Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity on the Web

Source: Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote, SXSW, 46:55, uploaded 2024-03-16, playlist index 356.

Jack Conte opens by asking the SXSW audience who makes things, who works in music, and who works in technology. He then traces his own route through the internet, from a musician playing empty bars to the co-founder and CEO of Patreon. His concern is the weakening of the follower: a person who chooses to receive a creator’s future work and can become part of a durable community. Ranking feeds and recommendation systems have turned that relationship into a promise that platforms can quietly break.

Reach, then a following

Conte finished college in 2007 with a record called Nightmares and Daydreams. He had spent six months and thousands of hours making it in his father’s house, working from his childhood bedroom. Even the album cover records the kind of work he was doing. He made a small clay figure from Sculpey, photographed it, and cut it out by hand in Photoshop with the lasso tool. He had a finished record and no clear way to find listeners.

His first plan involved sending messages to bands on MySpace, asking to open for them in local bars. He contacted venues, loaded his car because a van cost too much, and drove up and down the West Coast. Conte calls these shows tours with some reluctance. Most nights he played to empty rooms, ate tacos from the back of the car, and watched friends take well-paid jobs as investment bankers.

A friend then sent him a video of David Choi singing with a guitar in front of a webcam. It had around 300,000 views on YouTube. The number showed Conte that a musician could reach people through the web without first persuading a venue to provide a stage.

He began uploading videos from his bedroom. He filmed himself playing separate instruments, then used split screens to show the parts assemble into a song. The setup was plain: an Mbox audio interface, Pro Tools LE, an old Sony Handycam that recorded to Hi8 tapes, a bed comforter on the wall for sound dampening, and broken cymbals that a fan had sent him. The work was rough in its means and serious in its intent. By 2009 he had made 43 YouTube videos, and people were watching them. Thousands of views felt like a workable life after the empty bars.

The subscribe button changed the nature of that reach. A person who liked one video could choose to receive the next one. For Conte, that created a channel of distribution between a creator and the people who wanted more of the work. He treats the follow as a piece of internet architecture because it organises communication around a person, an artist, a community, or a body of work. It turns a single act of discovery into an ongoing relationship.

Pomplamoose and the working meaning of a follower

Conte learned what a following could do through the music he made with his girlfriend, Natalie. They posted a collaboration on his channel in 2008, where he had about 7,000 subscribers. The audience liked the different sound, so they created a separate channel called Pomplamoose. A link at the end of the first video sent almost 3,000 subscribers to the new channel. Within a year, Pomplamoose had 18,000.

The numbers mattered because they carried people across the boundary between a piece of media and a shared life. When Conte and Natalie announced a show, 40 people came to a San Francisco venue. After years of empty rooms, that crowd felt like proof that the work had found a social form.

The audience also supplied ideas that the couple had not planned. Conte’s sister once walked through a vlog holding a bar of grapefruit-scented soap. “Pomelo soap” appeared in the video, and viewers asked to buy it. Pomplamoose made the soap and received hundreds of orders. When USB drives became large enough to hold their music, they sold signed drives and recruited Conte’s family to help package them. They asked fans to submit artwork for an album cover and chose one of the entries. The audience became part of the work’s material life.

One show made the scale of the connection visible. Pomplamoose booked a laundromat with a cafe that could hold about 60 people. A video went viral and received roughly half a million views overnight. When the band arrived, 200 people were packed inside and another 150 to 200 stood outside in the street, with cars moving around them. There was no stage. Conte played while looking directly at people in the laundromat. The scene was chaotic, and it convinced him that a following could support a full-time creative life.

The couple also sold music without entering the traditional music industry. They negotiated directly with iTunes and told their followers when an album was available. Conte says they sold 30,000 songs in one month and received $222,000 in their bank account. The claim belongs to his account of the period, and the source supplies no sales records.

True fans and Patreon

Conte connects these experiences to Kevin Kelly’s essay “1,000 True Fans”. Kelly’s arithmetic says that a creator who can earn $100 from each of 1,000 committed fans can build a$100,000 annual business. Conte draws a line between reach, a person seeing the work, and a following, a person choosing to see more. A true fan takes further action because the work has become part of their life.

His examples carry the distinction. Pomplamoose fans made tattoos, shirts, drawings, cookies, and an oil painting of Conte screaming. Fifty people came to Dolores Park to appear in a music video and learned the dance in advance. Ticketed livestreams on StageIt brought in about $3,000 in 45 minutes. Natalie raised more than$100,000 for a record from 2,000 people. For another album, Pomplamoose offered the music to anyone who donated a book to the Richmond School District. The district received about 11,000 books, which Conte values as much as the reported $140,000 worth of donations.

This group of committed people gave Conte the idea for Patreon. His first sketch described a membership platform where fans could pay a creator through a subscription and the creator could run a membership around the work. Conte says that, eleven years after its founding, Patreon has more than 400 employees and more than 250,000 creators who have earned over $3.5 billion on the platform. Those figures are presented as evidence that true fans exist and will pay for creative work. The talk gives no accounting, date-specific source, or breakdown of the totals.

Ranking and the broken subscription

Conte divides the history of the internet into rough periods. The 1990s Web 1 was mainly read-only. The early 2000s Web 2 brought YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, with tools that let people publish and share. The 2010s introduced ranking.

Facebook began analysing posts according to how much engagement they were likely to produce. A feed that once represented the people a user had chosen to follow became an ordered list shaped by what served Facebook’s business and revenue model. Conte accepts that ranking was a sensible business decision for Facebook. It also meant that a follower might fail to receive a creator’s post.

That break changes the creator’s work. The artist once asked what to make and what the people who followed the work might enjoy. Ranking adds a second, hidden audience: the system that decides whether the post deserves distribution. The creator begins to think about the criteria behind the feed, even though those criteria can change without notice and remain outside the creator’s control. The work starts to bend towards the platform’s goals.

Conte does not defend a simple return to chronological feeds. A chronological feed can make constant posting the condition of visibility. His concern rests on the purpose of the feed. A product designed to strengthen a relationship, give a subscription a reliable meaning, and help a community grow has a different shape from a product designed to maximise attention and watch time.

TikTok then pushed the change further. Conte says that short vertical video is only the visible part of its effect. The deeper change came from replacing the list of subscriptions with “For You”, a feed in which TikTok chooses each post for the viewer. TikTok reached one billion users by 2021, according to the talk, and traffic began moving towards it. YouTube launched Shorts, Instagram launched Reels, and Twitter introduced its own For You feed. The follower became one input among many in systems built around recommendation.

Conte says he feels the loss in his own work. His fans see less of what he makes. Tickets are harder to sell, new work is harder to reach, and communities are harder to energise. He shows an email from a creator who says that changes at Facebook reduced traffic to their links and pages by 80 percent. The creator says they may have to sell their home and look for work in social-media management. Conte also mentions Vice, BuzzFeed, and Rooster Teeth as media companies facing related problems. These examples illustrate his diagnosis, while the talk offers no traffic data or independent account of each company’s situation.

The effect can turn into self-blame. Conte tells creators that a failure to reach an audience may come from a large change in the web rather than from a personal failure to improve. He calls the weakening of creator communities and distribution channels the hardest problem facing creative people today.

Then he changes the forecast. Conte does not think the follower will truly die. It remains too useful to creators, publishers, media companies, and the people who want to receive work from them. He expects new internet companies to build around the problem because the large social platforms have revenue models that push them towards discovery, personalisation, and attention.

Direct-to-fan infrastructure

Conte groups Discord, Kajabi, Fourthwall, Gumroad, Moment, and Patreon into an emerging group of companies that build deeper relationships between creators and fans. He resists treating this as a temporary “creator economy” category. In his account, these companies represent a different organising principle. Social platforms remain useful for discovery and reach. Direct-to-fan services provide the place where a creator can build community and run a business.

He says that about five percent of fans drive 90 percent of a community and its business. The ratio is a persuasive figure inside the keynote rather than a sourced finding. The useful distinction survives the number: a large audience can supply reach, while a smaller group may sustain the work through repeated attention, payment, participation, and trust.

Conte frames this forecast through his own position. He remembers being an artist outside the platforms and feeling anxious about changes he could not control. He is now the CEO of one of the companies that wants to solve the problem. He says he does not want the keynote to sound like a Patreon advertisement, then explains why Patreon has reorganised itself around the future of art and community on the web. The commercial interest remains part of the evidence.

Patreon began with membership payments. Conte says the company has since added video, community, podcasting, a new media player, commerce, free membership, and live experiences. He groups the work into three parts: media, community, and business. Patreon now presents itself as a foundation for professional creativity, organised around what Conte calls the true follow.

The community product gives fans a place to meet one another and lets creators join the conversation. Conte wants a community to gain energy over time, while he says communities on Instagram and TikTok become harder to reach. The claim describes his product theory. The talk supplies no comparison between the products or measure for community energy.

Commerce addresses fans who want to buy an episode, bonus episode, download, course, or another digital work without taking on a monthly payment. Conte names subscription fatigue, financial circumstances, and reluctance to make a recurring commitment as reasons a true fan may decline membership. A one-off purchase keeps that person connected to the creator’s business.

Free membership supplies another route. A fan can follow a creator without paying by giving the creator an email address. Conte says that 40 to 50 percent of these fans report an intention to pay the creator within the next few months. He presents that figure as an internal Patreon finding, without describing the sample, question, or method.

Patreon also acquired Moment, a live-experiences platform. Conte describes it as a way for creators to sell tickets to a shared online event around a film, stand-up special, or episode, so that fans watch together and remain part of a community. He names work with Tam, Paula, Bieber, and Andrew Schultz as examples. The point is to gather people around a particular work instead of leaving the creator to send them into a general-purpose feed.

Conte’s Patreon therefore has three jobs. It holds media, gives a community somewhere to form, and gives the creator ways to earn from different degrees of commitment. He wants the company to help create a web where creators control their businesses and careers and where professional creative work remains possible. That is a company ambition and a prediction, not an established result.

Three ways to work through the shift

Conte ends the product case with advice for creators who cannot wait for platforms to change.

Invest in true fans

The first principle concerns depth of connection. Conte asks creators to look past new views, new subscribers, and watch time and find the smaller group that forms the engine of the work. He does not reduce this to private messages with individual fans. Email lists, Discord, Patreon, or another place that a creator controls can support the relationship. The choice of service matters less to his argument than having a channel where a platform’s ranking system cannot silently decide whether the creator reaches the people who chose to hear from them.

Make work that matters to you

The second principle concerns the pressure to make for the algorithm. Conte describes the force as a constant pull towards content that satisfies someone else’s distribution system. He uses a business comparison: a hot-dog stand beside the Eiffel Tower can rely on a daily stream of new tourists, while a local restaurant can build its life around people who return because they trust the food and the service. The first model depends on traffic. The second depends on a local depth of connection.

He points to the YouTube New Wave as a creative example. These creators make 30- or 45-minute films and documentaries about their lives, struggles, college, and entry into adulthood. The films move slowly and ask for patience. Conte sees their growing communities as evidence that a creator can build a serious business around work that the feed’s short-term incentives do not favour.

Know what you want

The last principle comes from Conte’s own difficulty as a creator and CEO. A dashboard tells a creator what success should look like through numbers such as views and watch time. After years of reading those numbers, the creator can begin to treat the dashboard’s definition as a personal desire.

Conte asks whether artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, David Bowie, or Prince would have described their goal as maximising the hours people spend consuming their work. He is careful to say that he does not know what Bowie wanted. He can describe his own aim: to say something that matters to someone, something shaped by his particular experience, and to make that person feel less alone because the work expresses something they recognise.

He wants to make work that feels true now and remains true decades or centuries later. That is a different goal from watch time, and it may not be every artist’s goal. The responsibility is to decide what the work should do before an external dashboard decides on the artist’s behalf. Conte closes by asking creators to remember what gives the work meaning, then tells them to scream their guts out.

Limits

This is a keynote from Patreon’s CEO, delivered while the company was presenting a new direction for its products. Conte’s personal history gives the argument useful evidence about what a following felt like in one musician’s career. The Patreon sections also function as product positioning, so the proposed solution and the company’s interests remain joined.

The video reports figures about Pomplamoose sales, Patreon creators and payments, TikTok users, platform traffic, true-fan ratios, and free-member payment intentions. It names no studies, datasets, methods, or independent records for those claims. The examples of creators and media companies carry narrative force, while the talk leaves their wider causes and outcomes outside the frame.

Conte’s forecast remains open. Direct-to-fan services can give creators more control over payment and community, while they still depend on large platforms for discovery. The keynote does not settle how those services will moderate communities, rank work inside their own products, divide revenue, or reach people who have never encountered a creator. It makes a case for preserving the follower as a social and economic relationship, then places that relationship inside a new set of companies that will have to earn the trust they claim to protect.

Further reading / references

• Kevin Kelly, “1,000 True Fans”, the essay Conte names when he describes the economics of a small group of committed supporters.