[MattGaiser]

My view of work is that you can be paid in 4 ways:

1. Paid in cash.

2. Paid in power.

3. Paid in social status.

4. Paid in deferred career benefit.

Because of the reach of content with the internet, the pay in categories 2 and 4 has gone up. It depends on what you do, but pay in category 3 may also have increased. Unsurprisingly the cash pay is going to decline.

In my own case, I write a fair bit. I gain career benefits. I gain contacts from Hacker News as I write under my own name. There are friends who find it cool that I am published on Stack Overflow. I have a regular software engineering job, so the money now is not a priority.

Eventually most content creation is just going to be supported by people doing other things to earn a living. Only deep investigative journalism would require someone to earn a full time living doing it.

[jszymborski]

I think you might have missed a fifth: paid with passion.

Whether it nets as much long-term happiness or food in your mouth is free to debate, but I think a lot of people are just content with the idea of creating something they wanted.

I think you see this a lot in OSS (linux, git, gnu) as well as e.g. the video games industry.

I don't think it's a particularly sustainable way to get paid, but it can exit into the other 4 you mentioned.

[MattGaiser]

Quite true.

[rtlfe]

> Eventually most content creation is just going to be supported by people doing other things to earn a living.

That's fine for many types of content, but do we really want world news and investigative journalism to be done exclusively by amateurs with no resources?

[MattGaiser]

I actually think you could get some excellent investigative journalism from subject matter experts working part time.

But yes, that is one of the few areas where you still need permanent full-time people.

[Aerroon]

Isn't there also "not paid at all"?

[MattGaiser]

If you include the 5th point about passion that someone just below added among my 4, why would anyone do anything which did not pay them in some way?

[Aerroon]

Sometimes you're promised pay, but they don't actually pay you.