My primary guess would be that it's easier to earn your first dollars with fans vs. with B2B sponsorships (or even with retribution from platforms like YouTube). Also, I don't really understand the term illusion in the image if someone could help. 5% conversion from content consumer to "paid fan" does not seem that low
The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
11–20 of 168 posts
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#12I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content. I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
You are one of today's 10,000.
And if you have android:
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content. I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
You are one of today's 10,000. https://sponsor.ajay.app/ And if you have android: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
Extensions like sponsor block don't help when entire videos are centered around promoting a product. A very popular mountain bike channel I used to follow, GMBN, for example, pretty much only makes videos in order to promote sponsors. The sponsors drive the very content we're here for, it's not just 30 second spots.
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#14I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content. I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
Install SponsorBlock! With YT Premium and that, my video experience is completely ad-free.
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#15Sorry, but the "creator economy" is a mostly-malicious delusion. Sure, it can sound great. And for a very lucky few it probably is great. But the 99% reality is that it's just hype from techo-utopians, wanna-be's, get-rich-quick salesmen, and a bunch of mega-corporate platforms - whose profits are built on the backs of virtual-slave "creator" labor.
(Yes, maybe this is a bit too cynical. Maybe. A bit.)
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#16Sorry, but the "creator economy" is a mostly-malicious delusion. Sure, it can sound great. And for a very lucky few it probably is great. But the 99% reality is that it's just hype from techo-utopians, wanna-be's, get-rich-quick salesmen, and a bunch of mega-corporate platforms - whose profits are built on the backs of virtual-slave "creator" labor. (Yes, maybe this is a bit too cynical. Maybe. A bit.)
I see parallels to the AppStore where the dynamics are similar but the return on spending money to attract attention works much more effectively. Basically discovery is totally screwed because the stores/platforms are oversaturated and no one has figured out a sensible way to curate content in an algorithmic manner. The only thing left is to be a first mover, already have a big audience elsewhere or to be able to pay for eyeballs and focus on retention and monetization metrics to get costs below revenue. For the average “gig work” creator the latter is basically out of reach whereas mobile games spend hundreds of millions of dollars on customer acquisition and got incredibly sad when the privacy changes Apple made reduced the effectiveness of ad tracking.
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are one of today's 10,000. https://sponsor.ajay.app/ And if you have android: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
Extensions like sponsor block don't help when entire videos are centered around promoting a product. A very popular mountain bike channel I used to follow, GMBN, for example, pretty much only makes videos in order to promote sponsors. The sponsors drive the very content we're here for, it's not just 30 second spots.
SponsorBlock can also tag entire videos of the kind you cited! It won’t block them by default, but the choice of what to do when you find out will be yours.
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#18What creators need is a better youtube algorithm. Is it just me, or has youtube recommendations become almost unusable by now? Some years ago when I spent "an hour watching YouTube" I'd watch a huge majority of videos recommended by the algorithm based on my current subs. Today it is 1%. Why? I'll give you an example. I have varied interests, I sub and regularly watch a number if channels in each of my hobbies, but f…
here's my recommendation to get better suggestions.
in your single account you can multiple yt channels. the recommendations are per channel, so if you like cooking you can make a cooking channel where most of you recommendations will be just that.
I have around 4 channels each attached to a Firefox container you different topics (1main + 3 for more specific interests)
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#19Sorry, but the "creator economy" is a mostly-malicious delusion. Sure, it can sound great. And for a very lucky few it probably is great. But the 99% reality is that it's just hype from techo-utopians, wanna-be's, get-rich-quick salesmen, and a bunch of mega-corporate platforms - whose profits are built on the backs of virtual-slave "creator" labor. (Yes, maybe this is a bit too cynical. Maybe. A bit.)
I see parallels to the AppStore where the dynamics are similar but the return on spending money to attract attention works much more effectively. Basically discovery is totally screwed because the stores/platforms are oversaturated and no one has figured out a sensible way to curate content in an algorithmic manner. The only thing left is to be a first mover, already have a big audience elsewhere or to be able to pay…
Yep.
Ignoring stuff like charity raffles, I first saw such dynamics back in the 1980's, with this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonia_dilemma#Luring_Lotter... (in Scientific American, back when it was actually respectable). A huge-sounding jackpot, seemingly available to anyone with a postcard and a bit of luck...but that ain't how human nature actually works. A zillion wanna-be's entered, and nobody received enough money to even cover the cost of their postcard.
Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon
#20I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content. I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
Yeah it changed mid-2020. Youtube was a nice place to go.
Cheap entertainment is getting boring.