Creatives have been stolen from for 20 years.
Videographers, photographers, illustrators, and musicians. Writers have been taken advantage of the most.
The social media giants call creative work “user-generated content.” This translates to “content from creatives that is free or inexpensive.”
This content we all generate on social media is given to the tech giants for them to do two things with:
- Sell ads next to our content
- Sell a subscription to access our content
This is where things start to get nasty for creatives.
The only question you should consider before you give your precious content and time away
Today a photographer emailed me.
“Remove my photo from your essay, please.” I’d gotten their photo from a site called Unsplash. He told me they had a big fight with the owners. I asked them more questions.
He said the problem with Unsplash and user-generated apps is there’s no transparency. Unsplash charges users $6 a month. But where does that $6 a month go?
I told the photographer I was a writer. He said the only question us creatives should ask is:
What’s our cut?
Problem: Apps that run on user-generated content lack transparency.
They don’t provide clear incentives. They don’t say how much of the profit they keep versus what we keep. And they keep changing the goalposts.
How to work out whether you’re being taken advantage of
Apps that use our content pay us in two ways:
- They pay us money for our content
- They clearly help us build our email list
They’re the incentives. Nothing more, nothing less.
What doesn’t count as payment for your content…
I once heard a platform say “Forget about the money and email subscribers. The way you get paid is by adding your content to your resume.”
This is gotta be the most harmful thing ever said to creatives.
I was a tech recruiter in my last job. I’ve reviewed 1000s of resumes. Someone posting links to their essays on their resume does nothing.
Recruiters don’t have time to read them. And saying on a resume, “Look, here’s an essay with 5 likes and one comment about the future of cats and dogs,” isn’t going to help you get a better job or a higher salary. It’s a lie.
It’s a way to steal your content and give you a false incentive in return.
The other hoax is when platforms try to pretend as if likes, comments, or followers are worth something. LOL. As my friend JK says, likes ain’t cash.
Followers, views & likes on a platform you don’t own mean nothing. They’re useless vanity metrics… and you can be banned and lose all your ‘likes.’ Try paying your electricity bill with likes.
An unknown payday or 100–500 content views doesn’t progress your life or make it better. Run, run, run.
The quiet solution that’s destroying the bad idea of user-generated content forever
Sub$tack is made out to be the holy grail. It’s not exactly.
The reason Sub$tack is winning creators over in the millions is because they’ve made their take-rate clear.
You post your content on their platform and they take 10% of the money it earns. No hidden tricks. No circus hoops to jump through. Full transparency. And creatives have all the control. We own our content and can export our audience at any time if we don’t like the incentives.
I predict over the next 5 years Sub$tack’s model will destroy the harmful idea of user-generated content.
Social media apps we’ll either switch to this new model or find themselves with no content — or extremely bad content (generated by amateurs), and a mass exodus of users as a result.
Bottom line:
Incentives for creatives need to be clear. No more B.S. No more fake incentives or vanity metrics. Platforms will either help creatives earn money or build their email lists, or go broke. Good. About time.
Stop giving away your content and being exploited.
What do you think about this new trend? Let me know in the comments.
