Things are different now. People consume much more media, which is much more diverse than ever before. Thank population growth and the iPhone. Today, there are YouTube channels that only write video essays about The Simpsons, webcomics about engineering, blogs about crystal healing, and cartoon porn; you name it, there's probably a significant audience for it these days. The number of audiences and their sizes only get bigger with population growth, whereas an artist only needs a certain number of sponsors to sustain them, whether it's 100 or 1000.
The real obstacle is monetization, which primarily comes down to the business skills of the artist/producer, as well as competition between fungible alternatives (why pay $20 to watch a video when I can watch it on YouTube for free) and other external factors.
Things are different now. People consume much more media, which is much more diverse than ever before. Thank population growth and the iPhone. Today, there are YouTube channels that only write video essays about The Simpsons, webcomics about engineering, blogs about crystal healing, and cartoon porn; you name it, there's probably a significant audience for it these days. The number of audiences and their sizes only get bigger with population growth, whereas an artist only needs a certain number of sponsors to sustain them, whether it's 100 or 1000.
The real obstacle is monetization, which primarily comes down to the business skills of the artist/producer, as well as competition between fungible alternatives (why pay $20 to watch a video when I can watch it on YouTube for free) and other external factors.