We Polymathicans traffic in ideas. We are denizens of the Information Age and, in truth, will be among the first to benefit from the Income Explosion of the mid 21st Century. Also, while at first the acquisition of a location independent career doesn't make much of a personal impact, over time, especially for empty nesters, you will come to realize that all of EUNA has become your home. That doesn't mean that you don't have a physical home. Some nomads don't, but that is hardly the norm. Rather, you will probably have several residences. We have apartments in both Minsk, Belarus and Tirana, Albania and intend to find one more 'winter home'. The important part is that you will be free from formal geographic constraints.
There is a movement afoot, involving literally millions of people, who call themselves 'Digital Nomads'. It attracts the interest of millions more. However, since not all of them are denizens of the Information Age, they often struggle to find their location independent profession that will allow them to travel. Many people come to DN groups asking, 'How do I earn money as a nomad?" For us, properly approached, the latter is easy and the only question is how sedentary or footloose are we?
Digital Nomad is actually an imprecise term that I don’t like very much. It becomes a dumping ground for all expats, no matter how different they might be. Andrew Henderson owns a boutique consulting firm, Nomad Capitalist, that caters to wealthy multinationalists. He advocates for, and we (my wife and I) agree, the reasonable compromise between endless, nomadic wandering and the sedentary life of a single home. He calls this compromise the Trifecta Strategy.
This strategy takes advantage of the typical national tax law that if you spend less than 183 days per year in a country, you are considered a tourist and not subject to taxation. If, by virtue of living for part of the year in homes in three different countries, you do not spend 183 days per year in any one country, you may owe tax in none of them. Of course, if you are a U.S. citizen, you will owe tax on your worldwide income no matter where you live. In fact, if you reside in a country without a tax treaty with the U.S., you may end up with dual taxation. However, there are exclusions that allow you to avoid U.S. taxation on up to about 240K per year for joint filers. In Albania, as is our example, we get up to 270K tax exclusion on international income. So, we do not owe income tax anywhere. Of course, Albania has a 20% sales tax, so we are definitely contributing to our local government services.
Many of my subscribers will, in fact, live steadfastly in one country. However, for most Information Age, high income households, two and even three homes are becoming common, without any conceptual or ideological basis for it. The wealthy resident of New York City may decide to have a winter home in the Bahamas and a ski chalet in Banf. The wealthy Brit may winter in Dubai and summer in Marbella, Spain. Without really thinking about it, they are multinationalists residing part of the year in three different countries. I do believe that all of my subscribers should at least be aware of this option and, over time, I believe that many of them will pursue the Trifecta Strategy.
One of the ways that you can acquire your location independent income is by creating content in the form of newsletters, podcasts, videos, books, etc. Today, this can be surprisingly easy and lucrative. There certainly are other ways to achieve substantial location independent income and I will likely discuss them in a future issue.
Most of these options are simply different ways to monetize the profession of Public Intellectual. The very top of the profession, occupied by people like Jordan Peterson, Glenn Greenwald, Ben Shapiro, et alia, earn seven, even eight, figure USD incomes. While very few of us will manage that, as Kevin Kelly explores most of these media are developing 'long tails' that allow many more people to engage in these productive activities profitably.
Kevin Kelly wrote a very famous article, '1,000 True Fans' that originally identified this phenomenon. He suggested that if a person could get 1,000 'true fans' to support them to the tune of 100 USD per year, the person could achieve gross revenue of 100K USD and personal income of about 70K USD. As is common with visionaries, his idea was way ahead of its time and people discovered that accumulating 1,000 true fans, with the social media available at that time, was much more difficult than it sounded.
Then, YouTube kicked off the development of 'true fan' bases. It still relied on an ad supported business model, but it led to the feasibility of Patreon, Locals and Substack where people, rather than watching a bunch of ads in order to provide support to a Public Intellectual, could simply provide support directly. One of the characteristics of this business model is the opportunity to choose between being 'kind of curious', 'a fan, but not fanatic' or 'a true fan' by providing different levels of support. The different levels of support usually also grants different levels of access to the Public Intellectual.
With my Substack newsletter, I am doing this. The 'kind of curious' get free access to the 'abstracts' of my articles, the 'a fan but not fanatic' will get full access and also access to my longer 'white papers' and my 'true fans' will get all of that, plus courtesy copies of my e-books as I publish them and access to two 40 minute Zoom calls per week.
I talk about the income explosion and many people simply don't believe it. We get a steady diet of 'the best is behind us' and both the Left and the Right media moan about the shrinking middle class and increasing income inequality. They imply that those leaving the middle class are mostly falling into the lower class. Stephan K. Bannon repeatedly bleats out that the elites want to turn your children and grandchildren into 'Russian serfs'. That is flat out false, and, even if it was true that they want this, they are doing a horrible job of it. That is why I regularly publish the graph below.
As you can see, the middle class is, indeed, shrinking, but so is the lower class. It is the upper incomes that have grown from 14% to 34% of the population. There is increasing income inequality because a small percentage of households, every year, jump from the middle class to the upper class. 'Jump' is not hyperbole. Most of the growth in the 'rich' is in households with income over 200K 2020USD. They kind of jumped over the lower levels of 'rich'. I mention this by way of contradicting Kevin Kelly's implication that 70K USD per year is enough. It may have been in the 20th Century, but today, the goal should be 200K USD. A little over 10% of U.S. households are already at that level or above and the number is growing quickly. These represent the vanguard of the income explosion. If you aspire to be even a minor star in the Information Age firmament of Public Intellectuals, you will get there, too.
I wasted years trying to work with Google to build an income as a Public Intellectual. I had one article that had over 250K views, but I made almost no money and didn't get more than a handful of subscribers. If I had been on Substack, based upon my current stats, I would have over 30K subscribers right now. Adsense, Blogger, YouTube, etc. are designed to make money for Alphabet (Google's parent company) and they give their content creators just enough income to entice them to keep going. On the other hand, I started my first article on Substack on May 7. Most of my contacts are on Facebook and I invited them to subscribe to my Substack Newsletter. Facebook tries to interfere by shadow banning my invitations. I did get 20 subscriptions from Facebook contacts. Then Facebook subscriptions died off completely. My new subscribers flat lined and then, after publishing my first newsletter, they took off and continued to grow at about 18% per week. It is so very different than the experience on Blogger and Facebook.
If this growth rate were to continue for another 52 weeks, which I strongly doubt it will, by this time next year, I will have 535K subscribers. Of course, the reason I will likely do somewhat less well is that there are multiple inputs to my subscriber growth. Some are exponential, but some are linear. Also, real world growth rates follow a sigmoidal function, not an exponential function, and these approach an asymptote. Until one reaches the point of inflection in the growth, one can't really tell where the asymptote is. However, I expect it to be well below 535K subscribers.
My point is not to extol the virtues and potential of my newsletter, but rather to demonstrate that, if you write a Substack newsletter and you are good, you can be successful. This is in stark contrast to Blogger and Wordpress blogs that can be very good and still wallow in obscurity. Because Substack is new it is still growing quickly. Even now, however, the top ten newsletters are averaging 2 million USD of annual support. Also, the tail is long and while you will not likely earn 2 million USD any time soon, our goal of 200K USD is very achievable.
Under my current business model, my goals are to achieve 50K free subscribers, 4K regular paid subscribers at $60 per year each, 100 founding subscribers at $210 per year each and sales of about 5K books. This results in a gross income of $320K and a net income of $224K, which is approximately my maximum tax sheltered income. It places me in the top category on the graph. Because we live in Belarus and Albania, that is about 3X more income than it appears to people in Western Europe and North America (EUNA). So, it is not really a very aggressive goal. The top newsletter of today is likely the NYT 'Morning Briefing' newsletter with a distribution of 17 million. However, these high volume newsletters tend to be produced by several writers. There is no way for us to know whether the high value added is passing to the writers or if they are just feeding corporate profits. If history is any guide it is probably the latter.
Podcasts have traditionally been ad supported and downloaded from sites like Google, Apple, etc. There are about 1.7 million podcasts and, obviously, most of them are not very well distributed and earn their podcasters almost nothing. On the other end is Joe Rogan who is attracting up to 20 million listeners and earning well into eight figures USD. However, most paid podcasters earn around $1,200 per month. If they are employed by the Internet successors to talk radio, they will likely be paid $40K to $50K, again enriching their owners more than themselves.
The YouTube business model is also primarily a way to improve Alphabet's bottom line. They were passing through substantially less than 50% of ad revenue to the content creator. After a scandal and videographer uproar, they increased the payout to about half. Video content producers are learning to embed their own ads and to create Patreon and Locals support functionality. YouTuber Chris Chappell gets about 500K to 600K views per week. However, because of his anti-CCP message, China Uncensored is regularly demonitized. He has been able to field a high quality product by soliciting support directly via Patreon and Locals. However, there is still a problem with YouTube in that you do not own your audience. The same is true with Facebook and Linkedin. If they ban you, you lose your audience. This has happened multiple times to successful YouTubers.
Substack has a podcast functionality and, I suspect, soon will add video content. Of course, the content creator can embed ads, but often the content will be offered as a part of a supporter package. Also, with the click of one button, you can download the contact information of your subscribers. I do this periodically, not because I think that Substack will ban me, but because other, technical problems can occur. So, generally, Substack greatlly improves income potential but it also improves income security. If another platform emerges that fits your needs better, you have the ability to download from the old platform and upload to the new platform.
Whether a person creates a newsletter, a podcast or video, writing a book is a good way to increase your revenue per subscriber and it is used often. Video creator, Dave Rubin, regularly produces a book and with a subscriber base of 1.7 million on YouTube, he has a large base that he can contact quickly and easily. While Jordan Peterson does have a YouTube channel, he makes most of his money from his books. Many newsletter, podcast and video content producers who have more complex ideas to communicate a book is the best way to do it. I am working on five books at present.
In conclusion, I am aggressively entering this market of Public Intellectual as a Polymathican, with my target market being people committed to intellectual sophistication. However, there should be more, likely many more, Polymathican Public Intellectuals entering into this market niche. The market is likely about 15 million, mostly affluent and engaged, people. That is a small portion of the two billion or so people on the Internet, but it is a large number in absolute terms. My projected 50,000 subscribers don't even make a dent in the market. So I encourage you to consider joining in.