> Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of those buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator.
having a couple blogs/influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works)
> As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love
it's simply fun growing a brand/discovering new communities/creating one/watching the engagement and metrics
IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world.
This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time.
This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing.
Yep, I subscribe to a couple of podcast patreons.. for $5 a month for 5-10 hours of good content it's a no-brainer... Patreon.com/redscare It's basically just 2 women mouthing off, it's funny though. They do well out of it.
Patreon is quite a bit of work and requires constant upkeep to maintain a steady income flow. It's really no different from Twitch subscriptions in that regard. It does a better job of monetizing primarily because of the easily customized tiers, and secondarily because the platform specifically caters to paid content rather than free.
That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
I commented in detail on this a few months ago ...
What Proziam wrote is a little off, at least as far as music goes.
Hundreds of musicians/music vloggers are working full-time from Patreon/Adsense once they exceed 100,000 Youtube subscribers and upload weekly/biweekly and have 100+ Patrons.
Patreon produces a reliable income stream (for rent, etc.) while Adsense fluctuates but adds up ($1,000 - $5,000/million views typically.)
What I have heard with Twitch is that you need to be online continuously or the audience moves on.
> IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author
That was from a time decades ago when customer acquisition was expensive. With Youtube/Adsense it's not that hard, and one could experiment with Facebook targeting.
And any time somebody uses the phrase "walked back", I've found the author didn't have a nuanced understanding of the subject.
100 Patrons, even if they contribute well above average, say $25 (after platform fees/expenses/taxes), is still only $2,500 per month. There are some places in the US where that wouldn't be liveable, let alone offer enough stability for a person to enjoy a stable lifestyle. Of course, if you live in a low cost of living area you can make things fly that otherwise wouldn't. But even with that consideration in mind, how many places could you live a 'normal' life on 30k?
I've worked with musicians as well, including some with global recognition and (many) millions of views and song plays. From what I've seen, turning 100k Youtube subscribers into 100k income per year is far from the norm. Plenty of creators in that size bracket quit, suggesting it's not particularly sustainable.
That said, if you can, I'd love to get some more insight into the creators you feel are getting the most out of their effort, and how they're achieving their results!
I'll go into some more detail so people can picture how it works in 2020 better.
100k subscribers is the gateway to really making it on YT.
Above that you start going self-viral, so some artists have snowballed very fast (in months) from 100k to 300k+. It's like they're on YT, but their channel is "their own private island" and takes on a life of its own.
1) US artists will need to live at home (or in a van) or be very frugal to make it with the numbers I provided - but it's doable, and they will get a lot of free gear.
And they'll be full-time musicians, which is living the dream for most.
However, low-COL artists can (and do) earn the average local salary, plus free gear. So they have it all figured out.
2) US (and European) musicians will have a hard time touring as the bandleader on that income, since it's pay-to-play now for non-headliners in the US, typically $500 per show, and often T-shirt sales are restricted (see Sarah Longfield's interviews for the details.)
So that means keep uploading on Patreon/YT, or have your sponsors/fans in each city put you up.
3) "Be your own label.", "Own your publishing.", etc.
The important thing to realize is that there is no label deal available for new musicians (the exception would be super-strong writers) in 2020, and even if you signed one, advances have to be repaid. And oh ya, "360 deals" go after your Patreon and YT/Adsense, publishing and show revenue now - just say no.
So go whole hog on Patreon/YT/Adsense (ie. be your own label) because it's not like there is another funding option for most people, aside from a few guys making it as contract performers (ie. paying their dues) for regional touring bands.
See Rhett Shull's YT channel to learn more about that - he's a road dog contract hired gun guitarist with a knack for YT vlogging. Hats off, man, and congrats on the 100+k subs!
Also see Yvette Young's (from San Jose) meteoric rise - she just got an Ibanez signature guitar in her 20's!
Twitch counts it as a subscription if you use the free "subscription" from Amazon Prime. The thing is that it has to be manually applied every month. So if he's off for a couple days, very few people will resubscribe if they're not on his channel -- because he's off. It's not like 40k cancelled a subscription at once, their gift ran out and most re-upped as soon as he was back on a couple days later.
It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction.
Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.
Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well.
Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.
Twitch is an extremely imbalanced platform in regard to discoverability. Their model is to 'make the big bigger' and monetize a narrow field of creators well, rather than monetize a larger pool of creators. There are a number of valid criticisms of the platform, but this one is the most painful for new creators to contend with by a wide margin.
It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.
I don't think Ninja is a particularly good example because (1) he is operating at a scale where the normal rules don't apply (2) his rise was equally fast and volatile (3) twitch requires a constant presence more than other content platforms.
Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans"
The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans.
maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base.
At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
Ninja is the most visible example, but the same pattern holds true at virtually any audience size (within the range of what is typically monetizable). This pattern is actually more extreme on platforms like Patreon because the audience is expecting something for their money. They are closer to a customer than a typical viewer.
The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match.
Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin.
To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
Right, but while ninja might have lost $140,000 by going two days without streaming, almost none of the youtube channels I support on patreon are producing a video daily. Much easier to take two days off if you're only producing one or two videos a week!
On that front, I totally agree. Some platforms are far easier to manage an acceptable work-life balance than others. Unfortunately, a month off due to illness would still result in a massive loss of income which could take a long time to rebuild. The financial situations many creators put themselves in scare me, to be honest.
You need to create valuable calls to action and
continuously produce content in order to maintain
their attention.
Recurring subscription models help with this, as "letting the subscription continue" then becomes the easiest thing to do.
Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums.
There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
> Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone.
> ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort
I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
What would you prefer it to be called? We can change the words around to suit our social sensibilities but at the end of the day, we're still talking about convincing people to spend some money. Nobody bats an eye if you ask for more money from your boss, but many people are under a lot of pressure not to try to be compensated fairly for consumer-facing work.
Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
I think my main issue is the shift in focus away from a transaction (people paying for a product or service) to reducing people to simply being sources of money.
Also, the idea that fans or admirers should be converted into people who pay you money. My concept of a service like Patreon is that it's a way for people to give you money if they (independently) want to, rather than being pushed or cajoled to do so.
Taking this to extreme :)
100 True Fans ? try 1
Internet has enabled visibility so you need to only find one true fan who is willing to sponsor you 100,000 per year.
Funny, but this is not wrong either. It turns out anyone who has a good job is already building something one entity really wants -- themselves. The only difference is that they pay with their time.
Actually that's how art has worked for a looong time. Most pre 19th century artists that we remember now had a rich patron who put food on their table (and possibly influenced what they did).
> On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years.
22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it.
> Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.
Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential.
Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.
It's of course easy to prove if you define the nebulous 'true fans' as 'fan enough so that $X from each of them support me financially'.
I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).
While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast majority of fun creative content won't qualify for this anyway.
However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!
I'd suggest not doing tiers. Segmentation is repulsive. Why do I ever want to be a bronze-level customer in your product world? It perhaps makes sense for products that have monopolized or established firmly or where costs are truely substantial as feature/utilization is increased. However, most likely is often the side effect of throwing in the MBA part of your brain to squeeze in that last bit of revenue juice without you having to improve the tech. In essence, just luring in customers with "low starting from..." prices and then telling them they are fools to expect those prices. I tend to distrust products that rely on segmentation to inflate revenues and I think they are often ripe for disruption. At least, for creative/educational products please don't tell your customers that they are 3rd class citizens in your world unless they allow you to completely squeeze them out.
>The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription.
For the average person this is not the case assuming you as a creator are trying to extract similar value. That means you're pushing out a new release every year. That either means the new release invalidates the old one or is so enticing every time that people keep buying it without skipping releases as they think about it or are reminded unlike a subscription which can be automated.
It is not, it's far too short for that. The way it is now it isn't even a decent invitation to discuss.
dav43 could probably expand it into one easily though. What kind of bubble? Who's in it? Why do they think so? What are the consequences and what could be done about it? etc.
Well let me expand it again (i have another comment saying the same thing):
HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers. Even in the US, tell someone who makes 30k/year that you spend 1K/year on someone's Patreon and he'll think you're crazy... or spit in your face.
> HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers
That's a false assumption. HN is much larger than you think, with people all over the US and all over the world. It has highly paid workers, lowly paid workers, people who don't need to work, and people who need to but can't find any.
We tend to make assumptions like "for the most part" based on the internal image when our pre-existing conditions meet a handful of striking data points—say the first 3 or so. And then we don't change it. But which data points happen to strike us are actually a function of our pre-existing conditions also. There are many other data points.
i can see my response may have needed a few extra words, however I think referring to my comment in such a fashion is slightly misleading.
I’d hate to think that in this forum, just because a comment is short and succinct - what I thought to be a daily clear response, meaning “the authors live in a bubble of experience and expectations” - it is somehow lesser value that a comment that is long winded and without a clear opinion.
TLDR. I hope HN doesn’t confuse clear and succinct with snarky and sarcastic.
If it doesn't seem to you like "God these guys live in a bubble" would come across as snarky and sarcastic, it would be good to recalibrate. From my perspective—and I'm pretty sure many other readers' also—it's an internet swipe of precisely the kind we don't want here.
Totally agree that long-winded, empty comments are not the recommended alternative. What we want is curious conversation: thoughtful, substantive comments that contain information. Drive-by putdowns kill that; hence the moderation replies.
What? Not at all imho. He writes very different. He likes to construct more complex sentences. This reads like your average journalist, which is okay, but not particular distinguishable.
The _Future_ of the Internet, a post-scarce good, is not going to be a Profit Model Powered by The Extraction Economy.
It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the gain in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: http://free.eco .
But let's call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as "Passion Economy", which sounds a lot more noble than "overcharging random strangers on the internet".
I'm also surprised that "whales" went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.
give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc.
i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he/she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his/her passion position in life but most of us should/must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time...
I'm having trouble envisioning very many markets where a "fan" is going to consistently spend $1k/year.
The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense.
I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income.
Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.")
I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.
This is a "think piece" and not based on any research or data. In reality, I'm seeing lots of relatively small entertainers do the 1000 Fans Thing on Twitch and it really works because each subscriber pays 5 USD per month.
The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit.
The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
> The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).
Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.
I agree that this can be very attainable as a B2B developer. The main challenges are both knowing and understanding the problem and solution and then attracting the audience. It's doable and is being done. We hear more about the unicorns. But there is still a lot of room for the little guys.
Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.
People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.
Just because you can draw a parallel between the two doesn’t necessarily make it exploitative. Most of the time I’m sure both sides win, the creator gets to follow their passion, the viewer gets to feel they had a part in it by paying some money. There is certainly a potential for exploitation and indoctrination, but that’s really only in extreme cases.
I don't mind people looking to get paid for what they do. There are plenty of models that let you pay artists more easily, I'm fine with those.
What I am talking about is the rationalization of making "fans", increasing engagement and the promotion of "whale" systems. Those lead to the problem I discussed.
You probably also don't mind consuming other people's work for free and for your own advantage. You're arguing from a very emotional and moral point of view. In the end, if the creator doesn't adapt to its audience (monetizing in a way that works) he will probably don't produce the content you value anymore. Nobody wins. People making up sales tactics for "artists" are just realistic. The reason content producers are drawn to manipulation is today's audience that is not able to decide between "valuable" and "worthwhile" content anymore. Everyone expects information to be free and then damns creators if they try to make a living off helping other people to succeed.
At the end of the day, you need to get by. If you want to live off the things you love you will most likely have to adapt to your audience and do sales like everyone else. Might not be an idealist's dream, but it's how humans work. Doing digital stuff doesn't make fans or customers change how they value things. Besides, giving away almost anything for free upfront raises the bar for people to pay anything at all. It's how we work.
Well when I was young I spent about $1k/year on little thingamajigs called cd's. That was perhaps "stupid" in a pure economic sense but I did it. And if I were young these days I can't say I wouldn't give that amount to some random "content creator" who could give me the same joy as we 80's kids got from sitting quiet and listening actively to music albums from beginning to end.
But me now is like "why the hell would I give that kind of money to some rando on the internet that stream games?". My patreon career is limited at giving a podcast creator $10/month and that was hard to justify for myself.
My first thought was how ridiculously out of touch with the economic reality of the 99% this author was. Even if you love an artist and are willing to spend some amount of money to support them, that amount is not going to be anywhere near 1k. This author is deeply ensconced in her elite Bay Area bubble. It is embarrassing, tbh.
It needs to be direct engagement at that price point. No one is going to pay Rachel Ray 1000/year for blog access. Someone may pay her 1000/year for access to Skype cooking lessons. High end prostitutes are a nontech example of where they should focus on a small number of Whales. Also people who get paid to do keynote speaches at 20-50k a pop could have long term engagements with 100 fans paying 2k/year.
You can sell software development services, and your fan may be a graphic designer who uses you every time to build out the back-end for the beautiful designs they make. You do a good job, you're their go-to person, they are your "fan".
1. The article shows a pyramid and it's important. In order to get a few "true fans" (people prepared to pay dearly for what you produce), you need a large amount of "distant fans" (people who like what you do, as long as it's free). The key word is conversion, and, regrettably, it's not present once in the post [0]. It's probably in the 1 to 0.1% range.
[0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first.
2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?
The phrasing and contextualising in the article is all over the place. It's referred to as a 'shift', but also shows how the basic business models for 100 x $1000 and 1000 x $100 are completely different. They are examining a new different type of business using similar platforms, not a general trend of existing relationships changing in character.
Those trainers selling courses aren’t selling their $1000 courses to the same dedicated group of 100 course crazy training junkies every month, year in year out. Maybe someone will sign up for a series, or for special 1-1 sessions for a while, but then they will have got what they wanted and leave. That’s got very little in common with my long term relationship with a handful of people on Patreon for a few dollars each a month. There might be a very few, very wealthy patrons that do support a guru for large amounts every month, but that's yet another business model again and also has little similarity with the actual relationship people like me have with the people we support. Wealthy people supporting gurus has been a thing ever since there have been wealthy people.
Interesting point with the pyramid, a podcaster (Sam Harris) recently turned his free podcast into a "freemium" model where you get half of each episode for free. I imagine this is going to completely kill his following, as it did for me.
Freemium is actually being charitable, it's more like shareware.
You think people who currently pay will stop paying?
Like, it's some sort of virtue signalling?
If he's changed to that model presumably he doesn't care about his following but instead wants to make a living (or make himself rich, depending how things are for him).
It's going to kill his following among people who want to follow him for free, but by definition they don't bring him any money. If you have enough paying users, meaning your business gained momentum, you don't really care about free users anymore.
Some of the free users might pay. Small percentage “conversion” into paying users. But this can be done only once a large following was built and that model seems a bit disingenuous to me, free to paid, and I like the model where the content creator gives some extra to paying users.
Sam also does a number of live appearances, and I suspect that a number of free listeners would buy tickets once in a while to see him. It would be interesting to know if this move would decrease the popularity of live appearances as well.
Podcasts are spread by word of mouth. I will no longer be recommending it to anyone, and I imagine this is not unique to me. This kills the following it the long run.
Consider also the guest’s perspective. They want to teach a wide audience.
In fairness, he does continue to support a charity model as well. He clarifies very often that if you can't support the podcast due to financial reasons, you can simply email his team and get free access, no questions asked.
I think this is more what years of teaching people the wrong things entirely looks like. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times of all places that equated criticism of that show with misogyny because 'women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded “the authorities.”' https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/goop-gwyneth-palt... Like, this is an argument that they expect the most educated and informed members of American society to buy, and given what we've been teaching people maybe they're right.
Ouch. The only thing that surprised me about this is that someone of Betty Dodson's stature agreed to be on Paltrow's show. This is kind of like Bob Woodward appearing as a commentator on Fox News.
Gwynneth Paltrow's personal online store. People get annoyed because she's into alternative health stuff but it's really just a store for people who have the same taste as Gwynneth Paltrow.
From the article it sounds like part of it is going after the same sort of business as Ramit Sethi [1] [2] He seems to mainly sell courses on how to create and sell courses. I don't know how comfortable I would feel doing that. Maybe that's just me.
Good points. Based on my experience with whales in f2p games you will get outsized income from 0.1% of whale users, reliable income from 20% of hobby users, and one-off spend here and there from the rest.
When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.
Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.
The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.
I quite like and agree with the numbers here - you could be getting 10k / year before your first whale, so it does not make much economic sense to only focus on a 100 biggest fans.
You described the business model of Ludwig van Beethoven. One of the first independent artist in his profession. He had a few whales which gained status through personal inscription of his works and paid him to stay in Vienna. But he was massively popular in Vienna before he gained whales.
Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix!
One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living.
That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace.
A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.
> Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That's more than a year's subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix!
The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services.
But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.
I pay $75 per week to my personal trainer and where I live trainers are cheap. People routinely pay hundreds per week in places like LA.
I’m not sure I’d pay that for an online trainer but if there are probably things a step or two away from workouts where I would pay for an internet mitigated version.
But that’s not being a fan, that’s buying a service.
Problem is, you can only drink so many fancy starbucks coffees per day. There are many more content creators around.
What will the customers do when everyone wants a starbucks coffee per day? Pay one? Pay no one?
Also don't forget that not everyone is living in the HN well paid tech ivory tower. Even in the US, there should be a lot of people who can't afford a starbucks coffee per day...
$84 is more than I pay monthly for Spotify, Netflix, the local newspaper, my broadband connection and occasional magazine buys combined. $1000 is more than I spend yearly on my biggest hobby - and that includes air travel and hotel fares. I have a really hard time coming up with any kind of content that'd be worth that much money.
I think the point is that Netflix and your local newspaper don't interact with you, personally in a one-on-one, honest, direct interaction. At an $84/mo subscription level, that's what you're buying.
Now this may be because the buyer is a true-believer or whatever, but equally likely because they're now able to drop a name around the dinner table, tell their friends that they're in direct dialogue with a 'name',... Status signalling, in a phrase. Tell me why some (rich!) people are willing to pay millions of dollars for a painting that looks like a couple of wet blobs on a half-plastered wall. Same forces at work, I suspect.
Not denying your point, but the wet blob painting is probably considered an investment that is expected to increase in value over time, unlike a Youtube video.
So this is the problem with "starbucks coffee daily" argument - you are assuming people spend money logically/rationally, most people don't. That is why folks don't have any problem dropping $4 every single day at Starbucks (their coffee isn't even that good), but they won't spend $5 per month for something as important as email and depend on free email like GMail.
So what you're saying is this is just a restatement of the original article, but by someone who actually does earn $1k in a single day and so doesn't realise that's not a reasonable amount to spend.
I have seen people drop over $1000 dollars in gifted subscriptions/coins over the course of a single stream where a guy is just playing a video game. I'll admit that this kind of thing isn't common, and you definitely aren't going to find 100 people with that level of disposable income for your following, but there are plenty of people who blow what seems like an unreasonable amount of money just so a stranger on the other side of a screen will notice them.
> This strategy is closely related to the concept of “whales” in gaming, in which 1 to 2 percent of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue
Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother's consent and/or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.
Everybody should think deeply about ethics and act morally. Exploiting human beings is not okay.
But the idea of "whales" is nearly universal in all lines of business, and there's nothing unethical about it unless your business is already operating in some kind of ethical gray area.
If you are lucky enough to have customers at all, you will have some that spend 10x or 100x as others.
The most obvious example would be a neighborhood restaurant or food truck. Most people in your town might visit once or twice per year, if at all. But then you have your regular customers that you see a few times per week. Somebody who stops by twice a week is spending 100x as somebody who visits once a year.
Same with a department store. Most people buy nothing, some just want a pair of socks, and some will drop $2,000 on a new business wardrobe.
Something worth considering: if your business is one that inspires passionate fans, do you have any options for these folks to spend more? If not, are you kinda leaving a bunch of money on the table and hamstringing your fledgling business? Probably. Of course, this is something that takes ethical consideration and good judgement.
Maybe for a kid paying for school or saving it could be OK, but 100-fans-income is quite volatile. And the end of the day these people are living out from tips, pity and the grace of 1st world country donors (I am saying this while trying not to be controversial).
Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus volatile, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they'll replace him/her with whatever else is out there, and that's 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons.
The fewer
"fans" you have and the more they pay the more power they will have over you and the more demanding they will become. In other words: Your fans turn into patrons and will have a major influence on your work.
Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.
But finding those 100 people who care enough to pay for whatever it is you're producing must have a cost.
There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it's like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it's more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you.
That's without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It's especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.
the cost is immense. Look at how much money Jeb Bush spent in 2015 to get fans. Like finding a needle in a silo. Some people can do it much easier, but it's random. there is no rule or strategy to reliably get fans quickly.
Tl;dr: "Sell your customers what they want, make them pay what you say, be sure they're rich enough."
Best paradigm busting advice in business after "If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you'll have 5 milion customers" and "Always remember: profit is revenue minus expense".
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadhaving a couple blogs/influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works)
> As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love
it's simply fun growing a brand/discovering new communities/creating one/watching the engagement and metrics
This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you 'lose' a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose extraordinary sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time.
This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much 'hate' for influencer marketing.
[0] https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-reveals-shocking...
I'd think the trick is to find the right niche- if you're too generic, you're up against the big personalities.
That said, many of patreon's most financially successful users are producing content that isn't suitable for platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
What Proziam wrote is a little off, at least as far as music goes.
Hundreds of musicians/music vloggers are working full-time from Patreon/Adsense once they exceed 100,000 Youtube subscribers and upload weekly/biweekly and have 100+ Patrons.
Patreon produces a reliable income stream (for rent, etc.) while Adsense fluctuates but adds up ($1,000 - $5,000/million views typically.)
What I have heard with Twitch is that you need to be online continuously or the audience moves on.
> IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author
That was from a time decades ago when customer acquisition was expensive. With Youtube/Adsense it's not that hard, and one could experiment with Facebook targeting.
And any time somebody uses the phrase "walked back", I've found the author didn't have a nuanced understanding of the subject.
I've worked with musicians as well, including some with global recognition and (many) millions of views and song plays. From what I've seen, turning 100k Youtube subscribers into 100k income per year is far from the norm. Plenty of creators in that size bracket quit, suggesting it's not particularly sustainable.
That said, if you can, I'd love to get some more insight into the creators you feel are getting the most out of their effort, and how they're achieving their results!
100k subscribers is the gateway to really making it on YT.
Above that you start going self-viral, so some artists have snowballed very fast (in months) from 100k to 300k+. It's like they're on YT, but their channel is "their own private island" and takes on a life of its own.
1) US artists will need to live at home (or in a van) or be very frugal to make it with the numbers I provided - but it's doable, and they will get a lot of free gear.
And they'll be full-time musicians, which is living the dream for most.
However, low-COL artists can (and do) earn the average local salary, plus free gear. So they have it all figured out.
2) US (and European) musicians will have a hard time touring as the bandleader on that income, since it's pay-to-play now for non-headliners in the US, typically $500 per show, and often T-shirt sales are restricted (see Sarah Longfield's interviews for the details.)
So that means keep uploading on Patreon/YT, or have your sponsors/fans in each city put you up.
3) "Be your own label.", "Own your publishing.", etc.
The important thing to realize is that there is no label deal available for new musicians (the exception would be super-strong writers) in 2020, and even if you signed one, advances have to be repaid. And oh ya, "360 deals" go after your Patreon and YT/Adsense, publishing and show revenue now - just say no.
So go whole hog on Patreon/YT/Adsense (ie. be your own label) because it's not like there is another funding option for most people, aside from a few guys making it as contract performers (ie. paying their dues) for regional touring bands.
See Rhett Shull's YT channel to learn more about that - he's a road dog contract hired gun guitarist with a knack for YT vlogging. Hats off, man, and congrats on the 100+k subs!
Also see Yvette Young's (from San Jose) meteoric rise - she just got an Ibanez signature guitar in her 20's!
Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.
Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.
1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory
It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.
Furthermore I read your take, and maybe I'm wrong, as a 1k "fans" and not 1k "true fans"
The "true fans" model is a subset within the larger audience demographic -- they don't care if you stop producing for a while, need their short attention spans pandered too, or the like, this is what makes them "true" fans.
maybe your advice changed their life, or they really resonate with you for some personal reasons -- and again this would only be a sub-set of a creator's total fan base.
At least this is my interpretation of the concept.
The distinction between a 'true' fan and just a 'fan' is a vague one. If a creator has a total audience size of 1 million, you can bet that less than 1% of them are giving the creator any amount of money, even 1 dollar. Does that 1% count as their true fans? The folks with thousands of paying subscribers, or tens of thousands, have audience sizes to match.
Given that less than 1% pay anything, what percent of those do you think pay at least 20x the normal amount ($5 -> 100$)? Many creators make this somewhat visible by highlighting their contributors and the air is quite thin.
To make a long story short, I disagree with the concept because it paints a very rosy picture of the situation and doesn't match reality much, if at all. If you had 1,000 'true' fans you'd probably end up with $2,000 a month after taxes/platform fees/expenses. And of course, that assumes that you're able to consistently monetize through a subscription platform. If you had to sell individual products to get there it would be even worse.
Building a community helps retain people as well. This is easier said than done, since this aspect alone does require some effort and constant monitoring. Simplest examples of this would be subscriber-only Discord servers and/or webforums.
There are moral considerations to each of those strategies, of course. Canceling a recurring subscription shouldn't involve jumping through hoops. And "ostracizing/shunning lapsed members" is more or less a How To Run A Cult For Dummies tactic, so ask yourself if your subscribers-only community is operating like that.
> ... you often can't monetize them at all without significant re-activation effort
I find talk of monetising people extremely off-putting. Also (not meant as a personal attack), I do not want to be around or associate with people who talk like this.
Making good content consistently is hard work, I personally have no moral qualms about a creator trying to make a living doing it.
Also, the idea that fans or admirers should be converted into people who pay you money. My concept of a service like Patreon is that it's a way for people to give you money if they (independently) want to, rather than being pushed or cajoled to do so.
22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it.
> Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.
Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30/mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the increase is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it's still almost inconsequential.
Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There's a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.
I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong.
It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).
However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!
Trying to make all your customers fit just one single pricing model is bad for business.
For the average person this is not the case assuming you as a creator are trying to extract similar value. That means you're pushing out a new release every year. That either means the new release invalidates the old one or is so enticing every time that people keep buying it without skipping releases as they think about it or are reminded unlike a subscription which can be automated.
The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - 'I gave you money, now deliver this'.
The article describes customers not fans. The VC'ing of 1000 true fans.
Nevertheless it's great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.
And then they present the idea of selling what your customers want to buy as new ^_^
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dav43 could probably expand it into one easily though. What kind of bubble? Who's in it? Why do they think so? What are the consequences and what could be done about it? etc.
HN readers are for the most part highly paid tech workers. Even in the US, tell someone who makes 30k/year that you spend 1K/year on someone's Patreon and he'll think you're crazy... or spit in your face.
That's a false assumption. HN is much larger than you think, with people all over the US and all over the world. It has highly paid workers, lowly paid workers, people who don't need to work, and people who need to but can't find any.
We tend to make assumptions like "for the most part" based on the internal image when our pre-existing conditions meet a handful of striking data points—say the first 3 or so. And then we don't change it. But which data points happen to strike us are actually a function of our pre-existing conditions also. There are many other data points.
I’d hate to think that in this forum, just because a comment is short and succinct - what I thought to be a daily clear response, meaning “the authors live in a bubble of experience and expectations” - it is somehow lesser value that a comment that is long winded and without a clear opinion.
TLDR. I hope HN doesn’t confuse clear and succinct with snarky and sarcastic.
Totally agree that long-winded, empty comments are not the recommended alternative. What we want is curious conversation: thoughtful, substantive comments that contain information. Drive-by putdowns kill that; hence the moderation replies.
It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the gain in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: http://free.eco .
There is no such thing.
But let's call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as "Passion Economy", which sounds a lot more noble than "overcharging random strangers on the internet".
I'm also surprised that "whales" went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.
Amazing right? 500 is less than 1000 and 200 isn’t that much more than 100.
Feel free to take down the OP and put this comment up instead
give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc.
i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he/she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his/her passion position in life but most of us should/must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time...
prize tag is for goods not for people...
The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense.
I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of revenue from physical goods is very different from $1k of income.
Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. ("That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.")
I don't see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.
The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.
It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).
Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.
Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.
People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.
What I am talking about is the rationalization of making "fans", increasing engagement and the promotion of "whale" systems. Those lead to the problem I discussed.
At the end of the day, you need to get by. If you want to live off the things you love you will most likely have to adapt to your audience and do sales like everyone else. Might not be an idealist's dream, but it's how humans work. Doing digital stuff doesn't make fans or customers change how they value things. Besides, giving away almost anything for free upfront raises the bar for people to pay anything at all. It's how we work.
But me now is like "why the hell would I give that kind of money to some rando on the internet that stream games?". My patreon career is limited at giving a podcast creator $10/month and that was hard to justify for myself.
Still, he didn't give all his 1k to the same artist. Mainly because most artist launch at most 1 new album per year?
You can sell software development services, and your fan may be a graphic designer who uses you every time to build out the back-end for the beautiful designs they make. You do a good job, you're their go-to person, they are your "fan".
A couple animators on our platform have extremely dedicated fans making up the majority of the donation revenue.
Network economy matches userland economy.
We should henceforth refer to billionaires as "whales".
[0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with "whaling", which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first.
2. At the $1000/year price point, it's not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about "courses", about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people's vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?
If you take it a few steps further, e.g. online abdominal surgery courses, the point becomes more clear.
Those trainers selling courses aren’t selling their $1000 courses to the same dedicated group of 100 course crazy training junkies every month, year in year out. Maybe someone will sign up for a series, or for special 1-1 sessions for a while, but then they will have got what they wanted and leave. That’s got very little in common with my long term relationship with a handful of people on Patreon for a few dollars each a month. There might be a very few, very wealthy patrons that do support a guru for large amounts every month, but that's yet another business model again and also has little similarity with the actual relationship people like me have with the people we support. Wealthy people supporting gurus has been a thing ever since there have been wealthy people.
Freemium is actually being charitable, it's more like shareware.
You think people who currently pay will stop paying?
Like, it's some sort of virtue signalling?
If he's changed to that model presumably he doesn't care about his following but instead wants to make a living (or make himself rich, depending how things are for him).
Consider also the guest’s perspective. They want to teach a wide audience.
I noticed they mentioned an extra special interview at the end for paid subscribers. Seemed like a fair thing to do to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goop_(company)
Who has a basic misunderstanding on what exactly a vagina is.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/goops-netflix-series...
[1] https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/about/about-ramit/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramit_Sethi
When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.
Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.
The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.
Having trouble understanding how "private coding classes for kids" is preying on people's vulnerabilities...?
One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day's wage for a year's worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large can pay a day's wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that can afford the $100 in order to make a living.
That's not only workable math but something that's doable. The market can support the model, it won't always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable "day's wage" level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace.
A far far smaller portion of the population at large can afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It's definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it's more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn't likely to find 100 True Rich Fans, they're going to find maybe one if they're lucky. The market isn't going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.
The same people who pay thousands of dollars for self-help seminars and MLM schemes. You're missing why people are buying a product. All of the video streaming services out there combined won't help people get better at love or their career. That's why they're not willing to drop $1k on streaming services.
But a charismatic YouTuber who shows you how to bodybuild and gets you motivated? People will drop $1k on that per year.
I’m not sure I’d pay that for an online trainer but if there are probably things a step or two away from workouts where I would pay for an internet mitigated version.
But that’s not being a fan, that’s buying a service.
Problem is, you can only drink so many fancy starbucks coffees per day. There are many more content creators around.
What will the customers do when everyone wants a starbucks coffee per day? Pay one? Pay no one?
Also don't forget that not everyone is living in the HN well paid tech ivory tower. Even in the US, there should be a lot of people who can't afford a starbucks coffee per day...
Now this may be because the buyer is a true-believer or whatever, but equally likely because they're now able to drop a name around the dinner table, tell their friends that they're in direct dialogue with a 'name',... Status signalling, in a phrase. Tell me why some (rich!) people are willing to pay millions of dollars for a painting that looks like a couple of wet blobs on a half-plastered wall. Same forces at work, I suspect.
And its a steal.
Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother's consent and/or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.
But the idea of "whales" is nearly universal in all lines of business, and there's nothing unethical about it unless your business is already operating in some kind of ethical gray area.
If you are lucky enough to have customers at all, you will have some that spend 10x or 100x as others.
The most obvious example would be a neighborhood restaurant or food truck. Most people in your town might visit once or twice per year, if at all. But then you have your regular customers that you see a few times per week. Somebody who stops by twice a week is spending 100x as somebody who visits once a year.
Same with a department store. Most people buy nothing, some just want a pair of socks, and some will drop $2,000 on a new business wardrobe.
Something worth considering: if your business is one that inspires passionate fans, do you have any options for these folks to spend more? If not, are you kinda leaving a bunch of money on the table and hamstringing your fledgling business? Probably. Of course, this is something that takes ethical consideration and good judgement.
The whale term was invented by casinos wasn't it? Where there's no upper limit to how much you can lose.
There is no upper limit on the amount you can pay.
Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus volatile, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they'll replace him/her with whatever else is out there, and that's 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons.
Very risky for making a living, IMO.
Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.
There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it's like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it's more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you.
That's without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It's especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.
Best paradigm busting advice in business after "If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you'll have 5 milion customers" and "Always remember: profit is revenue minus expense".