In the modern Internet-based economy, it’s inevitable that everything be paywalled. The economy is becoming more and more built on information, and the only way to monetize information is to charge people to access it.
First, we had content creators who monetized their content. Then we had influencers who monetized their ability to influence others. Then we had context creators who took the masses of content and information and distilled it down into something contextual and meaningful. But now we have something new….
What? You might be asking. I’ll get to that soon enough.
But, back to the problem.
The problem is that people are getting tired of paying subscriptions (I know I am). People would rather do without the information, these days, than pay for it. Whats more, AI can generate such enormous quantities of information that people don’t really need to pay a human. So, what people have really been paying for lately is; opinion, expertise, experience, lived-context, the kinds of information that only humans can produce.
But even that has less and less value as the months go by. People just don’t care enough anymore to pay. It seems the content, influence, and context fads are… over.
And honestly, can you blame anyone? When every platform has a subscription, every newsletter has a paywall, every podcast has a premium tier; at some point… it’s enough. There are only so many hours in a day to read things and only so many dollars in a wallet to pay to read things. So, people are making choices. And what they’re choosing to cut is anything that feels… unnecessary.
That’s the real word. Unnecessary.
And that’s a hard thing to come to terms with if you’ve built your livelihood on producing information, content, or context. But it’s also an honest reckoning. The question is, then, what will be the next fad? What do people trying to produce something worthwhile on the Internet do now?
I think the answer to that is quality. We’re moving into the era of the quality creators.
Not just good, or consistent, or on-brand and optimized for the algorithm. But actually, genuinely, necessarily good. The kind of good that stops you mid-scroll. The kind that makes you forward something to a friend with no caption because the thing speaks for itself. That kind of quality has always been rare.
But now, it’s the only thing that justifies asking someone to open their wallet.
I would predict that the new benchmark for paid content is going to be content of real quality. And that is certainly going to narrow the field; because so few people can produce something of genuine quality.
But that’s not a bad thing. We will all be pushed to become better — at whatever it is that we do. The noise is starting to be drowned out because the market finally got honest about what it actually values.
Quality over quantity.
So, I’m not looking at this as a setback. I’m looking at it with the excitement of a creative person. The opportunity to think of new things and create in new and innovative ways.
Creatives are now being pushed to do their best work. And I, for one, am excited about it. The bar just got raised. And I think I’m up for the challenge.
Are you?
Cheers