Jack Conte, who is the founder of Patreon, gave a talk last year on the death of the follower and the future of creativity on the web. I can’t believe I didn’t see this before today, but it was a great talk and well worth your time.

In short:

  • The 2000s were about the follow.
  • The 2010s were about ranking systems.
  • The 2020s are about algorithms, and what Conte calls the ​“Death of the Follower.”

What follows that are some terrific thoughts on what creators can do to mitigate TikTok-style algorithms (which are now all over YouTube and Instagram), and what the responsibilities are of creator-focused platforms.

I’ve been designing a creator-focused media platform for a client for a couple years. It’s a massive project. It launched last week. (I can’t share a link yet; I’m waiting for the go-ahead from the client. Sorry.) It was great to watch this talk and hear some of what we’ve been discussing internally reflected in Conte’s conversation. 

Part of the problem is that this is a huge task:

  • A lot of creators are multifaceted now, so doing just video isn’t enough. Similarly, just audio is a tall order. A lot of musicians are on YouTube. Even podcasts will be often be delivered in audio and video formats. And a lot of creators want to live stream video these days, which is, from a technical perspective, yet another format.
  • On top of that, consumers want ways to stream the content and ways to download it locally (even if they merely want to archive the content, which is reasonable), and there are a lot of potential legal pitfalls to embracing either approach for a media company.
  • Similarly, you have to give creators control how they communicate with their fans. This gets back to that Follower idea. (I have a lot of thoughts on this, but don’t want to divulge any strategic discussions I’ve had with my client.)
  • And finally, you have to let creators sell what they want to sell, how they want to sell it.

So one could easily imagine a wide variety of features that need to exist on a creator-focused platform before that platform will capture the eyeballs of its target audience. Building all those features costs a lot of money, and if you don’t already have a platform, requires a lot of investor capital.

Patreon is in a unique position to do this. I hope my client can make a bit of a splash in that market as well.