Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote

[Applause] hi everybody hello hello um welcome I'm so psyched to be here today maybe before I even get started can I just get a show a hands um if you're a Creator raise your hand let's see creators oh my gosh yes okay uh if you're um in the music industry focus in the music industry management companies labels okay great cool and then how about um if you're just in in Tech like anybody in Tech creater economy Tech okay awesome cool all right cool cool mix of folks here today um I've been thinking a lot about

the whole Arc of the internet uh and how it's evolved over the last couple decades and then how I think it's going to evolve and patreon's place uh in all of that and that's what I want to share with you today um so uh I started making music and videos and putting them on the internet right after um I finished College uh in 2007 and uh I made a ton of movies in school I also made animations as a kid so making stuff wasn't particularly new to me uh but I had just spent at the

time when I finished College 6 months and thousands of hours on a new record called nightmares and Daydreams I was living at my dad's house at the time working out of my old childhood bedroom and I was trying to figure out how to reach people with this new record that I had worked so hard on like even the cover that guy on the cover is an actual clay guy that I made out of sculpy and then I did a photo shoot with him and I got a great shot but then I had to use the

lasso tool in Photoshop to cut him out and this was before the mag glasso tool so I had to do that [ __ ] by hand and that took way too long but none of that mattered because I by sheer luck I happen to finish school right when this budding technology called the internet was going through a massive shift it was just starting to move from what people called Web one to Web 2.0 I'm sure everybody knows about this in this room yall are here at South by Southwest so you probably know this but web

1 was essentially a read only version of the internet in retrospect people call this '90s version of the web the static web it was like AOL where you could browse web pages and read the news but there was no easy way for people to upload and share and then in the early 2000s a slew of new companies like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter came onto the scene and YouTube's motto was Broadcast Yourself the whole idea of web to was that for the first time as a creative person you could easily participate on the internet you

could post and tweet and upload instead of just being a passenger and I thought that was [ __ ] awesome honestly I still think it's [ __ ] awesome it's so easy to forget how magical this is how special this is but this moment in history marked a shift for Humanity and for artists and creators especially because for the first time on the internet you could do more than just consume you could create you could reach other people and it was in that moment right here in 2007 when I happen to graduate college and finished

my record nightmares and Daydreams and I was trying to reach people with it and at the time my best bet was dming bands on MySpace and asking if I could open for them at local bars up and down the West Coast I sent cold Outreach to music venues to get booked and then I got in my car because I couldn't afford to rent a van and I drove up and down the West Coast United States and I played the dankest local bars and I sang my guts out and I sweated and I sang and I

sweat and I sang and I ate tacos out of the back of my car while my friends were all getting promoted and high paying jobs as investment bankers and I did that for years tour after tour and I'm using the word tour lightly here like there weren't people at my shows like like nobody came I had no fans on a good night there were a couple stragglers who wanted in off the street but I was playing empty bars it was so hard to reach people so you can imagine how excited I was when a friend

sent me a video of a guy named David Choy singing with a guitar in front of his webcam on a new website called YouTube and this video had like 300,000 views or something like that I couldn't believe it David was reaching people this phase of the internet had the potential to solve a fundamental problem for me as an artist I felt like I had to jump in and I did I immediately started uploading videos to YouTube back then no one else was showing the like at home recording process so I just filmed myself playing instruments

and then I layered them in the video with split screens so people could see all the musical elements coming together to form a song and it's funny because in 2023 this idea seems totally obvious but nobody was doing that back then it wasn't a fancy recording studio with millions of dollars a equipment it was a bedroom with an Mbox audio interface and a cheap version of a laptop recording software called Protools Le and an old Sony handicam that I lugged around with me everywhere that shot on high eight tapes and a bed comforter Hing on

the wall to dampen the sound and broken symbols that a fan sent me in the mail for free but I was making real music I was screaming my [ __ ] guts out and playing accordion and doing collabs with friends and it started working people started watching my videos and listening my music I was reaching people my videos started getting thousands of views it wasn't millions of people at first but it was so much better than playing empty bars so I kept doing it and by 2009 I had made 43 YouTube videos of my songs

and I was feeling amazing because For the First Time Of My Life I was actually reaching people with my work okay but the real beauty of this new website called YouTube the most amazing thing about it was that it had a subscribe button I only realized how truly special this idea was in retrospect but in my opinion this concept turned out to be one of the most important things about this new era of the internet what people called Web 2.0 the Subscribe button was foundational it changed YouTube from being a tool to reach people to

being a way to reach them and then build a following around my work the Subscribe button allowed people who liked my stuff to sign up to see more of it in the future and as a Creator it gave me a channel of distribution to ensure that my future work was sent to those people so it turned out that web 2 solved more than just reach more than just Discovery it represented the birth of the follower in my opinion the follow is not some handy feature of a social network the follow is foundational architecture for human

creativity and organization the idea of a Creator an artist or a community of fans around them who want to see their future work this concept the follow it's profound whether it's the following that I was building as a musician or a podcasting Duo who talks about what it's like to be single moms in a community of single mothers who finally feel seen and understood or a Science Education Creator and students who didn't previously have access to high quality education the follow was a system of organization for the entire internet it was a framework for the

distribution of creativity and communication not just reach but a past it ongoing communication connection a sustained relationship community and I learned just how magical the concept of the following could be when I did my first collab with my girlfriend Natalie we put up a video on my YouTube channel in 2008 that was a song we created together and it was different than my music it was way less screamy and insane but it was more active and fleshed out than her music so we decided to create a new separate channel for our collabs and we called

this new YouTube channel pomus but oh all right got some P fans in the house all right but we posted our first video the first PP video was actually posted on my channel and I had about 7,000 subscribers at the time and my subscribers loved this new video and at the end of it we posted a little link to the new pom channel to tell people about it and almost instantly the new pom Channel got 3,000 subscribers that's what a following is people see your new [ __ ] literally they follow you wherever you go

on the internet so Natalie and I started making more videos and more videos and within a year we got 18,000 subscribers and then in one video we announced that we were playing a show and we showed up to the show in San Francisco and there were 40 people there and oh my God guys I cannot tell you what it's like to have 40 people at your show after years of playing empty BS [ __ ] magic it was amazing it was so great uh that night was such a great night I feel like I I

I literally can like remember that another time um Natalie and I were filming a vlog to to uh you know put in one of our videos and my sister happened to walk in like behind us and she was holding a bar she's a soap maker she was holding a bar of grapefruit scented soap pomus means grapefruit in French and she said hey guys look I have Pomo soap and Natalie and I just saw that and decided to keep it in the video and we we put it up um in the video and our F like

oh my God Pomo soap we want to Bar Pomo soap and so we made another video and we said okay now you can order Pomo soap and we got hundreds of orders for pom soap um another time when USB uh thumb drives were starting to get huge we thought why do CDs let's put all of our music on a thumb drive um and so we did um and uh and we we loaded up the thumb drives we put up a video we said hey if you want to buy a thumb drive you can buy a

thumb drive now and we ended up um selling hundreds and hundreds of thumb drives we decided to sign every one of them because we wanted to like be really you know personal with our fans um and we it was It was kind of crazy we had to like figure out the packaging we had no idea how to package that many thumb drives um we my family ended up uh helping out um my my parents were freaking out dad's like taking pictures and stuff you know like it was like really fun it was amazing um another

time we decided to put our album on iTunes our first pom moose album back in like 2008 um and we didn't have artwork so we asked our fans like hey do you want to make the artwork for pom and we got hundreds of submissions for the for the cover of the new P moose album from our fans and they were freaking talented their artwork was amazing um this is the one that actually won Natalie and I just love this one so this is actually this is the artwork for our first album it was made by

one of our fans um another time we booked a show at a laundromat um that's a sentence I just said uh we we booked a show at a laundromat the idea was like it was a laundromat where there is a cafe and a laundromat you could go order food do your laundry eat by the time you're done eating take your laundry home um that was the idea of a laundromat and uh we booked the show like if you crammed people in there it held like 60 people in this laundromat um and then we uploaded this

video and this was the first video that we ever uploaded that went viral and it got like half a million views overnight and we showed up to our show at the laundromat and there were 200 people crammed inside the laundromat and then 150 or 200 people outside like spilling in the street cars were swerving around them um and like there was no stage like it's a laundromat so literally I'm playing music and there's a person like I'm like looking at a person's eye while I'm playing pomu songs like it was it was insane honestly it

was the first night um it was Mayhem I don't have any pictures of the night but this is what it felt like like it was just like insane um and this was the first time I was like oh my God this is going to work like having a following is amazing this is going to work we're going to be able to be full-time musicians um another time we posted another video and at the end of the video we told our fans hey we're uploading a song to iTunes we decided not to ever sign or kind

of enter the the music industry we did everything ourselves we negotiated our own contract with iTunes directly WE Post our songs directly to iTunes um and so we kept almost you know all of the revenue associated with that and um and when we posted this album told our fans about it online told our followers we sold 30,000 songs that month and we got $222,000 deposited directly into our bank account it was more money than I had ever seen in one place ever in my life I was losing my mind it was so incredible um then

then P started playing um shows and we started touring and you know hundreds of people started showing up uh and then many hundreds of people and then thousands of people started showing up um and uh this is my wife crowds surfing because she's a [ __ ] badass um and that's what I mean when I say that the Subscribe button is not a silly feature the concept of the follow changed my life it made my dreams come true as an artist it took me from playing empty bars to living out my fantasy as a musician

the follow is a piece of Internet architecture that felt closer to Magic than anything I had ever experienced in my life right around the moment that pompus was starting to work right through all of this there is this genius named Kevin Kelly has anybody heard of Kevin Kelly founder of wired yeah a bunch of people okay aming thinker and mind um he wrote an essay called a thousand true fans and his premise was simple it was that in the age of the internet you don't need millions of fans to be successful if you can just

find a thousand people who are willing to buy a hundred bucks of stuff from you per year that's $100,000 per year which is a pretty freaking great business as a creative person you just need a thousand true fans who really connect with you and believe in you and this is different than just reaching people it's even deeper than followers this is super fans true fans real fans call it whatever you want the idea is that there's this group of people that is your core if reach means people see it and follower means people want to

see more then true fans are the people who go to the shows and buy the merch and download the record and pay for the course and get the live stream tickets and all the things and this idea really resonates with me we had fans showing up to pom shows uh with uh tattoos of the band we had um fans literally making custom t-shirts of pomp uh posters drawings um artwork um cookies we had a fan do icing of my face on a cookie I ate my face we had a fan who made an oil painting

of me screaming my [ __ ] guts out um I I I learned HTML uh and I had a little website um I used this link release software called e junkie and I cobbled together like a little MP3 store for myself on the internet and I would sell original music and I was selling 500 bucks a month of my original songs on my own website with my own shitty thing that I made um fans were showing up to to buy things to be there um one time uh we asked our pomp fans to come film

a music video with us on a Saturday like show up to Dolores Park in San Francisco just show up and be in this music video and 50 people showed up they even learned this dance and and we shot this dance and the dance is in this PO video um another time we we uh we would actually always use this um software called stage it which was like a ticketed live stream software so we could play our songs people could buy tickets and show up live on the internet um and Natalie and I would just sit

at home and play these songs for 45 minutes and people would buy tickets and leave TI during the concert and we would routinely make like three grand in 45 minutes playing our songs it's like these are true fans another time Natalie uh raised over $100,000 for her record from just 2,000 people um another time we made a pom album and we went online on YouTube we put up this video and we said hey everybody we have a new pom album it's not for sale you can't buy it you can't get the new pom album the

only way to get the new pom album is if you Don a book to the Richmond School District and then um send us the receipt for that book and we will send you the P Moves album for free just donate a book super easy we'll send you the album in the mail for free and the Richmond School District ended up having to rent a shipping container to keep up with the packages it's like 11,000 books that got sent to the rich school it's like $140,000 worth of books um it was it was amazing it felt

incredible to see that many people show up for this that's true fans real fans super fans call it whatever you want but this was the concept that was rattling around in my head when I started patreon 11 years ago this is actually the first sketch of patreon um I called it my co-founder and he turned this into uh what is now patreon um and the idea was very simple it's like a membership platform where fans could uh sign up for a subscription payment to the creater and the creater could run a membership and get paid

for their work I'm not going to tell the patreon founding story I've told it a million times um but the company is now over 400 people 11 years in we have over 250,000 creators who have made over three and5 billion dollars on the platform which I think of as proof If We Ever Needed it that the true fans are there and the true fans are ready okay in the background while patreon was being formed building over the last decade the whole internet was again uh starting to shift and if you think of the '90s as

web 1 the 2000s as web 2 right around the 2010s there was a new change happening Facebook started experimenting with a new thing called ranking and I realize most everybody here knows about this but what ranking did was essentially it took the feed which you can think of as a list of posts from creators that I follow and it analyzed each and every post for how engaging it was and if it wasn't engaging enough enough Facebook would then take that post and push it down in the feed in other words they started ranking or ordering

posts according to what was best for their business this was actually great for Facebook it was the right business decision for them and their company and their revenue model but what it meant for creators was that for the first time since Web 2.0 my followers might not necessarily see my posts and this idea of a subscription started to break down if the person doesn't receive the things it's not really a direct true connection between a creater and their fans it's not really a subscription the channel of distribution is broken and it creates another problem too

around creative freedom because now suddenly my post has to be better than the other posts according to a set of criteria that I don't know or have control of or even agree with so instead of thinking what do I want to make what lights me up what what is the output that I want to create as an artist what will my fans love instead of thinking those questions now in the back of my mind I'm thinking what will the ranking algorithm favor and that subconsciously or consciously changes my creative output to achieve Facebook's goals not

my goals as a Creator and if it were just Facebook doing this fine creators would just leave and post somewhere else but it worked really well it was great for Facebook's business and people started spending even more time on the platform so the other platforms had to compete and YouTube launched the cosmic Panda redesign centering the entire company around watch time and Twitter and Instagram followed with rank feeds in 2016 and we only saw it in retrospect but now I think of the 2010s as the decade of ranking the decade when the original promise of

the Creator Le Community the true follow was broken for the first time I want to just do a quick aside here because I know there's this big debate in the world about you know chronological feeds versus algorithmic feeds and I don't want to make it sound like I'm a zealot uh on on either of the two polarized sides that's actually not the the takeaway here it's not how I think of it I actually see problems with chronological Feats because as a crater if if if it's chronological then you have to keep posting to stay on

top so I don't think that's necessarily the best way to build strong relationships either the the problem that I have is if if you're going to change that if you're going to adjust the way you you create a feed what is the purpose behind that what is the intention behind that are you are you trying to create a place where you can build strength of relationship with your community where your fandom gets energized over time where people are guaranteed that subscription where you get a direct connection with your community and your true fans is that

it or is it maximizing attention is it maximizing watch time those are two very different goals and very different ways of organizing your entire product as a tech technology company this one helps me as a Creator and this one hurts me as a Creator it hurts my community it hurts my business it hurts my creative output I I wish that it stopped there but around the turn of the decade a new company came onto the scene called Tik Tok and Tik Tok had a much deeper impact in the ecosystem I think anyone foresaw at the

time it wasn't just short form vertical video that wasn't it that's a red herring I think it was much more fundamental than that Tik Tok said we want to make the most engaging feed possible this whole idea of a list of your subscriptions forget about that in fact forget about the whole concept of subscriptions Tik Tok started from the ground up with something totally different called for you where each of these posts are chosen for me by Tik Tok instead of me choosing what's in my feed and this completely abandoned the concept of the follow

but it worked Tik Tok hit a billion users by 2021 and traffic on the internet started flowing away from the Legacy social companies and toward Tik Tok so just like with Facebook and ranking the other platforms had to compete YouTube launch shorts Instagram launch reals and Twitter launch to four you feed as well and within a couple of years this whole system of organization for the internet the Creator Le Community started to fade into the past I have really felt this personally as a Creator in the last four years especially my fans don't see as

much of my stuff anymore it's harder to sell tickets to a show it's harder to reach people with my new work it's harder to build community it's harder to build a business it's harder to energize my fans just curious for the creators in the audience are you feeling this too are folks in the room feeling this I'm seeing nodding heads raised hands yes okay I'm this is I just feel it What's Happening Here is we are in the middle of another shift and this is a big one if the '90s was web one and the

2000s was web two and the 2010s was ranking I'm worried that the 2020s could become the death of the follower I um got an email from a crater that I was spending a lot of time with uh little while ago about a year and a half ago and I got this email my heart just sank in my stomach uh can we get the slide up great um hey Jack uh I'm writing this letter to you hat in hand due to changes at Facebook overnight the traffic to my links in my pages drop by 80% as

such it looks like I'll have to sell my home I'm dusting off my resume and looking for jobs in social media management um if this is now more it's I'm seeing more and and more of things like this and it's not just happening to creators it's happening to anyone who posts stuff on the internet it's happening to Media companies uh look at what what's happening to you know Vice and and and BuzzFeed and you know rooster teeth's announcement a couple weeks ago this is a really hard change to navigate for anyone who's posting stuff online

and trying to build community and business um for the creators in the room I think it's really important to remember that and and to understand that um if you're not connecting as much as you want to with your audience right now that does not necessarily mean there's something wrong with you a lot of us as creators have this tendency to be like oh what can I do better and that's a good impulse honestly it's like growth mindset how is how can how am I contributing to this what can I do better um and and again

that I think most of the time that's really good but there is also something happening in the background right now happening it's it's a macro thing that's happening on the web that makes our jobs as creators really hard right now there a lot of smart people at big companies that are well-funded big media companies trying to figure this out too and they're having trouble with it too so as creators just know that doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with you here I believe that this problem is the single most important problem that faces creative people

today the weakening of Creator Le communities of our distribution channels to our fans this is the hardest most challenging and most painful issue threatening the present and the future of creativity on the internet so I want to be very clear about this I actually I don't think that this is going to happen I don't think that we're actually going to see the real death of the follower that's not what I think is going to happen I think the follow is too important to die I think it's too valuable to ignore I think it's too useful

and awesome for creative people for Publishers for media companies and I think the next wave of Internet and Media technology companies are going to Surge on this problem and try to solve it and it's actually already started and the incumbent social platforms they're not going to be able to fight it because their revenue relies on maximizing attention to drive their businesses they're being forced up towards Discovery towards reach personalization algorithmic curation these are the levers that drive attention and therefore they drive their strategies that's why there's a already opening up and why we're starting to

see a whole new set of companies emerge that look fundamentally different from the Legacy social landscape Discord and kajabi and fourth wall and gumroad moment which patreon acquired last year the courses platforms events companies some people are calling this subset of companies the crater economy I don't even think of it like that it's a fundamental shift in approach and the Hallmark strategy of the drivers of these businesses is the focus on deeper connections as opposed to just more connection ctions the true fan the real fan call it whatever you want it's the 5% of fans

that drive 90% of the community and business this is a direct to Fan business this is an ads business this is about depth of connection this is about maximizing attention this is about deeper fans this is about more fans and what binds this new wave of emerging companies is that their strategic focus is down here the next decade of creative and media technology companies will focus on building direct to Fan connections and Community strength as creators we'll still need the social platforms we'll still need those companies up here for discovery for reach we need that

but those companies will be one component of the many tools that we have as creative people to help us run our communities and businesses that's where the world is going I'm sure of it and personally right now uh I feel a a a sense of responsibility through this I feel a sense of responsibility because um I remember what it feels like to be a crater on the outside of these platforms watching the internet move in a direction that I don't agree with and that I don't like and that I don't think is good for my

community or my business I remember what that feels like I remember feeling anxiety I remember feeling fear I remember being scared of where that was going and what it meant for me and now through whatever Crazy Life Path I have been on uh as an artist I'm I'm now finding myself as a CEO uh of one of these [ __ ] tech companies and um I feel this sense of uh I want to help build the type of internet that I want as a Creator that's what I want to do um so I really don't

want this talk to feel like a patreon ad actually I I really hope it doesn't but um but I do want to give you a a sense of how I'm thinking about this problem given this seat that I'm in and how patreon is now thinking about this problem um and what we think our place is in it and what we want to do about it um and the headline is this it's been 20 or 30 years and the current version of how art and Community exists on the internet today I don't think is the right

version how community and art exists on the web I don't think it's the right way and I want to I want patreon to contribute to building a better version of how art and Community could exist on the internet we've oriented the whole company uh around this problem and we've been building a lot in the background over the last couple years but we made some big announcements uh a couple months ago about the next phase of patreon and how we're thinking about this problem specifically we um started as a membership platform 11 years ago subscription payments

but we have built a lot especially in the last three years in an effort to take a more holistic approach to solving this we built video Community podcasting better posting a New Media Player Commerce free membership which is essentially like a follow gated on an email and live and while this might look like a lot it's actually just three things media community and business and we're now thinking of patreon no longer as a membership platform where we started but as this whole thing the media community and business foundation for the next decade of professional creativity

on the internet organized around the concept of the true follow in an effort to build a better way that art can exist on the web that's the theory that's what the company is setting out to solve now um and in practice what that looks like is a a new set of products and tools that we built into patreon um this is our first foray into community and um essentially this allows fans to connect with each other and and build energized fandoms and creators to hop in there and talk with fans and um it's it's a

place for True fandom why do we build this what's what's the thinking what's the strategy and the idea behind this here's why as a Creator on the internet today I can get subscribers and I can get views and I can if I could send my fans to Instagram or Tik Tok and they can be there but what I've noticed is those communities degrade over time I I they they they don't get energized over time they get deenergized it gets harder and harder to reach those people I make a post I reach 2% of my audience

I reach 1% of my audience I lose touch with those people and there's no way for me to find those real fans those true fans the small portion of my fans that drive everything for me as a Creator the way we're building this and what I want as a Creator is a place where I can send my fans and that Phantom gets energy over time that Phantom gets closer that Phantom gets more vibrant more connected over time more enthusiastic over time that's what I want as a Creator that's the space that I want to have

as a creative person creators deserve a place like that that is important it's important for the future of creativity okay another thing that we bu is Commerce Commerce allows creators to sell a digital thing an episode a bonus episode a download a you know a course anything that you can sell online um any digital thing why did we build this why did we build Commerce because creators send lots of people to their patreon millions of people to their patreon pages every month what we found is a lot of those people are true fans they're like

the really intense interested excited fans but not all of those fans are ready to pay with a subscription payment in fact a lot of them don't want to pay a subscription payment a lot of them um and and why why don't they want to pay with sub well they either they have subscription fatigue which is a real thing or they're not in the right financial situation or they don't want to commit to a payment every month but they're still true fans and rather than having those true fans uh leave the creater we want to give

creators a way to start forming connections with those fans to build businesses with those fans and so we built Commerce as a way for the fan the true fans that aren't yet ready for a subscription payment they can now participate in the Creator's business and Community through this Commerce product and and meanwhile the creater can can build an awesome business along the way too the logic is very similar for free membership why do we build free membership what is free membership by the way it's a thing of this as like a follow gated on your

email so it's kind of like an email capture almost as a Creator um it allows a fan to follow your page without paying um in exch for giving them your email and it's the same logic as Commerce creators are sending their true fans Millions um every every month to their patreon pages and we wanted to give creators a way to reach that portion of their fans that they go to the shows they have the merch they have the Hat they're true fans but for whatever reason they don't want to buy one of the things you

have digitally and they don't want to uh pay a subscription and this allows creators to continue forming relationships with those fans and what's super exciting about this is we have found that about 40 to 50% of these fans actually say that they intend to pay the Creator in the next few months they have high intention to be a part of the Creator community and business and this gives creators a way to start building Community with those folks okay we also uh acquired um a live experiences platform called moment and um I don't even want to

call it ticketed live streaming because it's not it's so much more beautiful than that Arin and the team did such an incredible job building this building this place for creators to sell tickets to these uh live experiences and they can debut their work a standup special a movie that they've made um a special episode that they know is going to be a total Banger whatever it is it allows creators to sell tickets to that experience and then um have Community with those fans while they're all watching it together um and they've launched amazing creators Tam

and Paula and and and Bieber and they've worked with folks like Andrew Schultz and it's just an awesome way for creators to have that live Community experience and start Gathering those community members around their work okay so um all that to say the way we're thinking about it and the way we're thinking about this next phase is that we're not just a membership company anymore we're a true Fan Company we're a Creator company we're we're building a better way for art and Community to exist on the internet because I want patreon to build an internet

where creators have true creative freedom I want patreon to contribute to web where creators have control of their businesses and their careers and I want it to feel like fire to be part of a Creator Community I know what it feels like to be part of an energized Community I remember it and I have that same conviction now that I did back in 2013 when I started patreon I know that it is possible to build an internet where Phantoms Thrive and where professional creativity is possible for anyone I believe this in my bones it is

not a choice it's not optimism it's just deep down what I actually know to be available to humanity if that is the path that we choose okay that's what patreon is doing it's how we're thinking about this future and our and patreon place in it but for the creators in the audience um we don't have to wait creators don't have to wait for this uh over the last decade I've talked to thousands of creative people had my own creative projects I've learned a lot um and I want to share just a few thoughts about navigating

the the shifts in the internet um and and and how we can all um prepare ourselves and our communities for those shifts we and we and we don't even need to wait for any of the any of the tech platforms to catch up uh can I get next slide great the first um invest in those true fans invest in the the depth of connection not just new it's not all about new views new subscribers watch time up and to the right it's about depth it's about quality of interaction it's about finding that small portion of

your fans uh that are your engine that are your core and then figuring out how to reach them by the way sometimes when I talk about this creators uh think well does that mean like DMs like should I be talking to individual fans um no not necessarily that's not actually what I mean I mean find find in those people and building real connections with them um in in whatever capacity you have and um my team will probably kill me for saying this but I'm not it's not even using patreon there's like a bunch of ways

that you can do this right like you can do it via email lists you can get a Discord you you could get a patreon if you want I'm a little biased but I think you could um you could you could find um some other place where you can build that Community with your true fans the the point is find those people and invest in that community that is the engine that will drive your business slingshot your business through these shifts in the internet okay the second thing um make beautiful things uh there is so much

tension especially right now to make for the algorithm and I've seen the diagrams I've seen the charts I've even drawn them in my answer are you you know make for the algorithm make for yourself and then make the things that help you build a business and you sort of this V diagram the little center part and that's the sweet I've seen all that um and I get that but the gravity the gravity everywhere we look as creators today the gravity is just pushing us it's just pushing us toward making for other reasons than why we

set out to make things in the first place it's so important to remember to make beautiful things to make things that light you up and to make things that you care about there's a wonderful metaphor that I love um it's a business metaphor but it it makes sense for craters too I think it's a metaphor of the the business of the hot dog stand under the Eiffel Tower or the local restaurant and the hot dog sand on the afle tower um gets thousands of new customers coming through their hot dog sand every day right because

just tourists just coming through and they know they're going to get lots and lots of new customers and know those people come back but it doesn't matter because they're just always getting new customers every day because the Eiffel Tower and they just make hot dogs and sell them and some portion of those customers buy their hot dogs actually don't even have to be very good hot dogs right they just like sell hot dogs they know they're going to keep making money and that business works like it works it's an okay business there's another business which

is the local restaurant business where the people there just focus on making great food and having great service and they actually are not in a place that gets a lot of foot traffic so they don't get lots of new customers but everybody in like a 5 mile radius eats there twice a month and they just get lots of repeat customers because they've built trust and they've built depth of connection with those people and people know that restaurant and love it know they're going to have a great time when they're there that is a great business

you don't have to get lots of new and billions and acquisition and you don't that's not the only type of business you can build as a Creator there's this wonderful group of creators I'm my god I've fallen in love with them anybody heard of the YouTube New Wave has anybody heard of these folks seeing some hands it's this group of creators they make these wonderful 30 45 minute long form films many documentaries um about their lives and their struggles coming into the world and and quitting college and they're beautiful it's incredible they're patient they're slow

the films are long but oh my God the the the the the depth of the message in these films is incredible and they're building such a strong Community around their work such a people just love what they have to say and can't wait to see the next one that's a real business that's a real Community it's different than what we're incentivized to do everywhere on the internet but that that works okay the last the last thing wo that was loud um know what you want the hardest lesson I have learned as a creative person and

as an operator and CEO over the last 10 years is to know and trust what I want and to be true to that over time it's easier said than done um don't let somebody else tell you what you want because then you'll end up with what they want instead of what you want I think a good example of that is as creators we open up our our dashboards and we see these metrics on what success is this is a dashboard that someone else built for us and it tells us what we want and the weird

thing is after a couple years we begin we like start to believe that like our minds get reprogrammed and we believe this is what I want this is success and we chase that if you went back in time and you asked El Fitzgerald or David Bowie or Prince what do you want what's your goal as an artist what matters to you do you think Bowie would have said my goal as an artist is to maximize the amount of human hours spent consuming my work I don't know what Bowie wanted I'm not going to pretend to

but I can tell you what I want as an artist I can tell you what matters to me as a creative person and what I know will matter to me 10 years ago now and 10 years from now I want to say something that matters to somebody I want to say something that only I can say because of whatever experience I've had and my lived experience something that is uniquely pointed to me I want to say that I want to figure out how to say that I want to find that core of human truth in

my experience and communicate it eloquently and clearly and have it be true and feel true and have someone else see that and have that person think yes that feels true and it feels true to them and then I want that person to feel connected to me even though we've never met before in our lives but I said a thing that resonated with them and made them feel a little bit less alone because they felt like there was another person who had that same experience I want to make things that are Timeless I want to make

things that feel true now I want to make things that feel true in 50 years I want to make things that still feel true 500 years after I'm dead I want to figure out how to use my short years on this planet to find that kind of Truth and say it that's what I want as an artist and that's a very different goal than watch time that may not not be what you want as an artist and that's okay but the point is to know what you want what matters to you what are you trying

to achieve as a creative person we have this tendency to look outside for those answers I do it too this advice is honestly more for me than it is for anybody else in this room we want there to be a Yoda we want there to be a leader or a manager or a voice of authority that can tell us what we want because it's a scary thing to ask but that does not exist what we want comes intrinsically not extrinsically it comes from in here that's where we find it so as we navigate this next

phase of the internet as creative people as we go through these ups and downs of the web in its ever evolving state do do not forget what matters to you as an artist do not forget what fills you with pride to make do not forget your purpose for making things in the first place don't forget why you wake up in the morning and devote your time and energy to your craft don't forget what gives you a sense of meaning as a creative person and lastly don't forget to scream your [ __ ] guts out thank

you thank you everybody appreciate you being thank you thanks thank you thanks thank [Music] you