‘People Follow People’ and Other Themes on the Creator Economy

This week brought more moves in the slow death of the attention economy and the rise of the creator economy.

Twitter—the OG attention economy company—announced a flurry of new products to help individuals gather and make money from their followers on Twitter. It is too early to say whether the upcoming Super Follow product will get much in the way of usage. But it’s not too early to recognize the huge paradigm shift it represents away from business models based on selling eyeballs at scale (the attention economy) toward taking a cut of what creators on the platform are getting paid directly (the creator economy). As I wrote last week, I think the potential impact of this shift on the tech platforms and the media industry is grossly underestimated.