Nostr Web Client

You seem to have some very unrealistic expectations on what people should be paying for content. For comparison, consider the current mainstream model of advertising supported media. Advertising is sold through a variety of schemes these days. The most useful for this comparison is called CPM. CPM is 'cost per mille,' or cost per *thousand* impressions. It ranges anywhere from $0.24 - $10 depending on the media, target audience, advertising market, etc. A CPM of $5 is a pretty good (if somewhat arbitrary) starting point. At $5 CPM, a media publisher will get around $0.005 ( half of a cent) per impression. Most media will have several adds, so if we assume 4 adds per publication, that gives us a value of around $0.02 per viewer. Everyone won't zap, and I don't know the numbers, but we'll assume 20% until someone who tracks it corrects us. This means that you should ask for zaps of $0.10 (around 380 sats) to replace an add revenue of $4 CPM.

TL;DR - you can really only expect a value of a couple of cents per viewer. You will need a following of 10-100k to make a living creating high quality content.

Juraj 2y ago

Ad revenue is not a good indicator I believe.

Ads are expensive for most advertisers (when you calculate cost per acquisition) and cheap for most content creators. The main reason is there is too much advertisement trying to catch attention, so it is race to the top for the advertisers, but actually not much is sold.

Ads as a revenue model works for the top mass-market creators (think pop stars), it usually does not even cover the costs of (online) magazines.

Most content creators actually make money by either affiliate programs that can be targeted better (but not always - for example the endless VPN ads in podcasts), or by selling the content directly.

I don't think it makes sense to compare ad revenue to zaps as the only thing, because that is not how most content creators actually make money. Ads sell attention (in somehow unrelated way to the content), while zaps should capture the value created by the content itself.

If I create interesting content and get paid for showing you an ad for hair shampoo, it is not related to the content. The point of value4value is to value the content itself, not your attention around the content.

So I would personally rather compare zaps to how you can monetize content and not how people monetize attention, which sounds similar, but it's actually a very different business proposition.

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Discussion

Cpt. Charisma 2y ago

I might be wrong, but I think most Youtubers survived off of Youtube adds up until a few years ago. I noticed many of them complaining that Youtube reduced their cut of ad revenues and noticed a huge uptick in sponsored videos and referrals and direct product sales around the same time. If you remove the platform's cut of ad revenue, content creaters would do much better on Youtube ( I think it's around 50%).

Anyway, the CPM model can be applied to any existing content business model. You just divide total revenue by total views/subs/whatever to figure out your CPM, the work out how many people actually zap you to find out how much you need per zap.

After re-reading your posts, I think we are saying the same things in different ways.