Are content creators finally getting their due?

We’ve come a long way from the days when Hollywood scriptwriters wouldn’t be invited to the premieres of the movies they wrote

Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash

I’m beginning to lose count of the number of female friends who have jokingly, or perhaps half-jokingly, announced they are considering setting up an OnlyFans account. Sometimes this remark is qualified with the statement, “I’ll just sell pictures of my feet.” Sometimes it isn’t. I suspect the incidence of such declarations rises every time a media outlet runs a story about an erstwhile reality TV star/school teacher/journalist/nurse/beauty salon owner/sales rep/policewoman/pastor earning 10X their old salary by letting it all hang out online.

Younger readers will find this hard to comprehend, but there was once a time when men would pay good money to buy static images printed on dead trees of women not overly encumbered with clothing.

These strange objects were known as men’s mags and ranged from the stomach-churningly graphic to the unabashedly pornographic to the merely titillating. Though they tend to omit it from their CVs and not talk about it publicly, many prominent male journalists and some high-profile female ones started their careers working at men’s mags.*

I know this because I too spent the first part of my career working on gentlemen’s publications. Specifically, I spent a significant amount of time labouring in the salt mines of the men’s mags division of Kerry Packer’s then-thriving magazine company.

Given my background, I’ve watched with interest as the balance of power has shifted from ‘adult entertainment’ gatekeepers/distributors – photographers, mag editors, print media proprietors, porn film directors and studios – to what we used to call ‘glamour models’. Indeed, the trajectory of the porn industry in recent years has given me great hope. Hope that we are in the midst of a revolution that will see middlemen hurled on the ash heap of history and content creators finally being able to capture most of the revenue they generate.         

What life was like before the ‘creator economy’
Here’s what being a glamour model was like from around 1950-2010. If you were an attractive young woman, you first had to find a photographer to work with. If you managed to catch the eye of a photographer, you would do a shoot with him. He – it was almost always a he – would then attempt to sell your shoot to a men’s mag or, in the UK, perhaps a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.

If, and only if, the photographer was successful at selling your shoot would you, the model, belatedly get paid. You wouldn’t get paid a lot. Granted, it was good money for a few hours work, but it usually wasn’t a huge amount. Back when I was working on lowbrow men’s mags, at a time when those magazines made tens of millions of dollars profit a year, payments for models ranged from $150-$1,500 per shoot.

There were exceptions, such as Samantha Fox and Katie Price in the UK and Annalise Braakensiek in Australia, but glamour models typically didn’t make much money or have much of a shelf life. (Readers of men’s mag and tabloid newspapers didn’t want to keep seeing the same old faces, though I suspect it wasn’t the faces they were focusing on).

Back in the early 2000s, even a successful Australian glamour model would have struggled to earn more than around $30,000 in total over the course of her career, a career that would almost always be short-lived. I’m assuming glamour models in larger markets such as the UK and US did a little better, but probably not much better. I don’t recall seeing any media reports back in the day about scores of women quitting their normie day jobs because they had the opportunity to make millions doing glamour modelling for print publications.

The models might not have made much, but those at the top of the food chain sure did. For over half a century, the likes of Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, Larry Flynt, Kerry Packer** and Rupert Murdoch minted vast fortunes serving up images of naked ladies to their male customers.

If you had told me 15 years ago that one day women would be able to (largely) cut out the middle man and make $70,000 a month filming high-quality videos of themselves on a phone-computer-video camera gadget then sending those videos (almost) directly to thousands of paying fans, I wouldn’t have believed you. 

Gatekeeperdämmerung
I’ll leave it to others to debate whether glamour models were exploited in a wider sense. I believe they were undoubtedly financially exploited, receiving only a tiny fraction of the revenue that couldn’t have been generated without them.

Sadly, this has historically been par for the course for what we now call ‘content creators’. For as long as anyone can remember, actors, comedians, novelists, musicians and visual artists have had to bend over and cop a pecuniary arse-raping from sundry gatekeepers and distributors (agents, managers, art dealers, film studios, record companies, publishing houses and photographic agencies). And those content creators in a position to be ripped off were the lucky ones. We can only guess how many unrecognised geniuses went to their graves never having made it past industry bouncers. (Professional talent spotters have, at best, a mixed record. In 1962, Decca’s senior A&R man decided not to sign the Beatles because “guitar bands are on the way out” and instead inked a contract with promising up-and-comers Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.)  

Thanks to technology, especially the smart phone and the Internet, content creators have increasingly been able to disintermediate the parasitical intermediaries over the last decade or two.

For instance, a moderately successful stand-up comic and cage-fighting commentator was able to become the closest thing 21st America has to a Walter Cronkite figure. He managed to do this not only without the assistance of anybody involved in mainstream media institutions, but in the face of outright hostility from many of those working in mainstream media institutions.

Likewise, a nobody from flyover country who started posting videos to YouTube at age 13, is, a decade on, better known and wealthier than most Hollywood stars. Plus, he has never once had to kiss the arse (or worse) of an agent, casting director, studio head or film director.

And, yes, your old high school English teacher might just be supplementing her salary by selling immodest images of her feet, or other body parts, to appreciative admirers without ever having interacted with a cameraman, casting director or stick-flick director.

That’s the encouraging news.

But there are two somewhat discouraging facts anyone considering chancing their arm in the content-creation game should keep in mind.

Discouraging fact #1: Gatekeepers still exist. It’s now technologically feasible but still rarely practical to eliminate gatekeepers entirely. There are some content creators who interact directly with their customers, but this is the exception rather than the rule. If you are a fan of Louis C.K., you can go to his website and download a wide range of comedy specials he has filmed. Likewise, when one of the streaming services recently told Andrew Shultz he would have to edit out several abortion jokes before they would agree to air his comedy special, he bought the rights back and ‘self-released’ it on his website, charging those who wanted to watch it US$15. However, most content creators must rely on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, OnlyFans and Substack to distribute their content.  

There are two downsides to this.

The first downside is these platforms clip the ticket, taking anywhere up to 45 per cent of any revenue generated by content creators, as YouTube (est. 2005) does. Interestingly, platforms appear to be getting less greedy as time goes on, presumably out of a fear that content creators will make other arrangements if distributors take too big a slice of the revenue pie. OnlyFans (est. 2016) takes a 20 per cent cut while Substack (est. 2017) takes a mere 10 per cent. (Substack has also handed a number of high-profile writers substantial ‘advances’ so they could support themselves while in the early stages of building up their Substack-based business empires.)

The second downside is that platforms, especially the larger and more mainstream ones, can and not infrequently do punish or exile creators who produce heterodox content. YouTube has become notorious for demonetising and/or downregulating podcasters who stray too far from the Approved Narrative.

To be clear, such censorship is not always unwarranted. But many people are troubled by the capacity of giant tech companies to silence contrarian content creators, including ones who are ultimately found to have been making accurate claims rather than spreading supposedly dangerous misinformation.    

Discouraging fact #2: Content creation remains a winner-take-all game. Whether you’re shilling close-ups of your genitalia, or cat videos, or hot takes on the political issues of the day, it’s a very competitive world out there. In most cases, the top 0.1 per cent of creators in any content market will make big money, the next 0.9 per cent will do OK for themselves, and the bottom 99 per cent will earn nothing, or close to it.

That’s something you might want to consider if you’re a librarian contemplating endangering your day job by selling risqué videos of yourself stomping on bugs wearing nothing but Chanel No°5.

*I’m not going to embarrass anyone who prefers to keep their shameful men’s mag past quiet. But given he’s open about it, I will note that one of my favourite Substackers, Ed West of the Wrong Side of History, started his career writing for Nuts Magazine, which no doubt has something to do with his ability to write so entertainingly about dry topics such as zoning policies and foreign aid.

There are some eminently readable memoirs about the world of Australian men’s mags. Two of my favourites are Mark Dapin’s Sex & Money: How I lived, breathed, read, wrote, loved, hated, dreamed and drank men's magazines and Paul Merrill’s A polar bear ate my head: Misadventures in magazines. I haven’t yet got around to reading it, but I’m sure Phil Barker’s Axed: Who killed Australian Magazines is also excellent.       

**Despite his own, ahem, colourful private life, I was informed by several people in a position to know that Packer was embarrassed by magazines such as Picture, People and Ralph and sensitive about being called a smut peddler, but addicted to the vast profits his men’s mags division generated.