The traditional media model was turned on its head by the proliferation of digital media. This is just a well-established fact, and some of us have spent our entire careers navigating as best we can as the ground shifts constantly beneath us — cycling through subscriptions, eyeballs for advertisers, pay-per-click, native content, paywalls and other models. The simplified dinner table version of this debate swings between “Why pay for something you can get for free?” and “You get what you pay for”. But both parties are trying to address a slippery question: what is the value of content?
Ignoring genre for a minute, whether you’re into podcasts or newspapers, fiction or biography, you’re a content consumer. Some of us like the physical and cerebral bulk of a tome — think War And Peace — and some of us are addicted to animal rescue videos on Instagram. You may make a judgment call on which is a productive use of your time and mental energy, but in the era of digital content I’m tempted to say: “Why bother differentiating?” Personally, I’m just excited by the shift that Covid-19 lockdowns illustrated, that our creators and creatives are needed and necessary.
In the 1990s and 2000s, artists were a totally acceptable group to poke fun at, apparently. I’m talking about the humanities crowd that studied general arts degrees with credits in classics and maybe history and appreciation of music as side dishes to their psychology major BAs. These troopers survived a barrage of “What does a BA stand for? Bugger All”, and came out the other side with a vlog and marketing career. They’re not tech billionaires, but they now monetise their podcast via Acast, or have turned a love of crafting into a content stream complete with sponsors. It’s part of what is now being called the passion economy, and has direct implications for the media’s ongoing midlife crisis.
When the outside world receded, we found solace in content. We consumed it voraciously. Netflix, for example, has more than 200-million subscribers and generated almost $25bn in 2020. It was as “unprecedented” a year for streaming as it was by any other metric. An estimated 100-million people listened to a podcast each month in 2020. E-books saw double-digit growth. Even physical books got in on the action: this beleaguered medium, whose pre-emptive death knell has been rung erroneously so many times, saw book sales grow 8.2% in 2020 — a figure NPD BookScan said was its largest annual increase since 2010.
All of the above boils down to paid content that is enabled by digital. Yes, even print books, because we certainly weren’t browsing bookstores in the malls in 2020. This is a high point in the e-commerce maturity cycle that bears some unpacking. Ten years ago, buying a book or CD online was seen as an early, tentative step onto the e-commerce curve. The implication being that we were all working our way up to buying our couches or vehicles unseen online, but perhaps big purchases weren’t the best hallmark of being comfortable transacting online after all. Or they were, but their utility as a milestone has perhaps expired.
A big purchase online is still a single discrete transaction, whereas making multiple micropayments possibly feels more like a feature of true digital transformation in our lives. How many streaming services do you pay for? And how often do you accept in-app purchases? Remember the horror stories of how Ms Regular Joe’s toddler rang up huge charges on her iTunes account playing games? In 2021 that just feels quaint, and honestly Ms Joe probably drops a bunch on Candy Crush packages weekly, in addition to her Sweat app subscription, the delivery fees she’s long since accepted as part of her Woolies Dash or CartRun costs, and the R200 or so she happily hands over to Facebook fundraisers.
We are firmly living in the time of micropayments, Venmo and content subscriptions — both direct and through platforms such as Patreon and OnlyFans. What do you get a friend for their birthday when they have all the gadgets and goodies they might need? How about a personalised message from their favourite singer on Cameo? A new app that’s just launched in beta phase —called NewNew — lets users pay to boss others around or make decisions for them.
It’s not yet in our local app store, but the BBC ran a feature on it this week, opening with the example of a content creator who let his follows choose his takeaway meal for him, paying $5 for a vote in his Chinese vs Korean food poll. Now you can thank my touchy-feely humanities background for my instinct that that’s just a sign of modern capitalism gone mad, and we can debate this using our Philosophy 101 skills.
This app, and the passion economy creators who literally sell, well, passion in the form of NSFW OnlyFans accounts, have reset the world’s tolerance for paying for content, rewarding artists and being a patron of content again.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.