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Hi everyone.
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So, I'm going to take us back to 2007.
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I'd just spent about six months
working on album
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that I'd poured my heart and my soul into,
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and it was getting about three plays
per day on Myspace at the time,
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and I was getting more and more depressed
when I started noticing these other people
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who were playing guitar and singing
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and putting videos on this
new site called YouTube,
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and they were getting 300,000 views.
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So I decided,
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I'm going to start making
some Youtube videos.
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And one day they featured a video
of my band on the homepage,
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which was amazing --
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we got a bunch of new fans.
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We also got a bunch of people who,
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I guess just didn't really like
the music or something --
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(Laughter)
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It's OK because people started
coming to our shows,
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and we started touring,
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and we came out with a record,
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and when I checked
our back account balance
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after our first monthly iTunes payout,
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we had 22,000 bucks in it,
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which was amazing because at the time,
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I was living at my Dad's house,
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trying to make a living as a musician
by uploading videos to the Internet
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which literally zero people
respected in 2009 --
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even the people who were
uploading videos to the Internet.
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And so for the next four years,
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I uploaded more and more
videos to the Internet,
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and they got better and better,
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and we made enough money
through brand deals
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and commericials and iTunes sales
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to buy a house,
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and we built a recording studio,
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but there was one big problem:
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making money as a creative person
in 2013 was super weird.
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First of all,
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the business models
were changing all the time.
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Our $58,000 of annual iTunes download
income was about to be replaced
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by about $6,000 of streaming income.
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Steams paid less than downloads.
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And then as more and more creators
started popping up online,
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there was just more competition
for these five-figure brand deals
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that had kept the band afloat for years.
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And to top it all off,
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our videos themselves --
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the creative stuff that we made
that our fans loved and appreciated,
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that was actually contributing
value to the world --
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those videos were generating
almost zero dollars of income for us.
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This is an actual snapshot
of my YouTube dashboard
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from a 28-day period that shows
one million views
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and $166 of ad earnings for those views.
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The whole machine in 2013
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that took art online and outputted money
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was totally nonfunctional.
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It doesn't matter if you're a newspaper,
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or an institution,
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or an independent creator.
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A monthly web comic
with 20,000 monthly readers --
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20,000 monthly readers --
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gets paid a couple hundred
bucks in ad revenue.
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This is 20,000 people.
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Like, in what world is this not enough?
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I don't understand.
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What systems have we built
where this is insufficient
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for a person to make a living?
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So, I actually have a theory about this.
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I think it's been a weird 100 years.
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(Laughter)
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About 100 years ago,
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humans figured out how to record
sound onto a wax cylinder.
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That was the beginning of the phonograph.
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Right around the same time,
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we figured out how to record
light onto a piece of photgraphic paper,
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celluloid --
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the beginning of film and television.
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For the first time,
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you could store art on a thing,
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which was amazing.
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Art used to be completely ephemeral,
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so if you missed the symphony,
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you just didn't get to hear the orchestra.
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But now, for the first time,
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you could store the orchestra's
performance on a physical object,
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and like, listen to it later,
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which was amazing.
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It was so amazing in fact,
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that for the next 100 years,
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between 1900 and 2000,
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humans built just billions and billions
of dollars of infrastructure
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to esstentially help
artists do two things.
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First, put their art on a thing,
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and second,
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get that thing around the world
to the people who wanted the art.
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So, so much industry is devoted
to these two problems.
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Oh my gosh,
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there are trucking companies,
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and brick-and-mortar and marketing firms,
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and CD jewel case manufacturers,
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all devoted to these two problems.
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And then we all know what happened
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10 years ago:
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the Internet matures and we get Spotify
and Facebook and Youtube
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and iTunes and Google search,
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and a hundred years of infrastructure
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and supply chains and distribution systems
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and monetization schemes
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are completely bypassed --
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in a decade.
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(Laughter)
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After 100 years of designing these things,
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it's no wonder that it's just totally
broken for creative people right now.
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It's no wonder that the monetization
part of the chain doesn't work
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given this new context.
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But what gets me super excited
to be a creator right now,
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to be alive today and be
a creative person right now,
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is realizing that we're only 10 years
into figuring out this new machine --
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to figuring out the next 100 years
of infrastructure for our creators.
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And you can tell we're only 10 years in.
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There's a lot of trial and error,
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there are some really good ideas forming,
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there's a lot of experimentation.
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We're figuring out what
works and what doesn't.
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Like Twitch streamers.
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Who's heard of Twitch?
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Twitch streamers are making
three to five thousand bucks a month
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streaming gaming content.
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The big ones are making
over $100,000 a year.
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There's a site called YouNow,
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it's an app.
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It allows musicians and vloggers
to get paid in digital goods from fans.
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So, I'm also working on the problem.
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Four years ago I started
a company called Patreon
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with a friend of mine,
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we're 80 people now
working on this problem.
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It's basically a membership platform
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that makes it really easy
for creators to get paid --
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every month from their fans
to earn a living.
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For a creator,
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it's like having a salary
for being a creative person.
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And this is one of our creators.
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They're called "Kinda Funny."
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They have about 220,000
subscribers on Youtube,
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and when they upload a video,
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it gets somewhere around
15,000 views to 100,000 views.
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I want you to check yourselves right now.
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I think when we hear numbers like that,
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when we hear "15,000 views,"
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and see content like this,
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we just snap categorize it as being
not as legitimate as a morning show
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that you'd hear on the radio,
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or a talk show that you'd
see on NBC or something,
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but when "Kinda Funny"
launched on Patreon,
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within a few weeks,
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they were making $31,000 per month
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for this show.
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It took off so fast that they decided
to expand their programming
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and add new shows,
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and now they launched
a second Patreon page --
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they're making an additional
$21,000 per month.
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They're scaling what's essentially
becoming a media company,
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financing the whole thing
through membership.
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OK, here's another example.
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This is Derek Bodner,
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a sports journalist who used to
write for Philadelphia Magazine
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until a few months ago when
the magazine cut out all sports coverage.
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Now he writes articles
and publishes on his own website --
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he's still covering sports,
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but for himself.
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And he's making 4800 bucks
a month from 1700 patrons,
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financing it through membership.
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This is Crash Course --
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free educational content for the world.
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This show's actually
on the PBS digital network --
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$29,000 per month.
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This is a duo sailing around the world,
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getting paid every month
for documenting their travels
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from 1400 patrons.
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This is podcast --
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"Chapo Trap House" --
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actually, since I screenshotted this,
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they're making an additional
$2,000 per month,
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so they're now making $56,000
per month for their podcast.
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And Patreon's not the only one
working on the problem.
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Even Google's starting to work on this.
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A couple years ago,
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they launched Fan Funding;
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more recently,
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they launched Super Chat
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as a way for creators
to monetize live streaming.
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Newspapers are starting
to experiment with membership.
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New York Times has a membership program;
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The Guardian has over 200,000
paying subscribers
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to its membership program.
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There's this bubbling soup
of ideas and experiments
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and progress right now,
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and it's pointing the direction
of getting creators paid.
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And it's working.
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It's not like, perfect yet,
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but it's really working.
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So, Patreon has over 50,000 creators
on the platform making salaries --
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getting paid every month
for putting art online,
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for being a creative person.
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The next hundred years
of infrastructure is on the way,
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and it's going to be different
this time because of this --
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because of the direct connection
between the person who makes the thing
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and the person who likes the thing.
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About seven or eight years ago,
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I went to a cocktail party.
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This is when the band
had hit our first machine,
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so things were really cranking.
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We had just made about
$400,000 in one year
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through iTunes sales and brand
deals and stuff like that.
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And this guy comes up to me and says,
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"Hey Jack, what do you do?"
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I said, "I'm a musician."
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And he just sobered up immediately,
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and he stuck out his hand,
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put a hand on my shoulder,
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and in a real earnest,
very nice voice he was like,
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"I hope you make it someday."
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(Laughter)
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And ...
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I have so many moments like that
logged in my memory.
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I just cringe thinking of that.
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It's so embarrassing to just
not feel valued as a creative person.
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But as a species,
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we are leaving that cocktail party behind.
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We're leaving that culture,
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we're out of there.
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We're going to get so good
at paying creators,
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within 10 years,
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kids graduating high school and college
are going to think of being a creator
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as just being an option --
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I could be a doctor,
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I could be a lawyer,
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I could be a podcaster,
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I could have a web comic.
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It's just going to be
something you can do.
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We're figuring it out.
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It's going to be a viable and sustainable
and respected profession.
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Creators are going to come out
the other end of this weird 100 years,
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this century-long journey,
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with an awesome new machine.
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And they're going to be paid,
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and they're going to be valued.
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Thanks, everybody.
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(Applause)
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I think it went pretty well.
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I want artists who saw that
to not give up --
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to know that we're getting there.
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It's not there yet,
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but in a couple years,
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there will be so many systems
and tools for them
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to just make a living online,
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and if they've got a podcast
that's starting to take off,
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but they're not able
to make money on it yet,
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that's happening,
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and they're going to be paid.
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It's happening.