Let’s Improve Our Media Consumption By Paying Creators
By: Natalia Perez
Tags: Media Consumption, Social Media, Creators, Creator Economy, Social

TikTok superstars are ubiquitous and terminally homogeneous: mediocre, often supremely boring dancers who have been catapulted to mega-fame on the popular video-sharing app.

If you’re surprised that Addison Rae has tens of millions of fans and earns millions each year, don’t be. Social media companies reward creators who maximize the time their followers spend on their ad-supported platforms, and these companies play a large role in who gets famous and rich on and off the platform.

The popularity of stars like Rae and others on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat is due in large part to the lack of control people have over the media they consume, a control exercised by all-powerful algorithms designed to exploit users’ attention. The expansion of the attention economy has resulted in poor and sometimes dangerous media consumption habits among people worldwide. Building an ecosystem on fair compensation for creating value is key to alleviating this quagmire.

Creator compensation rebuilds the system entirely with good old-fashioned supply and demand, which enables consumers to control what they consume, identify content that aligns more closely with their interests and is more useful and valuable, and reduce the spread of misinformation.

The Attention Economy Leads to Poor Media Consumption

Today’s social media platforms thrive off of advertising dollars earned by commodifying the attention of users. The attention economy encourages poor media consumption among users through algorithmically chosen content, information overload, and the proliferation of misinformation. Free, easy access to an abundance of online content combined with the advertising-based models of many current social media platforms has created a plethora of dangers for unassuming users. These dangers are compounded by the growing amount of time people spend on social media; the average social media user spends 2 hours 25 minutes on social media per day and 73% of users on Facebook use the platform to get news.

Social media companies don’t appear to care about the actual interests of users, as their incentives to create profit don’t align with what is valuable and useful to users. They engineer user feeds to maximize time on the platform in ways that are invariably not in the best interests of the user. Facebook and YouTube have been found to recommend content that is more extreme and radical than the beliefs of the consumer, manipulating people’s interests and, in some cases, sending them down a long, dark path of conspiracy theories and fringe ideologies.

Furthermore, information overload, created by easy, free access to online content, makes it harder for people to select content and information, process it, and make good decisions with it. Instead, people rely more heavily on their cognitive biases in selecting and processing media. Their ability to make good judgments online is impaired, making them more susceptible to accepting algorithmically-chosen content blindly.

Troublingly, studies have shown that in the age of information overload, misinformation spreads more quickly and easily. Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) ran simulations that found the quality of information falls as the information load increases. What is supposed to be a free, online marketplace of ideas and content is instead inundated with misinformation and outrage, while the poor fact-checking and moderation systems employed by social media companies exacerbate the problem. While the cat’s away, the mice will play.

In short, the algorithms that determine people’s media consumption lead them to misinformation and dangerous content, and we are more susceptible to it than ever.

The fix? Pay content creators.

Creator Compensation Creates Value For Consumers

Fairly compensating creators could be an antidote to fake news, helping to curb the spread of misinformation online and making people’s media consumption healthier. The first step toward reducing the spread of fake news is to make it more difficult or costly to consume information, as research indicates that information overload creates fertile ground for the spread of misinformation. Introducing creator compensation — essentially making people pay to consume information and online content — is one of the best ways to do so.

As the cost of receiving information increases, consumers benefit. As information consumption is reduced from overload to a more manageable level, people will have greater capacity to carefully evaluate and process the information they’re consuming.

Paying creators not only reduces information overload. It changes people’s attitudes towards the content they consume.

When paying for most anything, people more carefully invest in what will benefit themselves, so it makes sense to assume the same for media and content. Since they have money in the game, these new customers are more personally invested and are more likely to fulfill their goals in investing in the specific product or service. Suppose someone pays for a course on Teachable instead of finding a tutorial on YouTube. They may be more incentivized to learn and master the class’s lessons to make their investment worthwhile.

On the creator side, fair compensation yields more useful services and content for consumers.

A creator compensation model incentivizes creators to cater to their audience and provide tailored, personalized services and content. Creator-led content aligns with more niche interests and leads to a diversification in content.

Currently, for creators to be compensated on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify, they must generate millions of views and try to optimize for the platforms’ preferred engagement metrics, meaning that, to make money, they must try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The incentive to appeal to a wide audience has led to a flattening in the diversity of content and services creators can offer on social platforms, leading to success for relatively mediocre dancers like Addison Rae.

Creator compensation would allow creators to earn much more money with a smaller, dedicated audience. More in tune with their audience, creators can offer fans personalized and useful services and content. The focus of many current social platforms is entertainment — keeping people scrolling and online for as long as possible — and the creator compensation model instead emphasizes solving the consumer’s wants and needs.

Inducing people to spend mindless time on the platform would no longer equate to profit. Instead, creators would be incentivized to make the most meaningful use of the consumer’s investment to earn loyalty and return customers. Building the creator-consumer relationship in this way will be more efficient and equitable by leveraging market dynamics, rather than relying on a complex arbitrage for advertiser dollars.

Freeing Your Media Consumption With Creator Compensation

Creator compensation engenders a system in which consumers are able to select and curate their own media consumption and online content itself is responsive to consumer needs and demand.

The current system of online content and services isn’t driven by market forces, but by efforts to become one of the select creators that social companies reward through sometimes opaque processes with unclear requirements. In addition to creators on some platforms attempting to monetize their content by reaching the largest audience possible, creators on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok aren’t paid by their fans, but by the companies themselves, further removing them from the needs and demands of consumers. When the audience base is so large, it is more difficult to respond to demand, leading to bland content. Creators can also be paid for posting sponsored content, which erodes their creative value.

Algorithms also ensure that the information and content people consume online isn’t market-driven by artificially manipulating their interests toward what satisfies the platforms’ objectives, often engagement. Platforms like Facebook push consumers toward more extreme and radical content because it holds users’ attention and encourages more opportunities for Facebook to collect data and deliver advertising. Other video-based platforms exploit biases towards wealth and traditional beauty standards and reward creators who fulfill these standards even if displaying mediocre talent.

In fact, TikTok was found to have urged moderators in internal company documents to suppress posts featuring ugly or poor people, singling out features like “[u]gly facial looks” and “chubby” or “obese” people. These posts would then be disqualified from TikTok’s For You page, which recommends videos to users. Thus, social media companies homogenize creativity, directly funneling unoriginal yet conventionally attractive and desirable people and content to users. In this system, niche and original creators aren’t rewarded for their work and consumers’ actual interests and demands go unfulfilled, as they are instead fed content that is most profitable for the companies.

If monetization no longer requires an audience base of millions, content and services will diversify to creators’ and audiences’ true interests. And in the absence of homogenizing algorithms, the diversity of content will exist on an equal playing field for consumers to select and invest in.

Consumers will be able to exert more control over what they consume, not forced to view what gets pushed to the top of their feed. They can search out and find content aligned to their niche and diverse interests and avoid any trickle-down effects that homogenized content feeds may cause. By controlling what they consume, consumers can build a media diet that is more efficient, meaningful, and fulfilling, while creators can bank a more reliable, sustainable source of income for themselves.

With more direct access to fans and smaller fan bases, creators would be more sensitive to market forces, including consumer preferences, again underlining the power consumers can wield when creators are compensated fairly for their creative work. If a creator begins promoting misinformation or toxic content, they would likely lose a significant chunk of the paying audience and be forced to discard and reject such content if they hope to regain and retain the lost audience members.

What’s On the Horizon

Already more platforms are beginning to compensate creators — Snapchat and YouTube have launched funds for creators, ostensibly attempting to compete with TikTok’s billion-dollar creators fund. However, these compensation systems rely on opaque calculations and only reward a small percentage of creators, keeping most of the platforms’ profits from the people driving them.

Paying creators fairly for their work goes beyond benefiting creators; it extends to benefitting consumers as well. Creator compensation will lead to healthier media consumption by reducing information overload and the spread of misinformation and allowing people to access content that more closely aligns with their interests and fulfills their demands.

If we invest in creativity, then we’ll see less of Addison Rae and instead interesting, daring creators. We’ll enable dozens of creators to earn livelihoods from the millions Rae earns today.