It occurs to me that today is an impressively terrible time to run a content company but a great time to run a content business. If you are, genuinely, as talented a producer as those rarefied folks who actually did fairly well under the old model and you have business savvy, there exist a variety of new models who have economics which are radically, radically better than any option presented to you under the old status quo.
e.g. If you possess skills and audience equivalent to a midlist genre fiction author, you'd be pretty much insane to take a standard publishing contract right now. jakonrath.blogspot.com has written literally books about how the math shakes out.
e.g. #2: If you're really really talented at explaining very hard things to some identifiable audience of people who have money to spend, you could get a whole five thousand dollars by spending six weeks writing that up for publication as a dead-tree book. If you end up on the NYT best seller's list, you may even receive royalty checks which approach the imposing salary of a municipal water department HR clerk. However, if that field is commercially viable, there exist numerous other paths whose punch-line is "less work, more savvy, radically more money." (Publish and promote an e-book is one of them. That is easy to explain but probably far from the most lucrative option.)
The combination we haven't seen much of yet is "Take the new model, then scale it like the old model." (Outside e.g. platform companies like Amazon / Apple / etc.)