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The
Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
Fourteen years ago, Kevin Kelly famously proposed that an artist
could make a living online with a thousand true fans. Has time proved him
correct?
By Cal Newport
June 15, 2022
Illustration by Franco Zacharzewski
Earlier this spring, I
made my way to a modest broadcast studio, situated on the second floor of a
polished office building in downtown Washington, D.C., to watch a taping of an
Internet news program called “Breaking Points.” The show’s producer, a young
man named James Lynch, met me in the lobby and led me to a crowded control
room. Three experienced-looking, middle-aged engineer types staffed the video
boards. The scene reminded me of any number of studios that I’ve passed through
for television appearances. Unlike those traditional shows, however, this
control room also contained a much younger engineer, hunched over a computer
screen, furiously editing the video streaming in from the studio. “We’ll post
the show on YouTube by eleven,” Lynch explained. It was already close to ten.
Everything
about the production of “Breaking Points” is fast. The show, which stars
Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host, and Saagar Enjeti, a former White House
correspondent for The Daily Caller, produces three full episodes a week,
sometimes adding extra “mini” shows responding to current events. The episodes
are released in both audio and video formats almost immediately after they’re
filmed. This speed is necessary because “Breaking Points” is attempting to
approximate, using the tools of Internet publishing, the immediacy of live news
broadcasting. A segment filmed in the morning might be out of date by the
afternoon.
To
meet this production schedule, the hosts attempt to record each block using as
few takes as possible. When I arrived at the studio, Ball was recording a
monologue about Ukraine in which she inveighed against “the baked-in pro-war
bias” of cable news. A control-room engineer who was working the show’s video
TriCaster console threw up a graphic a beat too soon. Ball stopped: “Can we do
this again? Why was that so early?” This is the only reshoot that I witnessed
during my visit. A little later, there was a lull as Lynch attempted to track
down a former professional baseball player who was scheduled to be interviewed
about the status of Major League Baseball’s labor negotiations. Ball and Enjeti
stayed at their broadcast desk during the delay, using the time to write
headlines for the short YouTube Clips that would be made of the segments they
had just finished filming.
“MSNBC
caught ‘floating’ . . . No, caught ‘platforming’ fake Ghost of
Kyiv war news,” Ball offered.
“That’s
good, that’s good,” Enjeti replied.
“That’s
not too long?”
The
headlines for the YouTube Clips, Enjeti explained, are very important for
driving views, and little things like capitalizing emotive words can make a
difference. The eventual Ghost of Kyiv headline was worded as “MSNBC CAUGHT
Platforming FAKE ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ War News.” Ball told me that hyperbolic
headlines help bring viewers to the straight-news content that’s contained in
the clips. “We promise desserts, but serve up vegetables,” she said. (When I
checked a few days later, the Ghost of Kyiv clip had already had more than a
hundred thousand views.) Lynch eventually located the former baseball player,
and I was ushered back to the control room. The young engineer continued to
furiously edit and post clips. By 11:30 a.m.,
the filming was done: the content had all been uploaded, the control room had
emptied, Enjeti was on his way to the gym, and Ball was headed home to relieve
her babysitter.
Prior
to going independent, Ball and Enjeti co-hosted a show called “Rising,”
produced in a more traditional manner by The Hill, the D.C.-based
political newspaper and media company. Enjeti estimates that “Rising” required
a full-time staff of thirty. “Breaking Points,” by contrast, gets by with a
rented studio and the part-time efforts of eight hourly contractors, yet its
viewership metrics are already outpacing the hosts’ former show. These numbers
provide an interesting case study of the evolving news industry, but my
interest in “Breaking Points” is deeper. I see the show as part of a more
important trend, one in which a dismissed prophecy about the potential of the
Internet to support creative work might be making a triumphant return.
In
2008, a lot of attention was centered on the shift toward Web 2.0, a more
participatory version of the Internet in which users could post information
just as easily as they could consume it. We’re used to online participation
today, but back then so-called user-generated content was seen as both
cutting-edge and the key to unlocking the Internet’s full potential to improve
the world. At that year’s Web 2.0 Summit, a splashy annual conference founded
by Tim O’Reilly, the roster of speakers included Mark Zuckerberg but also Al
Gore and Gavin Newsom. It was in this atmosphere of possibility that Kevin
Kelly, a respected prophet of the West Coast techno-optimism scene and the
founding executive editor of Wired, published an essay on his personal Web site
making a case that the Internet was about to transform the world of creative
work in a profound and positive manner. He titled it “1,000 True Fans.”
The
essay opens by responding to an idea that was enjoying a peak of cultural
influence: the long tail. The concept was introduced in a Wired article
written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who described the
ability of Internet-based consumer companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, to
use online interfaces and smart-search capabilities to offer rarer and less
popular products—those that exist in the “long tail” of traditional sale
charts. These new markets could be sizable. Owing to space constraints, a
physical Barnes & Noble bookstore at the time could carry a hundred and
thirty thousand titles. Amazon, free from the limits of retail real estate,
found that more than half of its sales came from books outside their
hundred and thirty thousand most popular sellers.
In
his “1,000 True Fans” essay, Kelly explains that he wasn’t as excited about
this new economic model as others seemed to be. “The long tail is famously good
news for two classes of people: a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and
Netflix, and 6 billion consumers,” he writes. “But the long tail is a decidedly
mixed blessing for creators.” If your work lives in the long tail, the
introduction of Internet-based markets might mean that you go from selling zero
units of your creations to selling a handful of units a month, but this makes
little difference to your livelihood. “The long tail offers no path out of the
quiet doldrums of minuscule sales,” Kelly writes. “Other than aim for a
blockbuster hit, what can an artists do to escape the long tail?”
This
question might seem fatalistic, but Kelly had a solution. If your creative work
exists in the long tail, generating a small but consistent number of sales,
then it’s probably sufficiently good to support a small but serious fan base,
assuming you’re willing to put in the work required to cultivate this
community. In an earlier age, a creative professional might be limited to fans
who lived nearby. But by using the tools of the Internet, Kelly argued, it was
now possible for creative types to both find and interact with supporters all
around the world. The same Internet that allows Netflix to help a small number
of cinephiles discover an obscure documentary might also allow that filmmaker
to be in touch with these same people directly, perhaps converting what Kelly
termed “Lesser Fans” into “True Fans,” defined as those “who will purchase
anything and everything you produce,” who “will drive 200 miles to see you
sing,” and “buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat.” According to Kelly, the
cultivation of True Fan communities is about more than just ego or the
celebration of art: they can become the foundation for an artist to make a
living. Kelly’s back-of-the-envelope math is both simple and compelling: if you
can recruit, over time, a thousand such loyal supporters, each of whom is
willing to spend a hundred dollars a year to support you and your creations,
you’re suddenly making a good middle-class salary doing creative work as your
full-time job.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW
YORKER
Surfing on Kelly Slater’s
Machine-Made Wave
The
1,000 True Fans theory is classic Kevin Kelly. He took something potentially
dark—in this case, a long-tail economic model that mashes creatives like a
digital-age ore crusher—and found an aspirational alternative narrative. The
new tools that allow Amazon to dominate Barnes & Noble might also allow
more creative types than ever before to make a living off their work. When
placed against the context of the global financial crisis, which was hitting
its full stride when Kelly’s essay was published, the appeal of this promise
was amplified. Unemployment was soaring while the value of retirement
investments was plummeting, but perhaps you could respond to the disruption by
finally pursuing the creative career about which you’ve been daydreaming. You
didn’t need a functional global economy to find happiness and economic
security, just a thousand other people who love what you do—and the Internet
would help you find and connect with them. Not surprisingly, the essay was a
sensation. “This is Kevin Kelly’s best riff of the year, and that’s saying an
enormous amount,” the Internet-marketing guru Seth Godin wrote, on the same day
the essay appeared online. “Go read it!”
Kelly’s
optimism, however, didn’t convince everyone. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist
and virtual-reality pioneer who had known Kelly for a long time, had doubts.
Lanier had once been a fellow techno-optimist, but by 2008, as he explained
in an interview with the
technology-news outlet The Verge, he was going through a period of “great
personal pain” caused by the reconsideration of his utopian digital ideology.
“I [had been] writing fire-breathing essays like, ‘Piracy is your friend’ and
‘Open everything up and it’ll work out,’ ” Lanier explained. “Then, when I
started looking at the numbers of people who were benefitting, I realized that
what was actually happening was the loss of the middle hump of outcomes; we
were concentrating people into winners and losers, which is the worse outcome.”
Lanier,
who had spent some time as a struggling musician, wanted Kelly’s theory to be
true. “I didn’t want to jinx it,” he later wrote. But he couldn’t shake the
insistent reality that he personally didn’t know any artists who were making a
living from an online group of dedicated supporters. If the 1,000 True Fans
model was valid, its impact should be more visible. Lanier brought his concern
to Kelly. In response, Kelly posted a follow-up essay that summarized Lanier’s
skepticism and asked his large readership to help assuage Lanier’s fears. “To
prove Jaron wrong,” Kelly wrote, “simply submit a candidate in the comments: a
musician with no ties to old media models, now making 100% of their living in
the open media environment.” As Lanier describes in his book “You Are Not a Gadget,”
Kelly’s readers struggled to identify more than a “handful” of artists who
seemed to prove his theory. “This is astonishing to me,” Lanier writes. “By
now, a decade and a half into the web era . . . shouldn’t there
at least be a few thousand initial pioneers of a new kind of musical career who
can survive in our utopia? Maybe more will appear soon, but the current
situation is discouraging.”
Kelly
offered a pragmatic explanation for why his model faltered. “It takes a lot of
time to find, nurture, manage, and service True Fans yourself,” he wrote. “And,
many artists don’t have the skills or inclination to do so.” Lanier, however,
proposed a more fundamental obstacle: the structure of the Web itself. As he
elaborates in “You Are Not a Gadget,” the initial emergence of the Internet, in
the nineteen-nineties, was a halcyon period. “The early waves of web activity
were remarkably energetic and had a personal quality,” he writes. “People
created personal ‘homepages,’ and each of them was different, and often
strange. The web had a flavor.”
In
Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s
ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated
creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their
simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their sales pitches about online
expression and connection, but really they were hijacking the Web 2.0
revolution by concentrating much of its new energetic user activity onto their
own proprietary platforms, where it could be efficiently monetized. Lanier
argued that, in order for these platforms to justify making so much money off
voluntary productivity, user content needed to be separated from the unique, interesting,
diverse, flesh-and-blood individuals who’d created it. To accomplish this goal,
the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more
homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized
photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and,
ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and
toward statistically optimized feeds. The user-generated Web became an infinite
stream of disembodied images and quips, curated by algorithms, optimized to
distract.
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The 1,000 True Fans
model was destined to struggle in the context of this dehumanized Web. Kelly’s
vision depends on an evolution of the Internet in which the vast tangle of
possible one-on-one connections partition into countless small cliques—each one
a fandom or a mini community revelling in the discovery of others who share
their quirks. Instead, the social-media giants effectively rerouted these
connections through a small number of hulking algorithmic hubs, around which
the collective creative output on the Web now ebbs and flows. If you’re a
niche-genre book writer, or an avant-garde musician, or a collage artist, the
logic of this system makes it difficult for you to find and cultivate a dedicated
group of fans. You can submit your creations into the stream, but, once there,
they will be chopped up and commoditized. If you’re lucky, perhaps something
you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same
spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions
to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards
passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The
winner-take-all dynamics of this algorithmically optimized stream will generate
a few winners—superstar influencers whose every post will be served to millions
of users. But these unicorns, in addition to being exceedingly rare, are not at
all what Kevin Kelly had in mind. The TikTok influencer Loren Gray, with her
more than fifty million followers, is much closer to an old-fashioned
mass-market Hollywood star than to someone involved in Kelly’s democratic
vision: large numbers of niche artists making a living through close
interactions with small groups of dedicated followers.
Lanier’s
explanation for the death of the 1,000 True Fans model has become a classic
tale of a paradise lost. The Web of the nineteen-nineties held great potential
for creative types. Then, when the Web collapsed into the walled gardens of
platform monopolies, this potential vanished—and left an opening for the
numerous new afflictions poisoning both our cultural and civic lives to rise in
its place. Lanier’s pessimism proved influential: the Times book
critic Michiko Kakutani named “You Are Not a Gadget” one of her Top Ten books
of 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle called it “a necessary
corrective,” and Time named Lanier to its 100 Most Influential
People list. A certain grimness soon became de rigueur in most reporting about
the Internet—including much of my own—while optimism became correspondingly
rare. I visited the “Breaking Points” studio earlier this spring because it
seemed to represent a notable break from the pessimism of Lanier’s corporatized
Web. Indeed, if we look closer at this show’s operation, it becomes clear that
we were perhaps too quick to dismiss Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory. It
faltered in 2008, but, fourteen years later, it might be making a comeback.
Ball
and Enjeti are not immensely popular influencers earning many millions of
dollars from a vast audience of followers. But they’re also not toiling away on
a show that’s effectively a nonprofitable side hustle. They instead fall into a
middle ground that Lanier despaired didn’t exist for creative professionals.
The total budget for “Breaking Points”—including all equipment, rental fees,
and contractor costs—is around a million dollars a year. From this budget, Ball
and Enjeti pay themselves individual incomes that are somewhat higher than
what The Hill paid them for their old show, but not
extravagantly so. They make, in other words, a solid and stable
upper-middle-class living doing creative work, and they do so in exactly the
manner that Kelly had proposed: asking for serious support from a small but
loyal fan base.
The
business model for “Breaking Points” is straightforward. Its staff releases a
condensed version of their show as a free podcast. They also post clips of
many—but not all—of the segments from each episode on YouTube. Though “Breaking
Points” makes some money from podcast and YouTube ads, the bulk of the revenue
comes from a premium-subscription model. If you subscribe at a cost of ten
dollars a month, or a hundred dollars for a full year, you gain access to an
uncut version of each episode, free of ads, in both audio and video formats.
When I visited the studio, Enjeti showed me the expensive camera system that
the show had recently bought, so that they could release the subscriber videos
in 4K resolution. Some fans, it turned out, like to watch “Breaking Points” on
their smart TVs like a standard cable-news channel.
There
are a few other perks offered to subscribers, including access to weekly
Q. & A. sessions and some bonus segments. The marketing copy for “Breaking
Points,” however, makes it clear that the subscription model is as much about
supporting Ball and Enjeti’s mission as it is about gaining access to specific
benefits: “Join at any level to say SCREW YOU to CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.” The
loyalty of their audience is perhaps best captured by their show’s origin
story. When Ball and Enjeti made the decision to leave “Rising” to go
independent, they needed capital to lease the studio and pay the contractors.
They came up with the idea of offering fifteen-hundred-dollar lifetime
memberships to their audience to help finance the shift. Anticipating that they
would have only a small number of takers, they promised to carve the names of
every lifetime subscriber into a plaque that would be displayed on the
“Breaking Points” set. In just one month, sales of lifetime memberships
generated enough money to fund the show for its entire first year. “It was
absolutely incredible,” Enjeti said. “Breaking Points” is currently supported
by around ten thousand paying subscribers spread over the various payment
tiers. This is a factor of ten more than in the 1,000 True Fans model proposed
by Kelly, but it remains a good case study of his model in action: a strong but
modest-sized community, discovered and served by using the Internet, directly
supporting creative professionals making a full-time living producing original
work.
Ball
and Enjeti are not alone in their reanimation of Kelly’s prophecy. Consider
Hilton Carter, a houseplant guru who has cultivated a loyal online following
that celebrates his over-the-top commitment to domesticated greenery. Carter
attracts converts in large part through the lush photos that he posts on
Instagram. Although his five-hundred-thousand-follower count on the platform is
respectable, it’s still far from the numbers boasted by élite social-media
influencers. The key to Carter’s career, however, is that, like Ball and
Enjeti, he transacts directly with his fans outside of social media, offering
live online courses on plant care and running a highly curated online
storefront called Things by HC, which sells plant cradles, signed copies of his
books, and an impressive-looking gardener’s apron. (When I last visited the
site, a note warned visitors to expect processing and shipping delays, “due to
an unprecedented volume of orders.”)
Some
creative professionals can get by without even having to sell anything in
particular to their 1,000 True Fans. Maria Popova, for example, makes a living
publishing essays on literature, art, and science on her site, the
Marginalian. Most of Popova’s income comes from asking fans to help
support her work directly, without expecting anything extra in return. “If this
labor has made your life more livable in the past year (or the past decade),”
she writes, “please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal
donation.”
A
shining example of the 1,000 True Fans model is the podcasting boom. There are
more than eight hundred and fifty thousand active podcasts available right now.
Although most of these shows are small and don’t generate much money, the
number of people making a full-time living off original audio content is
substantial. The key to a financially viable podcast is to cultivate a group of
True Fans eager to listen to every episode. The value of each such fan, willing
to stream hours and hours of a creator’s content, is surprisingly large; if
sufficiently committed, even a modest-sized audience can generate significant
income for a creator. According to an advertising agency I consulted, for
example, a weekly podcast that generates thirty thousand downloads per episode
should be able to reach Kelly’s target of generating a hundred thousand dollars
a year in income. Earning a middle-class salary by talking through a digital microphone
to a fiercely loyal band of supporters around the world, who are connected by
the magic of the Internet, is about as pure a distillation of Kelly’s vision as
you’re likely to find.
There’s
currently a lot of buzz among Silicon Valley types around the potential of the
so-called Web 3.0 revolution—a partly thrilling, partly cynical, partly
incoherent collection of ideas about how emerging blockchain technologies, such
as smart contracts and N.F.T.s, are going to liberate the Internet from
centralized control. Some Web 3.0 boosters have connected these new tools to
Kelly’s vision. Last winter, for example, Chris Dixon, a major Web 3.0
proponent and a general partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen
Horowitz, published an essay titled “NFTs and a Thousand True Fans.” In it,
Dixon argues that creators will “increasingly rely” on N.F.T.s to make money
outside the social-media ecosystem, because they provide trustworthy
documentation about the ownership of digital media.
Perhaps
Dixon is right that Web 3.0 will play a role in the future of online creative
careers, but it’s also clear that Ball and Enjeti, Hilton Carter, Maria Popova,
and any number of successful podcasters didn’t depend on a technological
breakthrough of this magnitude to put Kelly’s theory into practice right now.
The key to their success seems instead to be the willingness of their audiences
to step outside of the algorithmically controlled streams and interact with
creators directly, using more varied and independent tools. If you subscribe to
“Breaking Points,” for example, your payments are processed through a small
company called SuperCast, which will install a plug-in for your podcast player
to give you easy access to premium episodes. The show’s videos are posted
unlisted on YouTube, and the hidden link needed to access it is e-mailed
directly to you using Mailchimp. Similarly, Carter conducts his classes using
plain old Zoom. Popova simply dropped a PayPal widget onto her independently
hosted Web site.
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The real breakthroughs
that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as
cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming
services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content.
When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com,
Netflix, Peacock, and Disney+, why not also pay for “Breaking Points,” or throw
a monthly donation toward Maria Popova? In 2008, when Kelly published the
original “1,000 True Fans” essay, it was widely assumed that it would be hard
to ever persuade people to pay money for most digital content. (This likely
explains why so many of Kelly’s examples focus on selling tangible goods, such
as DVDs or custom prints.) This is no longer true. Opening up these
marketplaces to purely digital artifacts—text, audio, video, online
classes—significantly lowered the barriers to entry for creative professionals
looking to make a living online.
Changing
attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True
Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the
social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the
Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have
expressed skepticism about these platforms during this period was seen as
regressive and eccentric. In the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election,
these attitudes radically shifted. For different reasons, both sides of the
political spectrum began to immensely distrust the platform monopolies. The
algorithmically curated streams that had once seemed so futuristic suddenly became
Orwellian. Today, it’s not only acceptable to move more of your online
activities beyond the walled gardens of social media—it’s celebrated.
The
recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily
expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to
persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed
businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind.
Services such as Patreon and Kickstarter are jostling for a dominant position
in this direct-to-consumer creative marketplace. A prominent recent example of
such attempts to centralize the True Fan economy is Substack, which eliminates
friction for writers who want to launch paid e-mail newsletters. Substack now
has more than a million subscribers who pay for access to newsletters, and is
currently valued at around six hundred and fifty million dollars. With this
type of money at stake, it’s easy to imagine a future in which a small number
of similarly optimized platforms dominate most of the mechanisms by which
creative professionals interact with their 1,000 True Fans. In the optimistic
scenario, this competition will lead to continued streamlining of the process
of serving supporters, increasing the number of people who are able to make a
good living off of their creative work: an apotheosis of sorts of Kelly’s
original vision. A more pessimistic prediction is that the current True Fan
revolution will eventually go the way of the original Web 2.0 revolution, with
creators increasingly ground in the gears of monetization. The Substack of
today makes it easy for a writer to charge fans for a newsletter. The Substack
of tomorrow might move toward a flat-fee subscription model, driving users
toward an algorithmically optimized collection of newsletter content,
concentrating rewards within a small number of hyper-popular producers, and in
turn eliminating the ability for any number of niche writers to make a living.
For
now, however, it’s nice to be able to bask in this moment of potential for the
dream of building a new class of digital yeomen. When I visited Ball and Enjeti
at their studio, I asked if they had plans to expand “Breaking Points” into a
larger media company, backed by millions in investment capital and run by
dozens of full-time employees—making it, in other words, the type of
acquisition property that could ultimately generate real wealth. The question
made them visibly uncomfortable. Ball explained that one of the deeper joys of
“Breaking Points” is that it allows them to focus on creative efforts they
like—presenting and reacting to the news—without all the issues that plague
larger organizations. “I don’t want to have bureaucracy or office politics,”
she said. “People have shown up for us, and we want to deliver to them.” My
impression leaving the studio was that Ball and Enjeti really seem to be
enjoying what they’re doing at exactly the scale at which they’re doing it.
Their excitement was contagious. I couldn’t help but think that this must be
exactly what Kevin Kelly had in mind. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of paying
Substack subscribers.
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