zlacker

I think Substack is a pretty clear example of subscription model working well. There's also Patreon that is doing very well.

I wouldn't discount YouTube Premium and Twitter subscriptions. They don't cover the majority of users, but are a viable option if you (like me) can't tolerate ads.

>>eterev+(OP)
They're both companies that help others monetize their content, Substack is still quite small and Patreon has stumbled a bit recently trying to justify it size and value:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/patreons-valuation-dropped-70...

>>eterev+(OP)
Substack and Patreon both largely work because the top producers there got popular somewhere else first and then brought a large audience with them. It's not clear if a creator economy consisting entirely or primarily of platforms like this would be possible.

Hell, at least at first, Ello even tried this same technique. It was meant to be an online gathering place for pre-existing communities of artists who already knew each other from elsewhere. Even Facebook did this at first, too, automatically placing people into networks for their universities, assuming they would already know many of the other users from class. Ello required personal invitations whereas Facebook required a .edu e-mail address to register.

The fundamental problem here is all the value is in the network itself, not the platform. The fact that the network is largely on Facebook is as much a matter of chance and historical inertia as it is anything Facebook did well as a company or a technology. Likewise, I don't know that Substack did anything particularly repeatable to snag people like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald right as traditional publishers tanked. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

It's not like there is no precedent. Film studios and record companies have more or less always operated this way. All of the value of their products is created by the artists, not by the company. The only way for them to moat any of it is signing artists to exclusive contracts before they get big enough to have real negotiating power. But web platforms don't want to think of themselves as another MGM studios. They want to be 1950s Ford but with near-zero marginal cost of goods sold.

>>noname+Ru1
> value is in the network itself, not the platform

The value is always in the content and authors, not in the platform, so in that sense Substack or Pateron are not unique. The question is how exactly are you going to monetize this content.