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).
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