How “The Startup” Whitewashes the Exploitation of Content Creators

The Startup’s hype as covert PR for neofeudal tech giants

“The Startup” is one of the most popular online publications for freelance writers, judging from its 750K followers. But allow me to ask you a deceptively simple question: What is that publication?

If you think The Startup is meant to help digital content creators succeed as entrepreneurs, you’re mistaken, although it’s clear where you got that idea, namely from the publication’s self-image.

The Startup’s Boosterism for the Creator Economy

Have a look at The Startup’s submission guidelines, and you’ll see that the website has rebranded itself to focus on what it treats as an ongoing revolution: “From their little desk in their little rooms from the middle of nowhere, creators are taking over the world,” the editors say.

This is happening across all media, say the editors, including in text, audio, images, and video. Thus, “Some creators run widely profitable writing businesses, while others are busy building their empires through newsletters, podcasts, self-published books, online courses, or Youtube/TikTok/Clubhouse channels.” Perhaps that’s why ‘It’s no wonder that news like “X company acquired Y newsletter for $7-figure” keeps popping up.’

In short, the editors say, “The rise of the creator economy (and the upcoming generation of individual entrepreneurs it empowers) proves that you don’t need a company or an army of employees to be a business.” Thus, the editors emphasize, “With Start it up, we now prioritize stories that help today’s creators get smarter at building their thing.”

Instead of focussing on “traditional ways of building a business” or on tech startups, The Startup wants to encourage creators as part of this “creator economy.” This is because, as the guidelines once again emphasize, “building a tech startup is no longer the primary way to build a business. Individual creators are taking over, without needing an office space or a hefty marketing budget. From their little desk in their little room from the middle of nowhere, they are creating content and products that generate more business than by those companies with an army of employees.”

All clear now on what The Startup says it’s about? Good, now let’s see what The Startup really is.

The Reality of the Creator Economy

Perhaps you’re ahead of the curve and you’ve done a little googling on the creator economy. Or perhaps you’re one of those content creators so you have firsthand experience of the matter, and you suspect that something’s not adding up here.

See for example this Forbes article which starts off celebrating the promise of social media platforms. The promise is that by cutting out middlemen and physical limitations, the internet will enable creators to flourish. More than 50 million people around the world, says the author, consider themselves creators, and Gen Z and millennials prefer the creativity and freedom of having such flexible work hours (the insinuation being that they’re undisciplined).

Moreover, “over 2 million creators make six figures or more on YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram, and sponsored influencers are worth over $8 billion. This number is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2022.” And Non-fungible tokens empower online creators by cutting down on piracy of their content.

Then the article begins to overshadow that rosy outlook. Along with blockchains, NFTs can be hacked and they’re disastrous for the environment. More importantly,

The problem with many creator-focused platforms or monetization tools is that they reward very few…The reality is that platforms like Twitch, Nifty Gateway, etc., heavily reward their biggest creators in order to incentivize the general public to participate, creating the network effects that investors love so much. Creators then spend their time and energy trying to build followings, and more often than not they make $85 instead of millions.

For example, “96.5% of YouTube accounts fail to generate above the poverty line ($12,140), and only 3% of accounts generate more than $16,000 despite averaging over 1.4 million views per video.”

A 2020 Harvard Business Review deep dive into the reality of the so-called creator economy provides some more examples of how this online economy is closer to the perverse ideal of the neofeudal travesty. You may recognize that travesty from the meme about the richest “one percent” versus everyone else. In the real economy, there’s still a middle class, however precarious it might be. In the digital world, there’s not even a precarious middle ground, and it’s winner-take-all.

So roughly the top one percent of creators on these platforms have made millions and their spectacular success draws in the less lucky or less talented creators who strive to replicate that success. The bottom 99 make minimum wage at best, and most make far less than that. As the HBR author explains,

The current creator landscape more closely resembles an economy in which wealth is concentrated at the top. On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017. On Spotify, artists need 3.5 million streams per year to achieve the annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker of $15,080, a fact that drives most musicians to supplement their earnings with touring and merchandise. In contrast, in America in 2016, 52% of adults lived in middle income households, with incomes ranging from $48,500 to $145,500.

Indeed, 98.6% of artists on Spotify “made just $36 per artist per quarter.”

The Startup’s Subterfuge

Let’s return, then, to The Startup’s boosterism, and try to determine whether the editors are merely ignorant of this sad reality or whether they understand it and are dancing around it for a reason we’ll have to identify.

Are creators “taking over the world,” as the submission guidelines declare? That statement is vague to the point of being meaningless. Supervillains in comic books or in James Bond movies take over the world, so the phrase here can be only a euphemism.

The Startup’s editors say the content creators “continue to build trust with their niches” on various digital media platforms. That’s true, but it evidently doesn’t mean you can earn a living from doing so. Then the editors make that curious statement that begins to look more like a lie by omission: ‘It’s no wonder that news like “X company acquired Y newsletter for $7-figure” keeps popping up.’

These miraculous success stories do keep “popping up,” thanks in part to sensationalist publications like The Startup. But the idea of something “popping up” is consistent with the thing’s popping up only now and again. Technically, if success stories only keep popping up, those stories may hardly represent the experience of most people in the field. Thus, The Startup’s language here looks like a dodge of a truth that it understand but that it wants to hide because this truth is bad for its business.

Even talk of “the rise of the creator economy” is ambiguous because the existence of this economy doesn’t mean that creators are being rewarded for their participation in it. You could just as easily have spoken of medieval feudalism as “the rise of the peasant economy.” Would that mean it was good to be a peasant?

The Startup says, “We are moving away from traditional ways of building a business.” Notice again the careful vagueness of that language, as though the editors were advertisers trying to sell a faulty product.

Couldn’t we just as easily say we’re moving away from capitalism, from having to settle for our mere organic bodies, or from a time when life gets to exist on this planet? Sure, those destinations of a revolutionary new way of organizing society, of a transhuman utopia, or of the extinction of all life may be thousands or millions of years in the future. But it would still be true to say we’re “moving away from” one thing and towards those other, remote things. Everything is in flux, so The Startup’s claim here isn’t as enlightening as it might seem at first glance.

The clincher, though, is The Startup’s statement that these creators, working from “their little room from the middle of nowhere…are creating content and products that generate more business than by those companies with an army of employees” (my emphasis).

That language is just subterfuge. The wording is careful enough to avoid outright lying, while still managing to hide the facts that undermine The Startup’s hype for the creator economy. Sure, that economy may be generating more business than old-fashioned companies in the real economy (but likely not more than the financial sector). But notice how the editors avoid saying what you might expect them to say, that the content creators are raking in the bulk of the profits from all of that “business.”

Evidently, the tech companies that support the creators’ platforms, especially monopolies like Google and Facebook are taking down the lion’s share of the profits, doling out just enough enviable artist success stories to sustain pipe dreams for the other 99 percent of content creators.

The Startup’s Hype is Corporate Propaganda

What, then, is The Startup? What is that publication? It’s not what it seems to be. The Startup is set up as propaganda for the creator economy. Contrary to its deceptive rhetoric, the publication evidently means to speak on behalf not of creators but of the main profiteers who alone have the incentive to hide the fact that this creator economy is a neofeudal enterprise rather than a progressive one.

The myth The Startup wishes to perpetuate is clear from the question its submission guidelines say all its prospective writers should ask themselves: “Does this draft help individual entrepreneurs/creators get smarter at building their thing?” That makes it seem like The Startup is on the side of creators, that this publication is intended to help them “build their thing.” And you can certainly find thousand of articles there that promote this or that strategy for building your thing.

But The Startup leaves it to the reader to presume that if you build it, they will come. Anyone can talk about how to be a better artist or how to start a company. But unless the political and economic structures that cause the vast power inequalities are changed, talk of “empowering” creators by encouraging them to keep plugging away is worse than hot air. This boosterism would be like the medieval Catholic Church’s talk of the imminent second coming of Jesus, which kept the peasants’ spirits up as they toiled to enrich their lords.

Even The Startup’s reference to the empowerment of creators is shifty. The editors say (with my emphasis), “The rise of the creator economy (and the upcoming generation of individual entrepreneurs it empowers)” proves that you don’t need a traditional company.

Once again, this mythical generation of creative beneficiaries is “upcoming,” lying just around the corner like Jesus’s return which can always be pushed further into the future as the propagandistic needs may be. But The Startup is careful to avoid saying that the present generation of content creators is empowered by the digital platforms. So the editors know better, which means they must view their publication as essentially a fraud.

Covert Public Relations for Neofeudal Tech Giants

There’s no mention of the gig economy in those submission guidelines, which might seem strange because the creator economy is part of the gig one. Most content creators are either broke and dependent on handouts from their parents to get by or they have noncreative day jobs and are only doing what they love on the side, freelancing as a gig to earn a little extra money.

As Statista says, “The gig economy does not only consist of people who exclusively work gig jobs, as the majority of gig economy participants have a full-time position in addition to their gig work.” It follows from the fact that most content creators make less than minimum wage that if they’re getting by at all on their own, they’re involved in some other line of work.

The gig economy, too, is hardly something to cheer. What it means, after all, is that, due to the automation of labour, higher productivity, and the loss of unions in countries like the US, many workers can’t survive on just their day job. They take multiple jobs to get by, and those “jobs” offer few if any benefits and are precarious. A gig isn’t really a job in the middleclass sense. You benefit from the freedom of being your own boss and from the attempt to live your dream. But you also suffer from the sobering truth that for almost everyone, dreams aren’t real.

The Startup promotes itself as being on the side of creators, but in that case shouldn’t we be inclined to ask why that publication hasn’t rebranded itself to promote, rather, unionization, electoral reform in the US, or antitrust enforcement against the tech monopolies? Wouldn’t such political reforms correct the structural power imbalance that makes the real creator economy a travesty? Isn’t hype that leaves out such political remedies just so much PR on behalf of traditional (not revolutionary) corporate behemoths that are exploiting (not empowering) most content creators?

To be sure, you can find some articles on The Startup about tech monopolies, unions, and the problems with the gig economy. But those are drowned out by banal listicles and by optimistic takes on how to get ahead in the so-called “creator economy.”

And judging from the rebranding in their submission guidelines, the Startup editors’ view of their mission is duplicitous. They say they’re publishing on behalf of content creators, to help them succeed, but the editors don’t say they plan to address how the creator economy works systematically against most creators. That can’t be just an oversight.

The Startup’s self-image is one-sided and it’s as if it were supplied by lobbyists from the corporate exploiters of digital content creators. As far as I can tell, the hype is meant to reassure the hapless, small-time creators who labour fruitlessly on the platforms, and to retain them as fodder for the neofeudal scheme.