If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to say LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER. — Edward R. Murrow, 1958
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to monetize content using cryptocurrency micropayments for a number of reasons:
- I’m using my content-creation skillset to build a successful, micropayment-based media business due to the vastly improved profit margins as compared to ad-based platforms.
- I would like to see others do the same thing, since making a living in the creative pursuits is a dream that is very difficult to achieve.
- We must find a way to make content valuable if we really believe that creative, highly-skilled jobs are what will keep people employed during the next few decades of encroaching labor automation.
Look Now
Content creation within any discipline is a learn-by-doing process. Since we can’t yet download Matrix-style kung fu skills to our brains, becoming truly skilled at anything requires putting in thousands upon thousands of hours of practice time. Invested time does not always equate to skill, or value. Our current determination of value is mostly derived from what is popular. Invested time matters to us, individually, but it does not matter to anyone else.
Making great content is expensive, because it requires the skills reaped from the time investments of those who have chosen a creative path and followed it for some years. My personal definition of great content is high production value content that is also popular. We all love great content. An abundance of high-value content already exists, but the pathways to making it for a living are constrained and increasingly reserved for those who can afford years of unpaid internships. You should know that many of the people who make your favorite content have been subjected to a dramatic decrease in work/life balance over the past few years, despite the existence of unions. 14-hour+ days, 7-day weeks, for months on end, are common. The real financial winners are executives, not people who have invested years mastering visual effects or audio mixing.
We also live in a world where there is so much free media content available for consumption on ad-supported platforms that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of it in our lifetimes. The popular (not necessarily “great”, according to my own definition) stuff bubbles up, there is little to no incentive to add to someone’s online tip jar, and while people are often surprisingly generous, they are generally not generous enough to pay the creator’s rent. As the mob flits from place to place, it creates an ecosystem where ad traffic has shaped the internet into whatever beholders want to see, as opposed to truths that are certainly not self-evident.
(Not to mention the amount of behavioral manipulation tools that advertisers now have at their disposal to make their ideas, “our” ideas. That’s another essay.)
Currently we have two main online content money-making models. We have the subscription model for the high production value stuff, and ad revenue for the rest of us. Many of us who make only ad revenue online know we can make great content, if we just got the money, and the chance. We love what we do. We’ve dedicated the years to learning our chosen skills. We’re popular, even, look at our follower count!
This is what we want to do with our lives, within a projected lifespan that includes mass job erasure because software will eat the world. We are creatives! We deserve to succeed!
Do we?
Sometimes I wonder. The struggle is real. I have been trying myself to build an audience. I wouldn’t call my content great, by the way, although I do tend to get good reviews. I am doing most things wrong. I don’t upload enough, I don’t tweet enough, and I am too introverted to publish everyday details of my life. My standards for myself are very high, because I compare myself to my own definition of “great”. But I know, like most of you who are reading this, that I can make great content, if I had more financial resources (i.e., not having a full-time job), because:
- I know I’m good at my chosen skills.
- There is meaning to be found in a career providing great content.
What gets me out of bed in the morning is this:
I believe I have seen part of the solution.
Still No Disaster After 60 Years, We’re Bored
Similar to Edward Murrow, I believe ad-based revenue models are not only annoying, but ultimately threatening. Mr. Murrow has been rolling in his grave for some time now. Many of his worst fears have come true.
I find the plight of the journalism industry to be of great concern, because even if I put away all my arguments towards sustaining content intended as mere entertainment, one of the cornerstones of any “free” society is the ability to find, and make publicly available, unsavory — and objectively proven — truths about that society. To be fair, in 1958 Mr. Murrow blasted TV’s emphasis on entertainment and commercialism at the expense of public interest, illustrating that to some degree, lack of interest in unsavory truths is a function of human nature, and not some new phenomenon enabled by the advertising evils of the internet.
Some of the best journalism-as-entertainment in evidence today in my opinion is done on “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver, who coincidentally resides on a cable network that bases its income on subscriptions — not advertising. One of the reasons that John Oliver’s show is so good is because it is not beholden to advertisers, who are always afraid of pissing people off.
The media subscription market is owned by giants and neither you nor I are likely to make a living that way. The user generated content market is how you and I get in, achieve some kind of work/life balance, and do what we love, for a career.
Internet advertising monetization currently dominates the UGC market.
Here are the core problems with internet advertising:
- Ad rates are so low that a successful creator can have millions of views, hundreds of thousands of followers, and still make a pittance.
- Product placement alienates followers because it is inauthentic.
- Adblocker use is rising dramatically.
- Who clicks these ads? When was the last time you clicked on an ad?
- Most ad traffic is not even human.
What we have here is artists being forced by market structure into serving the interests of large technology platforms. These large platforms maximize the ad revenue they make from displaying your content by designing elaborate curation algorithms. The curation algorithms keep users on their platform longer, exposing them to more ads. This system used to work fairly well, but due to the whole adblocking/robot problem, it’s not working so well anymore.
Malware infects the ad software of our most popular and trusted publishers, making our machines turn against us. Cultural issues in the entertainment industry keep shot-callers from using strong passwords, because they can’t be bothered. We think that truth will somehow keep coming our way despite the obsolescence of true journalism through lack of funding. Many countries around the world illustrate what life looks like without a free, funded press.
We can do better than this. We can bring back the notion of technology serving the artist, rather than the artist serving technology platforms. Think about what will happen when the first strong AIs come online if we do not.
If we do not make the philosophical shift now to make popular content economically valuable, then we’ve erased the one of the best reasons we’ve given ourselves to exist in 50 years.
Pay Later
A new technology has appeared within the last few years: cryptocurrency. This, YouTubers, is our future. I am of the mind that it has to be, if we continue the economic model of money = food.
Since the appearance of Bitcoin I have been championing its uses for content. I have thought up foolishly complex ideas for startups, taught an introductory class on cryptocurrency, and for now have chosen to stick with what I already know how to do: making videos based on the skills I have accumulated spending 10,000+ hours editing decidedly not-great content in the reality television industry.
This whole Bitcoin/cryptocurrency thing does not have to be complicated. It’s decentralized, digital money that transacts very quickly, and is perfect for micropayments because it is secure and divisible into tiny fractions of a dollar. Much has been theorized about how micropayments will change the world — and also about how they will never work. (Clay Shirky said so.) Mr. Shirky makes some excellent points and all of those were made before cryptocurrency existed.
People are currently conditioned to expect to consume content for free. A major disconnect exists between the passion and interest people have for both making and consuming content, and the ability to pay their bills with earnings from making popular content.
Micropayments for creators are not about entitlement, or getting rich. They’re about breaking down the barriers to entering creative fields and allowing people to survive doing things they find meaningful by independently (without studio/MCN contracts, or living off parents while enduring endless “internships”) making a living.
Let me run some numbers for you. I am a very small-time YouTuber with at the time of this writing about 195 subscribers and nearly 700,000 views.
I have one video that comprises most of those views, called “Cats React to Robot Cat”. Right now it has 669,597 views. Just within the last week or so has my channel’s ad revenue passed the $100 level.
The optimistic element of my personality operates a bitcoin micropayment website, which currently uses the Popchest service to host my videos and present them with a bitcoin paywall. Through some outreach on Reddit and my local hackerspace community (CRASH Space FTW!), I get the occasional visitor. My average video price clocks in at $.25 in bitcoin. Based on my Coinbase transaction report I’ve received about 110 views. So far I’ve made .089949 bitcoin, which is currently valued at around $40.05. Had I received the bitcoin equivalent of $.25 for 650k+ views of my robot cat video, I would have made 6 figures.
That is what I would call a sustainable income. ($.25 at scale is probably too expensive, but the micropayment space is far from being at scale and that is a separate discussion.)
The hardest part of building any media brand is building the audience — and it should probably stay that way. But after you have put in the years of perseverance through discouragement and exhaustion, and succeeded in building that audience in this internet era, I don’t feel that it should be just as hard to make money.
Your content may or may not be high production value, but a large audience means you are popular, and if you are regularly creating popular content, I think you deserve to be rewarded for it. The studio, YouTube, and Facebook systems make way more money off you than you do from them. Wouldn’t you rather be the master of your own destiny?
It is still very early on in the cryptocurrency space and right now I would say it resembles the Internet space circa 1997. Most people would describe cryptocurrency as something they have heard of but do not understand.
Already I’ve invested a lot of time into helping people understand it and I’m seriously considering preparing a class specifically geared towards creators. Using bitcoin is easy, and getting easier all the time. If you can manage your online bank account, you can manage a bitcoin wallet.
The future has potential. There are a few bitcoin micropayment services out now, and some coming in the near future. Popchest is running, Yours is launching in a few weeks, Stem and SnipBit may also be contenders. A lot of experimentation in the space is likely to happen regarding how to properly incentivize users to pay, but I dearly hope that solutions are on the way soon.
The challenge of our creator generation is to re-configure the ad revenue model. It has us convinced that without advertising we cannot survive. Advertising will always have its place, but are you willing to sacrifice your creative freedom and chance of a real livelihood to it, when a much better alternative exists?
If you are an independent online creator, consider taking these steps to educate yourself on how you can empower yourself by implementing micropayments into your work.
- Start using the Brave browser. It is built to solve advertising practices Brave describes as “abusive” by using micropayments.
- Open a Coinbase account and buy a tiny amount of bitcoin. Then, download a user-friendly mobile bitcoin wallet (I recommend Airbitz, as it supports both Android and iOS, but on iOS also check out Breadwallet) and discover how simple it is to send a payment from Coinbase to yourself.
- Consider moving one or two pieces of your premium content over to a micropayment service, and tell your followers why. If even a fraction of them pay for it, you’ll see much more money than if you keep all of your content on big ad-based platforms.
- Realize that the technology already exists to help you increase your monetization by many orders of magnitude and that you are most certainly capable of understanding and managing it all by yourself.
If you are reading this and have further questions, please feel free to reach out to me via @suchwowtv.
