After years of undermining the economics of culture, the internet is helping fund old and new art forms, often through subscriptions via platforms like Patreon
One secret to longevity as a pundit is to issue predictions that can't be easily checked. So here's one for the time capsule … Tweets: @traceyryniec , @perryhewitt , @mathewi , @colin_tobias , @puiwingtam , @fmanjoo , and @mims See also Mediagazer Tweets: Tracey Ryniec / @traceyryniec : Consumers ARE willing to pay for digital content. How the Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It https://nyti.ms/2nmG1Qf Perry Hewitt / @perryhewitt : “In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content.” http://buff.ly/2nni8rV pic.twitter.com/ra0Xys4Sti Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : The downside is that culture, news etc. becomes available only to those who can afford to pay for it https://nyti.ms/2mIfxp8 Colin Tobias / @colin_tobias : Incredible that an a cappella singer can make $240k /yr - renaissance indeed https://www.nytimes.com/... Pui-Wing Tam / @puiwingtam : We've reached a tipping point where cultural businesses can actually flourish because of the internet, says @fmanjoo http://www.nytimes.com/... Farhad Manjoo / @fmanjoo : People online are paying for news and the arts. This is a huge deal. My @nytimes column http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : People are paying for content again! observes @fmanjoo http://www.nytimes.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Farhad Manjoo's column flips the decade-old 'internet killed culture' argument just as publishers were betting their survival on direct payment: weeks earlier, Wired detailed how the New York Times was luring subscribers through vertical apps, chatbots, and live video in its digital transformation. The claim that consumers will pay for digital content was still contrarian enough in early 2017 to need defending.
The years since have treated it as a thesis statement rather than a provocation: Substack and Cameo opened livelihoods built on smaller audiences rather than mass reach, Twitch turned niche musicians' fan tribes into thousands of dollars a month, and by 2023 MIT Technology Review could treat willingness to pay as a force pulling people off big social platforms entirely.
First-order effects
- Creators on Patreon-style platforms gain income streams decoupled from advertising, so a pundit, podcaster, or comic can sustain work on a few thousand patrons instead of millions of pageviews.
- Consumers who once expected culture to be free absorb a new default — recurring charges for individual artists and publications — shifting household media spending away from ad-subsidized incumbents.
Second-order effects
- Ad-funded media companies face pressure to copy the model: the Times' subscriber-first buildout shows legacy outlets responding by converting audiences into payers, while platforms like Twitch and Substack compete to host the same creators Patreon targets.
- Patreon's own later turbulence — a 20% layoff of 93 employees amid creator-economy restructuring, plus overhauled discovery features meant to help smaller creators get found — shows the middleman layer itself fighting for economics even as the underlying behavior it enabled keeps growing.
Third-order effects
- If direct patronage keeps compounding, the policy fight over making Facebook and Google pay publishers loses centrality: Stratechery's argument that broken ad markets are the root of media's woes points to subscriptions as the structural fix regulators can't legislate.
- Culture's funding base shifts from intermediated advertising toward a two-tier system — mass ad-supported platforms alongside a long tail of directly funded niches — changing who bears the risk when a work finds no audience.
The trend: Cultural production is migrating from advertising-funded scale to direct audience payment, with platforms like Patreon, Substack, and Twitch turning small loyal audiences into viable businesses.