The creator economy is failing to spread the wealth

Services that stream videos and give you a small cut of the ad revenue (or similar schemes) lowers the bar for a person to be in a position where they could in theory get some money from people who like watching their videos.

Actual earnings of course is going to be highly concentrated among a tiny minority of the most popular ones. Surely nobody ever supposed or expected otherwise.

As far as I can see, creators can "run for office", and the people vote with their clicks. Seems pretty democratic to me.

The Verge had a good and sobering article about what that means in practice:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers...

Regardless, I never thought of "democratizing media" in terms of wealth distribution, but rather in terms of who gets to even try; less gatekeeping = more opportunity, even if the overall popularity / wealth distributions remain similar.

Anything where you have followers/reviews will favor established players.

The primary reason smaller creators aren't "getting paid" isn't because technology is impeding it. It's because the number of people who actually see fit to pay them anything is very limited.

Consumer content is largely a commodity. There's an almost infinite supply of it, and the bar to it having any meaningful monetary value is very high and increasing constantly. Even content that has decent entertainment or informational quality is often close to worthless commercially because there is so much of it.

If everyone had a browser-based digital wallet and could easily "tip" creators nominal amounts with one or two clicks, I believe very few creators would see a lift in their earnings.

This is really no different than street performers, except the performances are available online. Lots of people will stand by and watch a street performer do something cool, but most put nothing into the tip jar and the number of street performers who earn a respectable wage from their performances is close to nil.

Except the all mighty algorithm of course.

This isn’t really an issue with creator economy per se but rather the way all the major platforms work.

If creator economy is proving something to me is that objective quality of the product is useless, the "winners" are click-bait, gossip, exploitation, consumerism and outright kitsch.

Platforms are the real winners, the one percent of "successful" are serving as a bait for wishful thinking and expansion. As a result the rest of "creators" are competing for the fraction of shattered user attention span, repeating "best exploitative practices" and "marketing tricks". It is a sad picture. Really.

And since when "spreading the wealth" is prerogative of capitalism? Or someone is talking about communistic ideals without realizing the absurdity of the argument?

My problem is quality of the production and low IQ of creations, and I blame Everything as a service model. If this is the future we are creating, mediocrity is upon us big time.

Once a creator becomes popular, they often become sponsored, and a lot of the gear they use (which also sets them apart from regular creators) is given to them through sponsorships. It's not an unfair advantage to the sponsored creator, but it does prove to be an unfair advantage to their competitors when you consider they are displayed on each site. Think about an independent film producer competing against a major studio produce a film.. This kind of ecosystem completely destroys the value of independent artists and favors big industry every time. There are literally thousands of talented people creating content totally for free over many years because of the myth of an eventual payoff that is the very basis of modern-day creator funds.

These platforms don't have separate categories for content creators based on their funding and content to fairly display everyone as equals, or among people operating on each level of ability/funding, why? because platforms favor proven earners and big industry -- Thy also don't want unknown creators to potentially replace chosen creators as well in a lot of cases.

Money/Profit drives platforms, not content, and not a concern for discovering new talent, but platforms want independent content contributed without providing opportunity and without paying independent creators for it (of course). Platforms create the dream of discovery and work hard to lure independent creators with the ideal that they can grow on them purely as fish bait to cover the fact that most already engineer their featured content heavily to be pre-determined and fixed.

Don't get me wrong, occasionally new talent slips through, but it's very rare in frequency.

Because top creators make so much, there's an entire network built around them, where platforms promote them and where algorithms keep them on top of everyone else, by featuring top streamers and earners on repeat, and by featuring them on front pages, while unknowns stay buried, without even an occasional mention on a featured page.

If you look at black hat forums, there are hundreds of people paying and faking their way in order to become popular and successful, and even some scammers are making more money off of fake music and streaming than really talented independent artists in music and video production. The current state of social media algorithms is not based on discovering talent, it is based on making companies money, and in covertly limiting user options for choices in featured content to make platform revenue stable.

A better way to look at the process of creating things as an independent artist is to focus on building locally, and in not trying to emulate nor compete with big industry, because the burnout is real, and the chances of growing, lasting, and thriving in massive creator-based ecosystem now are very very slim. Create your own web site, and own your own platform, because if you're an unknown or independent artist, major platforms aren't promoting you as well as a more dedicated online presence can.