51–60 of 224 posts
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! 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 con…
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! 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 con…
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.
IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world. 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…
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.
Taking this to extreme :) 100 True Fans ? try 1 Internet has enabled visibility so you need to only find one true fan who is willing to sponsor you 100,000 per year.
Aka your employer.
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix! 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 con…
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.
What I got from this post: Network economy matches userland economy. We should henceforth refer to billionaires as "whales".
> This strategy is closely related to the concept of “whales” in gaming, in which 1 to 2 percent of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue 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.
I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year. 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 tha…
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.
I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year. 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 tha…
The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit. The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.