[tablethnuser]

Good points. Based on my experience with whales in f2p games you will get outsized income from 0.1% of whale users, reliable income from 20% of hobby users, and one-off spend here and there from the rest.

When I think of someone paying me $1000 for art that others may pay only $20 or $5 for, first of all it still feels like charity from the whales. I think you could meaningfully create $20 and $5 tiers for any digital art. But what do you sell to raise the value two magnitudes other than status? Selling status to whales relies on a huge "commons" population for them to feel superior to. Nobody whales in a vacuum.

Second issue is whale rarity. Just to find your first $1000 whale you already need 1000 fans. The rest of them are only paying you $20 x 200 = $4,000 and $5 x 799 = $3,995 per year. That's $10k/yr.

The idea that you could only cultivate a stable of whales with artistic output is ridiculous. You somehow need to make the whales believe that the general population is their commons and then sell them status over gen pop, which is probably why the article hones in on wellness as the only vehicle in town.

[john61]

You described the business model of Ludwig van Beethoven. One of the first independent artist in his profession. He had a few whales which gained status through personal inscription of his works and paid him to stay in Vienna. But he was massively popular in Vienna before he gained whales.

[xchaotic]

I quite like and agree with the numbers here - you could be getting 10k / year before your first whale, so it does not make much economic sense to only focus on a 100 biggest fans.