podcast or something. You know, I just respond directly to the email notification I get that they subscribed and will like email them directly and sometimes even offer to get on the phone.

But every single one of my subscribers, I at least exchange a few emails with. And like every time, almost every time I do it, like there's this, you know, feeling of surprise that they have because they're not used to subscribing to things and getting like a one-to-one response back. And obviously that has a hard time scaling, the bigger that you become. Like, obviously, a Mr. Beast can't do that, at least him directly. Like, he might hire someone who could do something like that. But that's the great thing about, you know, who is the fit Paul Graham, who said in the beginning, in the beginning of your start up. Do things that don't scale. Do things that don't scale. And like, I really took that to heart. And that's one of the great things about building a,

you know, a creator economy business as you can actually talk to your audience. Well, I love that. Let's leave it there. Greg, Simon, thank you guys so much for coming. We'd love to hear where people can find you. If you guys have anything you want to plug or have people read, substack, you know, startup. Now's your chance. Where do you want to direct people to? Sure, yeah. Feel free to check out Zellis. We're at Zellis.com. Just launched a not too long ago. We're in VATERAL. Congrats. Happy to have one here, try it out. And I also host a show, three times a week on the creator economy. So createdeconomy.com. Nice. If we hit that up and we're more of the industry side, so we interview and talk to builders,

uh, uh, largely building and creating tools for creators. Love it. I would, uh, encourage people to listen to my podcast called the business of content. And every single week I have on a different entrepreneur who usually has built a bootstrapped content business, whether it's on substack or YouTube or a podcast or whatever. And I will, Brian knows this because he's been on my podcast. I will walk them through from the very beginning of how they launched it to, you know, how they made their first dollar to how they started making it as a full-time income. And so if you want to learn from people who built these creator economy businesses from soup to nuts,

this is the, you know, the perfect podcast for you to listen to. Highly recommended, of course. That's awesome. Brian, anything else? No. I was listening to a great episode of How Did This Get Made before we started this? The Drop Dead Fred episode of How Did This Get Made was making me laugh out loud

and my wife was wondering what the hell was going on. So I'll plug that. Chris, what do you want to plug? What do I want to plug? Well, I don't have anything specific. However, I think next week we're going to try something a little bit different. I spent the last two and a half, three weeks traveling to New England. and while I was there, I actually visited with my family and a bunch of my nephews and my younger brother. And they have a very interesting business.

And I want to bring them on to have them give us essentially a view, perhaps from the future, from the younger generation, since we're bringing the kind of like OK boomer view to meta and the metaverse. And I think that they will have a very enlightening perspective given what they're doing. So I would say stay tuned for that. Okay, everybody, that was the show. This is the tech meme ride home experience. and I'm your host Chris with Brian. Thanks again, Greg and Simon,

and we will see you here next week. Thank you, Simon and Greg. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.