Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Business Models”

BUT… It was not “the internet” that did this.

It is capitalism and its insistence that the only value anything in life has is the profit that can be extracted from it. It is capitalism that sees anything that is not generating profit as waste. It is like acid spreading across every aspect of our lives and devouring it all, burning it away until there is nothing left.

Put simply, the numbers don't add up. Data from Patreon and Substack suggests the average conversion rate from follower to paying fan is about 5%. This means a creator would need a total fanbase of 20,000 followers to yield 1,000 paying supporters. And building a core fanbase of 20,000 engaged followers is extremely difficult in today's crowded creative landscape.

Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know?

There is a striking parallel between reading WIRED during the late boom years (1998-2000) and reading tech publications during the last crypto hype cycle (2020-2022). It seems this is a pattern we are doomed to repeat, until and unless we actually learn from it.

The largest music corporations managed to support (and join) tech companies who had this idea of renting out music, calling the process streaming. They somehow convinced the masses to avoid piracy, pay the corporations a monthly fee despite NOT owning the music, and even consider this transaction a form of convenient bargain, a win/win. The frontier between marketing and gaslighting have gone wafer thin.