Revenue-sharing platforms replaced gatekeepers with mass-audience optimization.

Evidence

But the biggest cultural shift came from Web 2.0’s revenue-sharing models. Platforms like YouTube allowed creators to monetize directly, making a career in content creation an end goal rather than a means to traditional industry acceptance. Posting regularly could yield a middle-class income—without needing to win over a single gatekeeper. This radically changed the logic of amateur creativity. Before the internet, the stereotype of an aspiring filmmaker was someone with artistic pretensions—represented in the scrappy, outsider ethos of nineties indie auteurs such as Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. Once tech platforms began paying for views, this incentivized a new type of creator who simply talked into their camera and constantly honed their content to attract the broadest possible audience. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s omnivore monoculture counter-case: the mechanism of platform monetization explains why subcultural edge gives way to flattened universal content.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: platform pay-per-view as the economic engine of monoculture — the death of the sellout happens because there is no longer anyone worth selling out to.