odds of winning the attention lottery

Happy Tuesday!

I recently came across a study on creator income that caught my eye.

The numbers are staggering yet not surprising:

67% of creators earned less than $10k from their content last year.

Fewer than 5% cleared six figures.

And the top 10% captured 62% of all creator payments.

In other words:

Nearly 2/3 of the money is tumbling into the laps of just 10% of the market.

If that doesn't sound like a lottery, I don't know what is.

Yet the income disparity isn't what caught my eye...

It's what the winners are doing differently.

Because consistent sales almost never correlate with audience size.

Instead, the creators who are winning are the ones with the smallest gap between "follower" and "buyer."

They've stopped playing the attention lottery…

And started building a legit audience of people who actually buy their stuff.

Not-so-surprisingly...

This is the exact same dynamic I see play out with email all the time.

Someone will tell me they have 10,000 subscribers, but are struggling to make ends meet...

Meanwhile, someone else has 2,000 people on their list but is raking in $4-$5 per subscriber, per month, like clockwork.

The key difference isn't reach...

It's relationship density.

And this is driven by two things:

- How often subscribers hear from you after joining the list
- What type of content you send them

That's it.

If you've read my book or have been reading my emails for any length of time...

Then you know where I stand on both those topics ;)

And not to get too trigger happy with my citations here...

But Patreon also published some research on this recently…

And found that creators now rank "fan relationships" and financial stability above follower growth.

Smart thinking.

More and more people are giving up on chasing the crowd…

And focusing on going deeper with the people already in the room.

Some food for thought as you think about what you're optimizing for...

Jim Hamilton