This reminds me of the concept of "Pareto distributions"...
>In the early 1900s, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher (but he was probably no fun at parties, so you got him there) named Vilfredo Pareto became fascinated by the ideas of wealth and power – namely, how is wealth distributed across society? (Interestingly, he did not start this work until his forties, so it is never to late to make a difference.)
>Ever diligent, he pulled data from the 1400s through his modern times and found the same pattern everywhere. Whereas people had previously assumed that wealth would be distributed in a flat, upward-sloping line from poor to rich, what Pareto found was in fact a hockey stick – a small percentage of the population holds a majority of the wealth.[1]
So basically, a small number of all the "individuals" account for a large portion of the overall pool... the same would be true for fans... there is a universe of potential fans out there... millions of them. You need to find the ones at the edge of the chart that are willing to pay - those are true fans.
Other examples:
>The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras.
So I think the takeaway is, focus on making those people that truly care happy. Don't try to make the 90%+ that are not going to pay you much happy. Make the smaller percentage that are going to be with you for years with large money happy... it is easy to chase short term profits or short term incentives... invest in the long term for those rare ones that find value in what you are doing AND are willing to pay for it.
Personally I'd rather have the larger number of people. If one fan decides to stop being 1/1000 of my income it's a much smaller worry than if 1/100 of my income walks away.
Whales are nice to have but any financial model that includes them is gonna end up focusing on pleasing them. With a broader fan base I mostly need to worry about doing creative work that pleases me.
(I am an artist, and Patreon is a big chunk of how my finances work; this is based on my personal experience of how much stress I feel when a low-level patron leaves vs. a high-level one. Someone else will always show up to replace the low-level ones, not so much with the high-level ones.)
> Whales are nice to have but any financial model that includes them is gonna end up focusing on pleasing them. With a broader fan base I mostly need to worry about doing creative work that pleases me.
Woah.
That was a beautifully put summary of something I (and I suspect many others) have intuitively known, but perhaps have never articulated so well.
Framing it like this helps to make it a memorable guiding principle in all strategic decisions going forward.
You've never heard the story of the embittered simp, who was giving tens of thousands of dollars to camgirlA. The simp, upon discovering camgirlA fretting about dealing with an overbearing nuisance to Reddit (but one that pays her entire rent), vengefully withdraws all support donates to her rival, camgirlB.
Oh, I certainly agree people with a small number of customers have to keep giving those customers what they want in order to keep them as customers.
I just think that's true for people with a large number of customers too.
If customers have subscribed to my patreon to see my artwork of scantily clad anime ladies, I gotta keep giving them what they want whether I've got 100 customers paying $100/month or 10,000 customers paying $1/month.
You don't have to care what people giving you small fractions of your livelihood think. You, as a creator, care, of course. But you don't need to care care.
I am of the opinion that every established Content Creator starts to care less and less. And is better off for it! And I am also of the opinion that George RR Martin/JK Rowling/Tom Clancy/Stephen King loathe their most hardcore fans while being paid to attend Cons. Inevitable.
> Whales are nice to have but any financial model that includes them is gonna end up focusing on pleasing them
I completly understand where you are coming from, but most of our historical art is because of "whales", so all in all I don't think whales are bad for art. I am sure Leonardo would have preferred not to be under pressure from whichever prince he was currently working for, but did his art suffer?
I am not saying a whale is required, van Gogh is a good example, but even van Gogh might have benefited from a whale.
This gets very tricky very fast though and not so simple.
Those historical 'whales' you're referring to frequently would finance art for reasons bigger than just their own fancy or pleasure, for political reasons, for diplomacy, for communication, for power grabs.
And then artists would have their own way with exerting their own power over the process as well.
Did Leonardo's art suffer for being done for patrons? Maybe, who knows? What would he have created if he'd had some kind of Renaissance-era version of Patreon, with a thousand people willing to give him one measly florin a month to keep doing whatever he wanted to instead of painting the heck out of portraits of rich merchants and their families?
As an artist, I feel that there is a sort of scale of priorities. Making money with my art skills is more fun than making money with any other way. But there are things I like to draw, and I'd rather make money drawing those instead of things I don't like to draw. And I'd generally rather make money by drawing whatever the heck my muse directs me to draw, instead of what I think is likely to sell, or what someone with a lot of money would like me to draw.
Different people have different priorities, someone who's willing to draw whatever the hell comes their way probably makes more money than I do, and that's their choice. I have an artist friend who mostly dropped off the net for a few years because he was doing lots of very specific fetish art for a rich client who didn't want it posted anywhere, and was willing to pay handsomely for that. He was willing to do that, I wouldn't. He also had a kid to support, I don't.
And... poor Vince certainly could have used a richer set of patrons, yeah. He could have used a lot of things. Possibly including some modern psychoactive chemicals. Dude was pretty fucked up.
Sure, you get more money by serving a few whales, whether those be giant megacorps you customize your SaaS for, or people willing to pay a couple orders of magnitude more than anyone else for your artwork - but you're gonna have some powerful inducements to change what you make for those whales' needs, even if those are directions that lose you smaller fans.
And when you lose one of those whales, it's a blow.
My story: I had 500 true fans for RailsApps at one point in 2014. They paid $20/month for my Rails tutorials, which supported my open source project. It was wonderful to discover that if you are passionate and deliver your best, often without a thought to monetization, you'll have fans. "100 True Fans" makes a case for capitalizing on that kind of popularity. But fans can be fickle and creators can lose their passion. Establishing a relationship between fans and a creator isn't the same as establishing a sustainable business.
The story hasn't really ended. I've traveled for six years in Europe, Africa, and Asia and met fans of RailsApps and my 'Learn Ruby on Rails' book everywhere. The tutorials and the book are all online and available for free (but long overdue for updates). There are now over 10K fans but I'm not attempting to monetize the interest. Now I'd like to build a more sustainable business that reaches more people. I still like Rails (and the wonderful Ruby community) but I'm diving into new passions that could have more impact.
So 13 years after the publication of this article... how many people in here can say that they "followed the advice" and successfully managed to accrue "1000 true fans"?
Are they true fans in that they would happily pay for anything you build, or are they customers who pay for this service and would think before paying for another of your services?
How long it takes to get to the point when such a project could bring real money to leave full-time job? How much knowledge someone has to have to build such a thing?
I teach roughly 100k students through online courses. Whenever I release a new course, I get ~1% who immediately purchase it. Not sure if it's because I tend to produce high quality material which adds value to this niche audience, or if they are "die hard fans". I tend to believe it is the former. At least I hope so.
If only it was that easy... I really like the spirit of the "1000 true fans" slogan, but I think it is harder than you'd think. I only see a handful of success stories in a big pool of HN ppl discussing it here.
i like the idea in general, but the title is misleading. to have 1000 fans buy everything you put out, paperback and hardcover, you need somewhere between 10k-50k fans total, a small percentage of whom will be the die hards written about in the article
No proof of this, but I imagine that (very) small fan bases have a very different dynamic from large ones. As a fan of a generally unknown artist, you're part of a small clique, you enjoy this thing that very few other people love so it becomes a part of your identity, you know that your purchase or non-purchase can make a crucial difference, etc. so you're likely to become a true fan even if you weren't already. On the other hand, those with only a passing interest in the artist's work are not likely to stick around because they aren't constantly reminded that you exist through mainstream media, recommendation algorithms or friends.
I'd go further than this. I know plenty of musicians who have far in excess of a few tens of thousands of fans worldwide, but couldn't possibly survive on the income from their music. Similarly I know some writers who's books sell in the low tens of thousands who could never dream of leaving their day job.
So it's about more than the number of fans, it's related to the perceived value of individual copies of the work (and how monitizable, sorry horrible word) it is.
So a fine artist working in the digital space with a couple of thousand fans, may well be able to make decent money selling prints and NFTs. But a musician, writer or filmmaker will likely need several hundred thousand fans to build a useful number of 'true fans'. A youtuber may need millions of 'fans' to garner the same number of regularly cash supportive fans.
the following is a quote from the article. the article is a bait and switch. in the title, it tries to get you to believe that, hey, something you thought you had almost no chance of achieving is actually within your reach, but then with this definition of “true fan” define it in terms of a 1 in 50/500/1000 of a population of fans in general, which are worse numbers than i would’ve guessed before reading the article. As I said, bait and switch.
“ A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.”
I don't see anything "bait and switch" about it. It explicitly states you need "1000 true fans" not merely "1000 fans", and the wording already makes it evident that having a "true fan" is harder than merely having a fan or follower.
The title already was clear, and the quote you posted doesn't change anything.
So, to talk in paradigms, it's not so much that the article is "bait and switch" but that maybe you were expecting a "silver bullet".
an article whos title translates to, in the mind if most readers, you can be successful with 1000 fans, and then suggests with the definition of the specific type of fan that you may need 100000 to have a thousand of the kind described, is disingenuous, literally, on its face. Therefore, bait and switch seems to me to be an accurate description. Also, the article makes that jump, but doesn’t actually state it straight out, because that would be admitting the title is just clickbait. Enjoy it, benefit from it, be inspired by it if you are so moved, you do you; but in my opinion, it’s trash garbage writing. it reminds me of the way people talk when they are trying to talk you into their cult or pyramid scheme.
I think the expected % of people paying for the entire output varies a lot.
It's pretty affordable to buy the entire output of a band or author if you're a working adult and they're only putting out a $20 release every 2 years - so probably quite a large fraction of their fans buy their entire output.
And subscriptions to magazines are of course commonplace (or were pre-internet, at least)
On the other hand, if you're creating youtube videos, it's normal to have a lot more subscribers than patrons. And if you're making a syndicated TV show, there might not be a single fan paying per piece of work that you produce.
You had to use the qualifier "essentially" and avoid mentioning the actual title of the article, to make your point though...
>but in my opinion, it’s trash garbage writing.
Whatever. It's an article that makes a simple observation: that in this day and age, there are ways to make a viable living with small-scale patronage, facilitated by the internet, direct payments, and so on.
It's not about being it easy to make it without putting the work.
i changed my last post to remove the word essentially, since at the time there wasn’t a reply button below your reply and I thought you had blocked me from replying or something. not trying to make you look bad and change specifically what you alluded to.
“ It's an article that makes a simple observation” - it’s an article that plays games with language to mislead its audience. to reiterate read the definition of true fan. are you that big of a fan of literally anyone? the true fan bar is so high, the article ceases to have meaning based on its own words. feel free to extrapolate your own meaning, which is what i believe you are doing.
>to reiterate read the definition of true fan. are you that big of a fan of literally anyone?
Well, I do have a few Patreon accounts I support, so there's that. As for $100+, I have given such amounts to several causes (devs working on something like Asahi Linux etc).
And there are indeed lots of people who are $100+ Patreon / Substack, etc supporters as you can see directly there. Not to mention OnlyFans, where the amounts can get crazy...
that's reasonable. patreon is the closest we've come to the richard stallman "press a button send a dollar directly" that I know of, and I really believe in that concept.
However, and this is my autism not being able to let stuff go, as I realize i should let this thread die a peaceful death, however, a few dollars split among many, doesn't make you a quote unquote true fan, in the definition of the article. I will now stop arguing with you, as you support developers with your personal dollars. Regarding only fans, i'm pretty sure that crosses over to paying for a service rather than paying for entertainment, although it does have 'fan' in the title so you've got me there at least.
This is the opposite of what Twitter wants. In KK's example you would have minimal social presence and not be recognizable by the general public at all.
Twitter wants to promote the people who have 1k fans to turn them into 10k fans and 10x the revenue.
The original essay was written in a time when the concept of a social media celebrity was unheard of.
That said, as Twitter is now shilling paid newsletters, I'm sure they'd prefer 1000 users targeting a follower base of 1000 followers, instead of say 100 users targeting a base of 100k followers.
It's a good path for an unusual enough person. I live in Vermont and can get by on a quarter of that $100k a year (seems insanely high to me), and used to sell DSP plugins for $50 each.
I put out a lot of plugins and make the case that if you'd have bought one of them per year at the previous price, to join my Patreon at $50 a year.
I also suggest that if you're using lots of the plugins, to multiply that, but I don't do other things to encourage whales, leave them as un-served as possible: they get nothing free customers don't get, and my energy goes towards supporting those who are too poor to do any of this.
I've got over 600 patrons and the model works. One thing I would note is: since you're no kind of celebrity doing this, you're operating with a strange sort of fanbase. I am just an isolated hacker who's been pursuing audio quality for a quarter century or more, and who's been desperately poor and so I make a point to support the struggling artist. However, this makes the social dynamic between me and these 'true fans' weird.
The 'whales' are predictable and I discourage them by not giving them special things: they want custom plugins and for me to build stuff exactly to their tastes, assuming their tastes are the only thing that matters. The semi-fans are also easy: they don't give anything and don't ask for much, they're just watching. But some of the true fans are throwing money because they've identified things about me that they have trouble contextualizing: they'll say 'genius', they'll call me 'sir' as if I was some knight, and surprisingly often they'll literally call me Jesus Christ as apparently that's their only model for somebody trying to give substantial amounts of stuff without demanding payment.
Gotta be patient with this. "1000 true fans" is real. But ask yourself, how does a true fan, a 'most intense and passionate' fan, act? Are you emotionally ready for making these parasocial connections with a hell of a lot of people (more than can fit in your house) who are not casual, not measured, not calm about their fandom?
If you extrapolate what in yourself or your project would elicit this kind of fandom, you're looking at a sort of private army dedicated to your values. It's worth thinking about what values you embody that you'd like to see multplied 1000 times and set out there in the world. Like I said, I have to be patient with mine: they're not difficult, but it freaks me out sometimes when they get super hyperbolic. If I was all about punishing evildoers, my 600 fans (being hyperbolic) would be a pretty fearsome army.
> First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan.
Definitely not possible to earn 100k per year from 1,000 fans through music streaming alone. Musicians earn about $0.005 per stream on Spotify. To ear $100 from a single fan, that fan would need to listen to 20,000 songs, or about 1,000 hours. There are only around 720 hours in a month.
Which is why having multiple streams is the the key. Once fans love your music, you can also sell branded t-shirts, hats, posters and whatever else. You could also write a book of your songs, a "photography" book of your album cover designs, tour and do concerts, etc. etc.
You don't have to earn the $100 profit from each fan from just the core of your 'production' - think more sideways.
Right now I earn from Book sales, YouTube, Patreon, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, speaking engagements, merchandise (I need to expand), private one on one consulting calls, etc.
'True' fans don't just stream a musicians music. They buy bundles where a physical copy of the album comes with a t-shirt + poster etc. and costs $60. They go to every gig + spend $50 on merchandise. They pay $25 to watch a live stream.
Nice context. I wonder if this same kind of sanity test would make posting music on Spotify an outlier compared to other revenue streams for monetizing art
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369257 - Oct 2019 (24 comments)
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007347 - May 2018 (7 comments)
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625906 - Nov 2015 (8 comments)
All you need are 1,000 true fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338957 - May 2010 (10 comments)
The Problem With 1,000 True Fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922919 - Nov 2009 (6 comments)