Greentext

Sometimes I get the impression that social media fame is continuing the narrative of the American dream worldwide: strangely enough, many people assume that it happens regularly that someone steps out of their parent's bedroom, records a few videos, and overnight, without much effort, becomes a multimillionaire – just like that.

This is the absolute exception and has hardly happened at all for a long time. Online, it's long been like the real world economy: without the support of powerful players, it's basically impossible for anyone to become successful. It's a tough business with an endless number of competing content producers, from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion's share.

And there is yet another misconception underlying the illusion of quick money: you only earn enough to live on once you have a certain reach – something very few people achieve. Most work hard for ridiculously low income, if they earn anything at all.

Consumers, on the other hand, persist in the attitude that the internet has taught them over the last twenty years: they expect high-quality content on a daily basis without having to pay anything for that. They assume that the producers of this content earn good money from it, but in the vast majority of cases - and if there is any money made in the first place - this is not true at all, because it is not the creative people who earn big, but those who exploit them.

Anyone who believes that content producers can finance themselves through voluntary donations is usually completely wrong — Wikipedia's fundraising campaigns, in which only a tiny percentage of users contribute anything, are just one example of many, even though Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in many countries around the world.