One of the people I read fairly regularly (though not enough to actually pay for a subscription) is Ted Gioia, who writes at honest-broker.com on Substack. His most recent post on the macroculture (mainstream media like the New York Times, Disney, etc.) vs the “microculture” (basically, people posting stuff on YouTube and other places) is free to read, and worth reading, given that pretty much everyone on Cohost, including me, is participating in the “microculture” one way or another.
You can read the article for yourself, so I won’t attempt to summarize it, but I do want to comment briefly on some of his points.
First, he doesn’t understand why people in the “macroculture” aren’t paying attention to what’s going on in the “microculture,” unlike the attitude of mainstream media to counter-culture media in the past. This is easy to explain: in the era he’s thinking of (1950s and 1960s), the major difference between mainstream media and “alternative” media was one of scale: your local alternative weekly was essentially the same sort of thing as your main local daily newspaper, except everything was smaller: it had writers and editors, it ran news stories and reviews, it had ads, it was printed on paper, and it was distributed either to readers’ homes or (more commonly) to places they frequented.
It was relatively easy for a talented writer or editor to move from the “minor leagues” of alternative media to “the show” of a mainstream newspaper, because those hiring them were the same sort of people doing the same sorts of things, and could evaluate them accordingly. Ditto for small presses vs. large book publishers, and indie music labels vs. large corporate labels.
But today there’s a world of difference between what mainstream media do and what people on YouTube, Patreon, etc., are doing. The medium is different, what it takes to succeed is different, how you get paid is different, and so on. No wonder people in mainstream media are out of touch; nothing in their experience has prepared them for this environment.
Second, when discussing why “microculture” will win, he doesn’t touch on a key point: YouTube, Patreon, Tiktok, Spotify, OnlyFans, etc., are brutally competitive environments that take in an extremely large number of aspirants to fame and fortune and pit them against each other in a contest to win the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners. Those who reach the top ranks have benefited from a fair measure of luck, but having bested others in the competitive free-for-all they are also on average very very good at doing what they need to do to attract an audience. No wonder their offerings can command audience sizes and the associated outsized rewards that rival those of the “macroculture.”
(And the rewards are indeed outsized. A writer in the 1960s working at the New York Times might make ten times more money than a writer at a 1960s alternative weekly, maybe a hundred times more at most. However, as I wrote in my post on the distribution of Patreon earnings, top Patreon projects make about a thousand times more money than typical projects.)
Finally, when Gioia writes that “even the biggest potential enemies of microculture (those billionaires in Silicon Valley) need it for their own survival,” he mistakes where the true power lies. Yes, YouTube (for example) creates very little on its own and instead relies on the work of people making and uploading videos (“user-generated content” or “UGC,” to use the ugly marketing term). But there are millions of them, and only one YouTube. If a top vlogger decides to leave YouTube, there’s a horde of people standing in line to take their place. But if YouTube kicks off a vlogger (big or small) then there are few if any comparable channels of distribution they can turn to.
That’s because hosting video at scale is a natural monopoly: only large and well-funded corporations can build the centralized hosting services required to serve an audience of hundreds of millions or more, the recommendation engines needed for artists to come to the attention of others and potentially “go viral,” and the ad networks that are typically the means by which artists can be paid.
It’s also the case that the money that these platforms make is mostly not from the top tier of artists: again, as I saw in my Patreon analysis, their revenue from the top 100 artists is likely matched by revenue from the next 1,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 10,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 100,000, and so on. Since most of their revenue is from a large mass of typical artists, each of whom individually has little power, the platform can afford to squeeze artists, retain as high a percentage of revenue as they feel they can get away with, and screw over artists in various ways both large and small.
So the chief winners in the “war between the macroculture and the microculture” are not going to be writers, musicians, or graphic and video artists. They are going to be the large corporations that control distribution in the (ironically-named) “creator economy,” and the “Silicon Valley billionaires” who own them and run them.