The institutional-individual brand continuum

The creator economy as a term – like web3 and most board terms – is so vague to get tagged as mere jargon, as if the media business doesn’t have enough of that. But there is truth underlying these types of terms, and it’s important to my mind not to dismiss things before truly understanding them. Anything new is taken to the extreme before settling into somewhere along a continuum of how things were and how things will be. What’s important is connecting the dots and understanding what is a long-term shift and what’s a flavor of the month.

I believe the publishing industry is in the midst of a reset, part of a broader shift to primary-engagement media that’s more meaningful and dependent on a tight tie with specific communities. Narrowing the gap between the creator and the audience is critical.

It’s why I called this newsletter The Rebooting. One of the key long-term shifts that happening across many industries is a shift from institutions to individuals. That, to me, is at the heart of the creator economy. Institutions have had a very bad last couple of decades, and the loss of trust in them is inevitable. I’m often struck by how much of the “crypto narrative” – and the more I dig into crypto, the more I recognize how narrative driven it is since there aren’t many actual examples of useful examples of it in action beyond financial machinations – is driven by the lack of faith adherents have in institutions. Yet people like to support other people. That’s why Patreon has continued to grow – and why subscription dynamics are often driven as much by supporting a mission as they are about a quid pro quo for access to content.

Publishing brands have always been a collection of individuals (talent, if you must) who depended on a shared apparatus for a variety of functions, from packaging and positioning to distribution and monetization, not to mention technology, marketing, design, legal, finance, administration. That bundle put the institutional brand at the center. The constituent parts were more often than not interchangeable. That is what gives these brands enterprise value, after all. This made all the sense in the world when most publishing businesses were ad-driven. The shift from advertising and indirect business models to subscriptions and direct business models puts pressure on this approach.