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Michelle Eisen, a 15-year Starbucks veteran, is a barista for the coffee chain at a location in Buffalothe first Starbucks store to unionize back in December 2021, in fact. But on a Tuesday in March, Eisen was at a Pittsburgh Starbucks, to participate in what Starbucks Workers United members have dubbed sip-ins. A spin on sit-ins, they involve union workers and allies hanging out for hours in a Starbucks store, ordering drinks under names like Union Strong and leaving tips for workers. In the weekend leading up to that Tuesday, union members held more than 100 sip-ins across the country. It was a message to Starbucks management: Union workers were calling attention to the fact that, more than three and a half years after organizing their first store, they still didnt have a contract. Negotiations between the union and the company have broken down, members say. Since September, the union has presented the company with a number of suggestions around wages, benefits, and guaranteed hours, all of which are meant to be negotiations, but it says the company wouldn’t even counter those offers. The union (and the National Labor Relations Board) argue that Starbucks hasn’t been bargaining in good faith. But the Pittsburgh action was more than just a sip-in. Partway through, the workers at that store announced that they were on strike and walked out. Most of the attendees followed, forming a picket line on the sidewalk. Eisen and four others stayed in the store, refusing to leave. The sip-in had turned into an occupation. The stores manager called a manager from a different store for help. They would periodically come over and they were like, We need you to leave and wed say, We’re not leaving. We don’t know what you don’t understand about this, but we will sleep in the store, Eisen says. The five of them, all current or former Starbucks workers, were asking that company executives, including CEO Brian Niccol, talk to them and respond to the union’s demands. The crowd outside grew louder; there were speeches and chants from people on the picket line. Eventually the store manager called the police, who gave the occupiers three warnings to exit the store. When Eisen and the others refused, they were arrested, handcuffed, and walked out the front doors. That action was a form of civil disobedience, a nonviolent tactic in which people intentionally break the law or disobey orders in order to highlight actions they say are unjust. It has long been used by activistsduring the civil rights movement, the fight for womens suffrage, and frequently by labor unions looking to improve worker conditions. For Starbucks Workers United, the decision to engage in acts of civil disobedience didnt happen overnight. It’s a natural evolution or escalation for where we are on the campaign, Eisen says. After three and a half years, still in bargaining, and . . . with an offer [from Starbucks] that is very far from sufficient given what this company can provide to its workers, we felt like we needed to take a stand. Starbucks sit-ins spur action Starbucks Workers United has been doing various strikes since its inception in 2021, but recently, those protests and strikes have been escalating to arrests. A January sit-in at a Park Slope store was first. That was a union location that the company was permanently closing. Ahead of the closure, union members peacefully protested, and at least seven were arrested. Those arrests got a lot of media coverage, and Eisen says it pushed the company to agree, in writing, that they were willing to go to mediationa process in which a company and a union meet with a neutral third party mediator to assist in negotiations. That agreement to use a mediator was the first progress the union has seen in weeks, Eisen says. Before that, there had been a December bargaining session at which the company proposed an economic package with no wage increases for union baristas. The union opposed that proposal, and then conducted a five-day strike across multiple cities. The day of the Pittsburgh occupation coincided with two others, at a store in Chicago and also in Seattle. (In Chicago and Pittsburgh, 16 people in total were arrested.) The timing was intentional: The next day, March 12, Starbucks was holding a shareholder meeting. We wanted them to go into that meeting having to defend their actions when it came to how they were dealing with the union stores [and] union workers, Eisen says. This week, we took direct action to show @Starbucks the urgency of finalizing contracts with the wages, staffing, and protections we need to thrive.Were doing what it takes to win. And we won't stop until we do. pic.twitter.com/OQ60OOGUEO— Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) March 13, 2025 At that meeting, Starbucks executives were asked when the company would negotiate its first union contract. Though she didnt give a timeline, Sara Kelly, executive vice president and chief partner officer for Starbucks, answered in part that, When a partner elects a union to represent them, we are committed to engaging in good faith with that union and the partners who have selected that union to negotiate fair contracts. In a response to a request for comment about these actions and the current bargaining process, a Starbucks spokesperson said the company is focused on creating the best job in retail, and added that the company and the union have held more than nine bargaining sessions since last April and three mediation sessions, reaching over 30 meaningful agreements on hundreds of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them. They reiterated that the company is committed to good faith bargaining. Why Starbucks workers say civil disobedience makes sense Workers are willing to risk arrest to draw attention to their fightand that fact alone should show the company how desperate its employees feel, the union says. You’ve got people you employ who feel so strongly about the way you are mistreating them that theyre willing to put their body, their being, at risk to demand change, Eisen says. I just think you have to take that seriously. The union and Starbucks have come to some tentative agreementsaround issues like safety and dress codebut not on economic issues. The union says the minimal concessions from the companyno raises in the firt year and a guarantee of just 1.5% in future yearsamounts to less than 50 cents an hour for most baristas. The union also still wants progress around guaranteed hours and staffing; they say some workers have had their hours cut below the threshold to qualify for benefits, even as stores are understaffed. Starbucks Workers United filed an unfair labor practice against the company specifically alleging that its refusal to negotiate on economic suggestions, instead coming with a “fixed economic position,” is against the spirit of bargaining in good faith. Though Eisen was calmly walked out of the building when she was arrested, she says the sit-in was still nerve wracking: there are a lot of unknowns in terms of how the police will respond or how things may escalate. Though civil disobedience itself is nonviolent, it can provoke violent reactions from others. The union knew that if they were going to engage in actions that come with safety risks or potential arrest, they had to prepare their members. Starbucks Workers United reached out to labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr. to run workshops on civil disobedience, mostly talking about the tactics history and what the union should know if it wanted to carry this out. The most important thing is that you have a critical mass of your membership that embraces this and feels the need for it, he says, because if you dont, you will find yourself quickly isolated and ultimately defeated. When some people think of civil disobedience, they might think of the civil rights movement and the Greensboro sit-ins in which young Black students protested racial segregation. To some, the plight of Starbucks workers may seem, in comparison, less serious or not deserving of such drastic action. Unionized Starbucks workers have heard criticisms of their efforts since they began. When, in April 2022, an employee mentioned unfair labor practice charges against the company to then-CEO Howard Schulz, he told her, If youre not happy at Starbucks, you can go work for another company. Workers have also been criticized for being just baristas, implying that the title isnt deserving of raises or worker protections. Baristas, though, have been trying to communicate just how chaotic and difficult their jobs areand how understaffing exacerbates that. They’ve also highlighted issues with mobile ordering (asking for pauses or limitations during busy times) and their concerns about low pay. Eisen adds that its a pervasive American viewpoint that some jobs are just bad, and people should try not to end up there. But theres very little recognition, she notes, of the fact that these are jobs that need to be done. And they are in a lot of ways essential. Why do we look at a job and say, ‘Well, that’s not a skilled job? Working at Starbucks has been the most physically demanding job shes ever doneand shes put in years to develop her skills, get to know regular customers, and make friends with coworkers. Why should I walk away from all that? she says. Why not try to make it better? Starbucks unionand civil disobediencesits in a bigger context Diego Franco, a union member and Starbucks worker at a Chicago store, is trying to get a better jobby making his at Starbucks better. He was one of the people arrested at the Chicago sit-in, and though he said he felt nervous ahead of the action, it helped knowing he wasnt doing it alone. [Civil disobedience] comes with a lot of risk, but with that risk, it shows dedicationnot just to get a contract, but to the people who you work with, he says. Starbucks workers all over the country are participating in a strong showing of solidarity today.Civil disobedience, strikes, solidarity actions, and more are happening at $SBUX locations all over the country.Hear us yet, @Starbucks? ITS TIME TO FINALIZE CONTRACTS NOW. https://t.co/e9GXWHFlFS pic.twitter.com/6hpxshl7l1— Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) March 11, 2025 That camaraderie is key, Fletcher says. When speaking to the union, he emphasized the risks and hard realities of civil disobedience, how these actions require preparationand the fact that workers need to know they’re not alone in order to get through it. The Starbucks unions cause has reached beyond the company. It helped spur a larger revitalized labor movement that has seen record-high strike actions and led to the highest U.S. support for labor unions since 1965. Starbucks workers sit in that broad labor contextas does civil disobedience as a tactic. People are standing on the shoulders of others, he says. Theres a history to this. Since the first Starbucks store unionized in December 2021, it has been joined by more than 550 stores, encompassing more than 11,000 workers. Though labor experts have long said that penalties under current labor laws are so weak that they’re essentially toothless, the Trump administration has already been even more hostile toward unions, adding to the challenges workers face. Still, Eisen is hopeful about the future of Starbucks Workers United. I know these members and I know this campaign, and I know that for every one of us who gets exhausted and has to take a step back, there are 10 more Starbucks workers who are willing to step into their place. And so the company is fighting a losing battle, she says. We will keep growing [our actions] and getting bigger, until the company just has to recognize that.
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E-Commerce
As the 2025 Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, youd expect the league to use its marketing muscle to hype the heroics of its biggest stars. But its anime-style ad campaign takes that idea to a new level. Heroes of the Game mixes the on-field superpowers of players like Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Julio Rodríguez, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge with the pop cultural artistry of anime hits like One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist. Created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the league also partnered with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios in Japan, as well as acclaimed animation director Hiroshi Shimizu, to make the work. The first ad features a whole collection of players, with individual player spots rolling out over this month. The new work follows earlier collabs with anime series Demon Slayer and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for the season-opening Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs last month. Not-so odd couple It may feel like an odd coupling, but MLB chief marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler says the league has used anime in past social posts and fans loved it. And our players are also die-hard anime fans, says Rawn Dowler. Whether it’s Julio (Rodríguez) or Fernando Tatís customizing their cleats with their favorite characters, or Jazz Chisholm wearing a One Piece chain, anime is really popular in our clubhouses and with our players. So we felt like it was a really authentic medium to tell our player stories. The campaign lands at a time that finds baseball flying high. The leagues $12.1 billion in reported 2024 revenue was a record, breaking the previous record of $11.6 billion set in 2023. It also represents a 33% jump in the past decade. Last seasons attendance of more than 71 million fans was the highest since 2017. Television viewership was up across the board, including among the coveted 18-to-34 demographic. If you hit a baseball to Julio Rodríguez, just know you've entered a no-fly zone J-Rod anime goes CRAZY #HeroesOfTheGame pic.twitter.com/kyQq8fFppS— MLB (@MLB) April 13, 2025 Now that it’s got the attention of fansespecially younger onesMLB is focusing on how it can harness their passion for baseball and culture in creative new ways. Back in 2023, the league partnered with Wieden+Kennedy for its Baseball Is Something Else campaign, which this years work continues. Rawn Dowler says the emphasis on specific stars has really paid off, noting, We have young, dynamic, diverse, global players who transcend baseball, and our younger sports fans are increasingly identifying with individual players. So we want to continue to prop up the folks who are the face of our game. The league picks which players to spotlight based on a number of factors, including sheer on-field dominance, and making sure the mix works across a variety of club markets and global audiences. It probably shouldnt be a surprise to find the anime pedigree involved in the new campaign, considering Wieden+Kennedys award-winning, manga- and anime-related work for McDonalds last year. That saw the fast-feeder flip its golden arches as a nod to the fictional spoof store WcDonalds that had become a mainstay of many popular manga and anime TV shows, graphic novels, and video games for the past several decades. The brand went deep to collaborate with celebrated artists on limited-edition packaging, a new sauce, and a series of WcDonalds anime shorts and manga. The next big league event is the inaugural Speedway Classic in August, when the Atlanta Braves will play the Cincinnati Reds on the infield of NASCARs Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee. In the meantime, the league will continue its winning formula of finding creative ways to bring pop culture to baseball, and its superstars to pop culture. It’s just a really exciting time in baseball right now, Rawn Dowler says. The talent level is insane. We have players achieving remarkable feats, and they’re doing it with a little bit of swagger, style, and flair, and so that has allowed us to really showcase and tell the stories of our players.
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E-Commerce
The ever-increasing power of generative AI has divided the graphic design community. Many are embracing the tools in their workflows, while others believe theyve stolen from culture and commoditized a craft. In any case, we all live in a strange time, when people are often presenting fully generative work as their own. Sometimes thats innocuous. And sometimes thats icky. But now Adobe wants to offer the public a means to distinguish the authentic from the automated. A new created without generative AI tag in Adobe Frescothe company’s drawing and painting appwill let you mark work as being free from the use of generative AI tools, to certify that you created it by hand. The feature is likely to come to other pieces of the Adobe Suite, according to Eric Snowden, SVP of design at Adobe. [Image: Adobe] Fresco is one of our tools that were not including generative AI, and we wanted to make sure that for someone creating these amazing artworks by hand, they have the ability to say, I did not use generative AI inside of Fresco, says Snowden. Those are our customers, too, and we want to support them. If they feel the need to be able to convince clients that they didn’t use generative AI, we want to make that as simple for them to do as possible. The new optional disclosure comes alongside a greater wave of announcements from Adobe this week that double down on generative AI. Adobe is introducing video and vector support to its own commercially safe Firefly model, while also integrating popular generative AI models by third partiesincluding OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles Imagen and Veo, and Fluxinto its software suite. (More partners, including Runway and Luma, will be coming down the line.) Despite Adobes lengthy, and even delayed approach to building its proprietary AI model, Snowden says enabling these options that Adobe has tacitly criticized is all about customer choice. How Adobe marks work as created without generative AI To certify your work as AI-free, Adobe is using its Content Credentials standard. While originally presented as a means to limit misinformationa topic on which I was more than a little skepticalthis approach to metadata makes a lot more sense in the context of Adobes GenAI workflows. These credentials are basically a running receipt of where you did what to any piece of media inside of Adobe’s system. So it will list if you brought your own photo into ChatGPT to restyle it, and then exported it to Adobe Firefly to turn it into video. (Adobe is labeling any media imported into its software that out of its gaze might already be influenced by GenAI as media of unknown origin on this running receipt.) Granted, provenance is almost an oxymoron in any generative AI workflow: ChatGPT 4 was trained on 13 trillion tokens of data youll never be able to cite. But the Content Credentials standard does offer some sort of ledger of reference to clients or the public at large to how something was created. Its something a creator can point to and explain or defend the source of their work. I think illustration is where we’re seeing [demand] . . . but I don’t think it’s specific to only illustration, Snowden says. Indeed, the competing platform Procreate has taken an anti-GenAI stance, but anti-AI sentiment doesnt apply to illustrators alone. I would imagine there are people in every creative discipline where generative AI is not something they’re interested in, Snowden continues. And if they feel compelled to communicateor they’re again being asked to communicatethat they didn’t use generative AI, we should help them do that. Claiming that any digital work is free from the influence of AI is impossible. For a human gesture to be transformed into a pixel, its filtered through all sorts of algorithms that help smooth and make sense of ones input on a screenand that’s definitely true for Adobe Fresco as well as the other apps in its suite. Long before GenAI arrived, Adobe products were steeped in the benefits of artificial intelligence and similar coded assistance. That said, Adobe is clearly reading the room, and realizing it must acknowledge that many creators find generative AI to be an assault on their viewpoint and livelihoodeven while Adobe is investing more into these technologies that are simply too powerful, and in demand, to be ignored. Everybody’s going to create in such different ways, says Snowden. Which is the exciting thing about working on these kinds of projectsgiving people as much choice as possible.
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E-Commerce
Welcome to the world of social media mind control. By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. Youre about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception. The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth. We know that China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea are using bot networks to amplify narratives all over the world, says Ran Farhi, CEO of Xpoz, a threat detection platform that uncovers coordinated attempts to spread lies and manipulate public opinion in politics and beyond. Bot farm amplification is being used to make ideas on social media seem more popular than they really are. A bot farm consists of hundreds and thousands of smartphones controlled by one computer. In data-center-like facilities, racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossipeven though theyre not. Meta calls it coordinated inauthentic behavior. It fools the social networks algorithm into showing the post to more people because the system thinks it’s trending. Since the fake accounts pass the Turing test, they escape detection. Unlike conventional bots that rely on software and API access, bot farm amplification uses real mobile phones. Racks and racks of smartphones connected to USB hubs are set up with SIM cards, mobile proxies, IP geolocation spoofing, and device fingerprinting. That makes them far more difficult to detect than the bots of yore. Its very difficult to distinguish between authentic activity and inauthentic activity, says Adam Sohn, CEO of Narravance, a social media threat intelligence firm with major social networks as clients. Its hard for us, and were one of the best at it in the world. Disinformation, Depression-era-style Distorting public perception is hardly a new phenomenon. But in the old days, it was a highly manual process. Just months before the 1929 stock market crash, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFKs father, got richer by manipulating the capital markets. He was part of a secret trading pool of wealthy investors who used coordinated buying and media hype to artificially pump the price of Radio Corp. of America shares to astronomical levels. After that, Kennedy and his rich friends dumped their RCA shares at a huge profit, the stock collapsed, and everyone else lost their asses. After the market crashed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Today, stock market manipulators use bot farms to amplify fake posts about hot stocks on Reddit, Discord, and X. Bot networks target messages laced with ticker symbols and codified slang phrases like cmon fam, buy the dip, load up now and keep pushing. The self-proclaimed finfluencers behind the schemes are making millions in profit by coordinating armies of avatars, sock puppets, and bots to hype thinly traded stocks so they can scalp a vig after the price increases. We find so many instances where there’s no news story, says Adam Wasserman, CFO of Narravance. There’s no technical indicator. There are just bots posting things like this stocks going to the moon and greatest stock, pulling out of my 401k. But they arent real people. Its all fake. In a world where all information is now suspect and decisions are based on sentiment, bot farm amplification has democratized market manipulation. But stock trading is only one application. Anyone can use bot farms to influence how we invest, make purchasing decisions, or vote. These are the same strategies behind propaganda efforts pioneered by Russia and the Islamic State to broadcast beheadings and sway elections. But theyve been honed to sell stocks, incite riots, and, allegedly, even tarnish celebrity reputations. Its the same song, just different lyrics. People under the age of 30 don’t go to Google anymore, says Jacki Alexander, CEO at pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. They go to TikTok and Instagram and search for the question they want to answer. It requires zero critical thinking skills but somehow feels more authentic. You feel like youre making your own decisions by deciding which videos to watch, but you’re actually being fed propaganda thats been created to skew your point of view. Its not an easy problem to solve. And social media companies appear to be buckling to inauthenticity. After Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X), the company fired much of its anti-misinformation team and reduced the transparency of platform manipulation. Meta is phasing out third-party fact-checking. And YouTube rolled back features meant to combat misinformation. On TikTok, you used to be able to see how many times a specific hashtag was shared or commented on, says Alexander. But they took those numbers down after news articles came out showing the exact same pro-Chinese propaganda videos got pushed up way more on TikTok than Instagram. Algorithmically boosting specific content is a practice known as heating. If theres no trustworthy information, what we think will likely become less important than how we feel. Thats why were regressing from the Age of Sciencewhen critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning were centralback to something resembling the Edwardian era, which was driven more by emotional reasoning and deference to authority. When Twitter introduced microblogging, it was liberating. We all thought it was a knowledge amplifier. We watched it fuel a pro-democracy movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa called the Arab Spring and stoke national outrage over racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, planting the seeds for Black Lives Matter. While Twitter founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey thought they were building a platform for political and social activism, their trust and safety team was getting overwhelmed with abuse. Its like they never really read Lord of the Flies. People who dont study literature or history, they dont have any idea of what could happen, said tech journalist Kara Swisher in Breaking the Bird, a CNN documentary about Twitter. Your outrage has been cultivated Whatever gets the most likes, comments, and shares gets amplified. Emotionally charged posts that lure the most engagement get pushed up to the top of the news feed. Enrage to engage is a strategy. Social media manipulation has become very sophisticated, says Wendy Sachs, director-producer of October 8, a documentary about the campus protests that erupted the day after the October 7th Hama attack on Israel. It’s paid for and funded by foreign governments looking to divide the American people. Malicious actors engineer virality by establishing bots that leach inside communities for months, sometimes years, before they get activated. The bots are given profile pics and bios. Other tricks include staggering bot activity to occur in local time zones, using U.S. device fingerprinting techniques like setting the smartphones internal clock to the time zone to where an imaginary user supposedly lives, and setting the phones language to English. Using AI-driven personas with interests like cryptocurrency or dogs, bots are set to follow real Americans and cross-engage with other bots to build up perceived credibility. Its a concept known as social graph engineering, which involves infiltrating broad interest communities that align with certain biases, such as left- or right-leaning politics. For example, the K-pop network BTS Army has been mobilized by liberals, while Formula 1 networks might lend themselves to similar manipulation from conservatives. The bots leach inside these communities and earn trust through participation before agitating from within. Bot accounts lay dormant, and at a certain point, they wake up and start to post synchronously, which is what we’ve observed they actually do, says Valentin Châtelet, research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. They like the same post to increase its engagement artificially. To set up and manage thousands of fake social media accounts, some analysts believe that bot farms are deployed with the help of cyber criminal syndicates and state sponsorship, giving them access to means that are not ordinary. View this post on Instagram
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E-Commerce
Substack and Patreon are vying to become creators primary revenue stream. For most influencers, payouts from platforms like Meta or Google arent enough to build a sustainable career. Rather than spending their days hawking products, many creators are turning to direct fan support, and two companies dominate that space: Patreon and Substack. Patreons latest move targets streamers. Its native livestreaming feature, currently in demo and set for a broad rollout this summer, could attract gamers and broadcasters alike. But Substack beat them to it, launching a similar live video tool just three months earlier. As the two platforms expand their offerings, the rivalry for creator loyalty is heating up. The market for creator livestreams Video already performs well on the platform: Its Patreons second-highest-earning media category after podcasting. Many Twitch streamers rely on Patreon as a more stable source of subscription revenue, preferring it to Twitchs unpredictable payouts. With the addition of live video, Patreon is betting that more of these streamers will shift even larger parts of their operations to its platform. Creators can use livestreams to attract new free members, but they can also use it to encourage free members to pay to upgrade to unlock a Live so that creators are earning the most from their fans, writes Drew Rowny, Patreons VP of Product, in an email to Fast Company. Native livestreams will also be a part of our existing ticketed events experience on Patreon. Live will become a part of our tools that already convert 700,000 free memberships to paid each month. But Substack, which was founded four years after Patreon, already has the upperhand. The platform introduced livestreaming to top-performing creators in September, then expanded access sitewide in January. Video is now central to Substacks strategy: 82% of its 250 highest-earning creators are using audio and video in their work. Since its inception, Substack has been a refuge for journalists leaving legacy mediaand its live video feature is now drawing in television anchors as well. Don Lemon and Jim Acosta both stream on Substackand sometimes, they stream together. As of 2025, roughly one in three live videos on the platform are cohosted with another Substack creator. Earlier this month, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced hell be streaming there, too. The important thing about live video, community features, or any other publishing tools is that they aren’t just standalone featuresthey’re connected to a network that helps publishers grow both audience and revenue, Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie writes in an email to Fast Company. That’s what Substack does exceptionally well. Who will win the creator subscription market? Second-stream creator revenue has been Patreons domain for over a decade. But Substack has recently inched its way, courting TikTok creators with big-money incentives. To some extent, the budding strategy has worked. When Hannah Neeleman, the infamous trad wife behind Ballerina Farm, wanted to venture outside of TikTok, she started a Substack newsletter. So have a good many shopping influencers, wanting to more easily insert affiliate links. Not long ago, Patreon would have been these creators only option. Of course, Substack doesnt think of itself as a Patreon competitor. It wants to be known as a wider social media platform, and not just a subscription serviceeven if it continues to tout its five million paid subscriptions. Substack is a destination people visit specifically to discover new voices and find creators to subscribe to,” McKenzie says. “Users willingly engage with all content forms while there, whether it’s livestreaming, reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts. In that sense, Substack is truly a 360-degree platform, offering creators everything they need. It’s more comparable to YouTube than to Patreon. That doesnt mean Patreon is losing its grip. The company emphasizes that more than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan paid programs. The growth of other platforms could just be a sign of an expanding industry. Were seeing more and more platforms helping creators to connect directly with their fanswhich is a great thing for the creator economy, Patreons Rowny writes. Creators can build tighter communities, grow their audience more, and earn more income on Patreon. Were laser-focused on helping creators manage and grow their direct-to-fan businesses.
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E-Commerce
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