2024 Is the Year Creators Took Over | The New Yorker:

In each case, creators exerted their newly appreciated superpower to reach their audiences directly, without the approval of traditional media gatekeepers. Whether hippopotamus or tradwife, they are self-contained celebrity machines, merging recognizability with online-distribution capacity.

I believe it was Katherine Dee of Default Blog who said that eventually, trad media will try to pouch these creators and we’ll start to see a bundling like with cable. I don’t know which situation is worse/better.

Edit: yup, it was Katherine Dee in a post called We Already Solved Subscription Fatigue:

A lot of small time creators, and I’m including myself here, don’t offer enough value to justify even $5/month. Which is why I think for people like me, we’ll probably see a return to bundling or networks, in one form or another.

Now that I think about it, why aren’t more writers just doing this independently? There are no real technology barriers. What’s stopping five or so popular bloggers from “bundling” their work? Keep the price at five bucks with the hopes of attracting more paid subscribers.

Did I just invent the newspaper?