I had missed this piece when it came out. Great stuff.
It's definitely VERY VERY hard to build an audience. Not just traffic to show numbers, but an actual audience of people who like your stuff with enough intensity to pay you, tell others, stick around for a long time, etc.
While the % make it seem very unlikely to succeed, at least the absolute number of those who do succeed are pretty large compared to the old world where distribution was controlled by a few gatekeepers and basically nobody outside of that system could reach much of an audience.
I really wonder how it'll shake out, and if the answer isn't some fractalization into all kinds of tiny niches, each with its powerlaw where the best creators can have durability and do well on a much smaller scale because they are differentiated and because their audience will stick with them as long as they keep doing good stuff (and after long enough, they've benefited from iteration and experience so much that they are pretty far ahead of random new entrants).
Thank you man. I do think that some of this is an outside versus inside view distinction. Going in the percentages are very small, however as you say the absolute numbers are large enough, and persistence does have an asymmetric payoff. In this as in many other areas, wanting to do it trumps many other considerations I feel, including the fact that you have to be flexible about how you get to the endpoint to, and maybe even that there is no endpoint.
Yeah. I think the idea that "it's the future of work" and "everybody will do it" is kind of crazy, just like not everybody will start a business or write a novel.
But I do love that the opportunity is now there, and there's a lot more choices of interesting things to do for those who want to!
Another interesting angle is to think about all the non-captured value that is created for society by all this creative activity.
If I'm looking for a way to fix my vacuum cleaner and find a video from a guy on Youtube, he may make no money from it, but it's a clear value to me (and potentially many others).
Yes it clearly increases the positive externalities, though I think this is vastly more positive sum. In most cases it's good if you create so much value that you yourself only capture part of it - that's how we raise the wtarline.
I had missed this piece when it came out. Great stuff.
It's definitely VERY VERY hard to build an audience. Not just traffic to show numbers, but an actual audience of people who like your stuff with enough intensity to pay you, tell others, stick around for a long time, etc.
While the % make it seem very unlikely to succeed, at least the absolute number of those who do succeed are pretty large compared to the old world where distribution was controlled by a few gatekeepers and basically nobody outside of that system could reach much of an audience.
I really wonder how it'll shake out, and if the answer isn't some fractalization into all kinds of tiny niches, each with its powerlaw where the best creators can have durability and do well on a much smaller scale because they are differentiated and because their audience will stick with them as long as they keep doing good stuff (and after long enough, they've benefited from iteration and experience so much that they are pretty far ahead of random new entrants).
But how many niches are these really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All very interesting
Thank you man. I do think that some of this is an outside versus inside view distinction. Going in the percentages are very small, however as you say the absolute numbers are large enough, and persistence does have an asymmetric payoff. In this as in many other areas, wanting to do it trumps many other considerations I feel, including the fact that you have to be flexible about how you get to the endpoint to, and maybe even that there is no endpoint.
Yeah. I think the idea that "it's the future of work" and "everybody will do it" is kind of crazy, just like not everybody will start a business or write a novel.
But I do love that the opportunity is now there, and there's a lot more choices of interesting things to do for those who want to!
Totally. And yes it will be a marginal activity but this is good because that's how alpha gets created. This is my broader theory of how I think this works - https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/strategy-decay-as-an-institutional
But it's excellent in that providing more avenues is net positive!
Another interesting angle is to think about all the non-captured value that is created for society by all this creative activity.
If I'm looking for a way to fix my vacuum cleaner and find a video from a guy on Youtube, he may make no money from it, but it's a clear value to me (and potentially many others).
Yes it clearly increases the positive externalities, though I think this is vastly more positive sum. In most cases it's good if you create so much value that you yourself only capture part of it - that's how we raise the wtarline.