Friday Flurry #15: The creator economy, cannibalism, and speed painting

Plus: books about weird chicks doing weird stuff.

Welcome to Friday Flurry, my weekly round-up. These posts, which are a mixed bag of what I’m doing, reading and thinking about, are exclusively for paid subscribers. If you’re a regular reader, and you enjoy my writing, become a paid subscriber.

This week, we’re talking about:

• Disgruntled audience members

• How social media created an economy where ordinary people create stuff for free and platforms make big money

• The dire state of news media and public interest journalism

• Accidental cannibalism

• My favourite books about weird chicks doing weird stuff

• Speed painting and sexy video backgrounds.

Enjoy!

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I’m thinking about… the ‘creator economy’

I continued my CRM cleanup this week (if you know, you know.)

I deleted over 3,000 people from my website subscriber database (not my Substack, don’t panic!), then I sent out an ‘enthusiastic consent’ email. The basic idea was: if I’ve got your email address, but you don’t want to read my stuff, please unsubscribe now to save your inbox.

An unexpected upside from this email was receiving tons of lovely, positive responses from people about how much they enjoy being on the list.

Now, this is important context, because around the same time all these lovely emails were flooding in, I got another email, from a disgruntled audience member named Terry.

The ratio of positive: negative emails was literally 50:1. And which email do you think I fixated on? 😖 Of course. The shit one.

Terry had completed one of my free leadership quizzes, and he didn’t like the result. So, he sent me an email to let me know what he thought of his quiz result - and also, of me. Here’s what he wrote: