Notice that most of these involve the creator teaming up with some sort of business person to get their work published and distributed. Now that the internet exists, it is much easier to self-publish. Of course, discovery becomes a challenge when there are so many people self-publishing; your signal gets lost in the noise; catering to a specific but knowable niche, or pander to broader audiences.

It is also still very difficult to sell things for money without going through traditional publishing channels. It is much better to release your main work for free so that it can be shared widely. Supporting your main work can be fan funding, merchandise, and advertising.

It is popular, in the traditional model, to invert your customer. For example, rather than having the audience pay directly for your content, give your content away for free, but charge advertisers access to your content’s demographics. So the real customers are the advertisers, and the audience’s attention is the product.

All of these give the audience a sense of ownership over the concept (whether this sense is reasonable or not is beyond the scope of this discussion) and allows the creators to avoid selling the audience’s attention. It also allows the creators to avoid the overhead (both financial and creative) of having to team up with someone business-savvy in order to distribute their work.

Important to note: audience-funded models work best if you can curate an audience that is engaged and loyal, which is something that I think we should be striving for anyway. They say that the best customers are the returning customers.

Things that I have found to be imperative as an artist:

The Extra Dimension is released under a Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International license. Feel free to use any or all of it as long as you link back to https://thenexus.tv/ted8.