My favorite quotes from Jarrod Dicker’s latest piece, “Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator”:
If you can write, build an audience & manage distribution, you are now a media company.
As larger media companies become labels, their value to the creator needs to supplement the value the creator can attain on their own.
The fuel of the information ecosystem is “breaking news” which is usually released by a larger publication and then runs through the creator lifecycle of syndication, curation, aggregation and then resuscitation. That information is most valuable when it “breaks”, then when there’s commentary on the curation and then it’s worth is dictated by programmatic level CPMs until it fizzles. This has encouraged consumers to believe that content should be free, or at least at some time, available for consumption at no cost.
Prior to this newsletter boom, readers have been doing anything possible to circumvent the payment experience. Again, this isn’t about paying for content but more so about needing control, needing a better experience and thus the casualty of that desire is media companies losing revenue (ad blockers and circumventing paywalls). But what’s incredible with newsletters is, people aren’t looking for ways to steal content. In fact, content is more portable than ever (I forward this email to you) but it’s not being done because the experience and control is finally made available to that particular reader. So much so, that they’re even starting to pay for it.
The holy shit! moment of creator’s realizing that their value *could* be larger than it’s getting credit for started with platforms and the ability to accumulate and engage followers directly on platforms. But the emergence of platforms like Substack, OnlyFans, Cameo & Patreon have accelerated that and are creating a new market indicator for individuals similar to what free agency does to athletes.
Before Substack, if an individual writer wrote for a publication, they had no idea what their ‘value per individual’ was. They knew their traffic, or their following on platforms outside of that publication, but internally their value was diluted amongst others.
What platforms in the passion economy bring is a direct value attribution by the fans to creators that’s dictated by all market factors (competition, content, platform, budget). As I argued in my last piece, these are benefits that larger media companies need to adopt as the attraction of brand reputation is now second to their ability to be excellent distributors, developers and managers of talent and talent’s product.
We’re seeing independent creators rebundle the unbundled newsroom and developing their own micro-labels anchored on platforms such as Substack. We’re seeing creators teaming up and organizing themselves to build collaboration groups to naturally support one another. We’ll start to see more products and companies focused on creator comfort (how can I be better at creating?) and confidence (how can I financially do this?) explode and surpass the value of the creative tools these individuals are building on.