The key to understanding the economics of podcasts, Substack newsletters, and OnlyFans accounts is accepting the cruelty of popularity curves. When a graph of popularity is constructed it looks like a Zipf Curve. The Zipf curve is extremely steep and unforgiving. The winners (a relatively small number of people) take all. The losers (everyone else) get practically nothing. Newcomers are exposed to the raw hyper-competition for attention. There are no formal gatekeepers or impediments; hence, the number of competitors is enormous.

Even popularity on Medium follows the Zipf curve.

If you are Joe Rogan (podcasts) or Blac Chyna (OnlyFans) you are a hyper-winner. If you are the average person you get practically nothing financially when you start a podcast, YouTube channel, twitch channel, weblog, Substack newsletter et cetera.

Interestingly, this is not a new observation about online activity. Way back on April 15, 1997 Jakob Nielsen wrote about the popularity of websites, and he found that popularity followed a Zipf curve distribution.