The Creator Economy Is Broken and We Have Some Ideas
The phrase "creator economy" makes us a little tired, but we are going to use it anyway because everyone knows what it means. Here is the situation as we see it.
A handful of platforms got very rich by convincing millions of people that posting on the internet was a real career. For a small number of creators it is. For the vast majority it is a side hustle that pays in dopamine instead of dollars, runs on algorithms they do not control, and can disappear overnight if a feed change pushes them off the cliff. The platform takes most of the upside. The creator takes most of the risk.
Meanwhile the people who actually love the creator's work, the audience, get treated as a number on a dashboard. They subscribe and the creator never knows their name. They show up every day and they get served ads against the content they came for. The relationship between creator and fan, which is the only thing that has ever mattered in any creative medium ever, is mediated by software that is optimized for someone else.
We think this is bad. We are not the only ones. But we have some specific ideas about what to do.
Direct relationships
The most valuable thing a creator has is the trust of the people who love their work. Every platform that comes between that creator and that audience, by deciding who sees what and when, is taking a piece of that trust and converting it into ad revenue.
World wants to be the opposite of that. When you follow someone on World, you actually see the things they post, in the order they posted them, with no algorithm deciding you would rather see something else. When a creator wants to message their community, the community gets the message.
Ownership of the audience
If you build an audience on a platform and the platform gets bought, sold, banned in your country, or quietly demoted because of a policy change, you lose the audience. We want creators on World to be able to export their followers, their content, and their communities at any time, for any reason, without asking permission. Your audience is your audience.
Money that is actually money
Tipping. Subscriptions. One time purchases. Merch links. Eventually, native marketplaces. We are working through the right rollout, but the principle is simple. If a creator on World makes a thousand dollars from their fans, the creator should keep close to all of it. We will charge what we need to keep the lights on and not a cent more. That is not a marketing line, that is a design constraint.
Community as the unit
A lot of what people call "creator content" is actually community content. The creator starts a conversation and the community finishes it. The fan art, the inside jokes, the shared language, the new friends. World is being built around the idea that communities are the real product and creators are the people who tend the garden. Both should benefit when the garden grows.
Small is the new big
The platforms have spent a decade telling everyone that bigger is better. Bigger reach, bigger numbers, bigger funnels. We think the most interesting creative work happening online right now is happening at small scale. A few hundred people who actually care about the same thing. A newsletter with eight hundred readers who all reply. A Discord with sixty members who hang out every night.
World is being built for those scales, not against them. You should be able to make a living, or just make something meaningful, with an audience of a few thousand people who love what you do. You should not have to chase a million followers to be allowed to matter.
What this looks like in practice
Some of this is in the product today. Some of it is on the roadmap for the next quarter. Some of it is further out and we are still figuring out the right shape.
What we can tell you is that every roadmap decision we make goes through one filter. Does this make the relationship between creators and the people who love them stronger, or does it put more software in between them. If the answer is the second one, we do not ship it.
The creator economy is not actually broken because the technology is bad. It is broken because the incentives are pointed the wrong way. We are trying to point them the right way and see what happens.