Thread by @patio11

The last ~20 years has seen the emergence of an Internet middle class, where the combination of wide distribution, distributed business education, and platforms lets professionals create value from anywhere.

Some call it the "creator economy": stripe.com/blog/creator-e…

I got something of a front row seat for much of my career, supporting myself in rural Japan by developing software that I was able to sell through net-scale platforms like AdWords.

Back in the day this required a commanding amount of rolling one's own infra.

(Heck, back in the day the community was far less sophisticated than it is currently, and interested software people getting together would spend weeks upon weeks discussing "business models" because it was not straightforwardly obvious that one could simply sell software.)

Platforms have done an enormous service for creators by packaging the business knowhow and much of the stack(s) required into services which still require quite a bit of entrepreneurial skill to use well, but are much more accessible than they previously were.

Stripe has the privilege of supporting many of these platforms and, through them, the creators earning a living on the Internet. We recently used both our own data and some of our reach to try to survey this sector.

Results are in the post at the top of this thread.

Since the Long Tail was written I've been particularly interested in to what degree there is area in the tail where participation in the Internet economy is viable as a full-time occupation.

Happily, that portion of the curve is a) large and b) growing quickly. (~41% YOY in US!)

We're also seeing both anecdotal and statistical breakout performance in Japan recently, which warms my heart. I've long thought the best chance for reforming the work culture here is to give people better options, either at startups or in striking out on their own.

I've previously written that Stripe is a platform of platforms. If you're running a platform which serves the emerging Internet middle class, or want to start one, take a gander at stripe.com/use-cases/crea…

And while I don't have anything specific to say at the moment, I will say that a lot of our product roadmap in the near future will be very, very interesting to Internet creators.

Back in 2006 I spent 25% of my launch budget faxing a contract overseas to get payment processing set up.

Through working with platforms, we hope to enable experiences such as would have been unreasonably ambitious back then.

And hopefully in 15 years much of the Internet's middle class will think back wistfully to that day they first earned a dollar on the Internet. (Fax not required.)