Everyone wants to be a creator — 57% of Gen Z say they’d like to do it for a living. But only a tiny fraction ever make real money at it. This week’s Deep Dive gets into why. The top of the market is real: Derek Thompson passed his Atlantic salary five months after leaving to write independently, Oliver Darcy is closing in on 100,000 subscribers at Status, and Joanna Stern left the Journal with six million YouTube followers behind her. What nearly all of them share is an audience they built inside a legacy institution and took with them on the way out. We break down the barbelled economics of Substack, why AI slop is making genuine human perspective the scarce and valuable thing, and why the whole shift comes down to one question: is your audience tied to the platform, or to you?
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