Creators, revenues, and why Facebook suspects I'm an electrician
The shift in algorithmic priorities doesn’t just disrupt the user experience, but also alters how creators connect with their audiences and directly impacts their ability to make money.
We published the first edition of this newsletter almost exactly one year ago, so as we get to our main topic today, let me throw some stats at you.
We published 44 newsletters, including this one.
The 3 most popular pieces in 2024 were
Almost 900 media professionals receive the newsletter every week.
We had ~10,000 unique readers throughout the last year.
In journalism, we often express our successes and failures in terms of numbers like these.
I used to write for and later ran big newsrooms, with massive audiences. A bad day would be only having 200,000-250,000 readers, a good one would be more than half a million. These numbers are not just about vanity, they have a pretty direct relationship with revenues, especially for advertising which still is mostly a volume business. An article read by only 10,000 people would have been a failure, let alone 44 articles with a cumulative reach of ten thousand.
Yet these 10,000 readers in 2024 meant something fundamentally different from the hundreds of thousands I used to reach. When someone (like you) subscribes to our newsletter, they're making a deliberate choice to invite our perspective into their professional life week after week.
While running major newsrooms, I was several layers removed from our readers, analyzing them primarily through aggregated data and demographic segments. Now, I can see exactly who's reading – fellow journalists, media executives, funders, industry innovators – and this direct connection transforms how I think about and create content. When I write, I’m not addressing an abstract mass audience or a fabricated persona. Instead, I’m writing for you, whose challenges and interests I strive to understand. In a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic distribution, there’s something profoundly powerful about the direct, almost intimate relationships we can build—connections that I hope benefit both sides of the exchange.
And just when I thought I had finally caught a trend early enough to ride the wave, I listened to Patreon CEO Jack Conte's interview about how the entire creator ecosystem is under existential threat.
Conte was talking about how social media is killing creators. His argument hinges on the idea that the (good, old) internet was once organized around the concept of the “follower”: users deliberately chose who or what to follow and received content directly from those sources. This model, he contends, was upended by TikTok, which prioritized serving content based on assumed user interests inferred from behavior, rather than explicit preferences indicated by following choices. As TikTok’s success soared, other platforms adopted the same approach, optimizing purely for attention and observed behavior rather than honoring stated preferences.
I think Conte has a point about platforms optimizing for shallow engagement rather than meaningful connections and my Facebook feed is a case in point. Ever since it decided I'm deeply interested in agricultural machinery and DIY electrical work (I'm really not), it keeps serving me videos of people processing sugarcane and using a heat gun to do something with wires. And like a toddler hypnotized by Cocomelon, I catch myself staring at these for 10-15 seconds before feeling the brainrot setting in and snapping out of it. The algorithm takes this engagement as enthusiastic endorsement, and no amount of "not interested" clicks will convince it otherwise. I eventually gave up and have largely broken up with Facebook, though this means I'm now that person who never responds to event invites. I believe the technical term is “enshittification”.
While this "engagement at all costs" approach might be a threat to the creator economy today, I suspect it will run into some very hard constraints in the near future. There are only so many hours in a day that humans can spend consuming content, even if some additional scrolling time will be freed up by autonomous vehicles in the coming years. Eventually, no matter how captivating it might be to watch someone dehusk a coconut, we’ll all have to get back to our lives.
The shift in algorithmic priorities Conte describes doesn’t just disrupt the user experience, but also alters how creators connect with their audiences and directly impacts their ability to sustain their work.
According to Conte, the creator economy's revenue splits roughly in half: one part comes from brand deals, sponsorships, and ads, while the other derives from what he calls 'direct consumer payments': memberships, one-time payment for digital or physical commerce, merchandise, courses, etc. He argues in favor of direct consumer payments, which he believes provide more stable income streams, as volume-driven advertising revenue is far more vulnerable to sudden swings in algorithmic distribution—a point he openly admits aligns with the business model of his own platform.
To place this in a broader industry context, consider the 2025 trend report from the Reuters Institute.
Their data has been showing a shift in the media business model over the past few years. Back in 2020, most media executives surveyed said display advertising was their most important revenue source, followed closely by native advertising and subscriptions. But by 2023, this hierarchy had changed, with subscriptions taking the lead. Even though the 2025 survey shows a slight dip in the relative importance of subscription revenues, it remains the most important revenue stream for the 300+ publishers in the RISJ survey.
This shift mirrors what Conte is discussing, and I think it reveals that the creator economy and the media economy are largely the same thing. Actors in both are slowly moving away from advertising-dependent models toward direct reader revenue. Both are competing for the same finite resource - audience attention - and both are trying to build the trust necessary to convince people to pay directly for content.
The Reuters report does a good job at showing how conflicted the news industry is about these structural shifts toward individual creators - with almost exactly as many media leaders saying this trend is good for journalism as those who see it as a threat.
To me, the convergence is clear and it will likely lead to more direct competition between publishers and individual creators in 2025 and beyond - battling for attention, trust, and revenues. But while some of these fights might be zero-sum (there are only so many sponsorship deals and subscriptions to go around) the smartest players on both sides will start to experiment with collaboration, some already have, like PressOne in Romania, also referenced in the Reuters report.
The line between "media company" and "creator" is becoming increasingly blurry, and perhaps that's exactly how it should be. After all, whether you're a newsroom of 100 or a newsletter of three, we're all trying to figure out how to provide a useful service to and cultivate meaningful relationships with our audiences.