Right now, monetizing requires a significant devotion of individual time, effort, and thought, which takes time away from content creation. It's a problem that each individual creator has to solve, rather than having a standard solution. The problem is standard, but the solution cannot be, because right now, social media websites, and their owners, insist on acting like feudal warlords, rather than merchants and traders in an industrialized and cooperative economy. If there is, for example, a website that allows me to have a STACK of SUBscribers, this is very convenient for allow my patrons to support me. But suppose this website has no way to attract those subscribers, because it lacks a social media attribute that allows discovery. Well, I could go on another social media website, and try to attract eyeballs, but heaven forbid I should even mention the website that allows a STACK of SUBscribers, much less link to it, or I'll be shadowbanned from the other sites for acknowledging that other websites exist. They all have a quasi-religious objection to eating anything less than ALL THERE IS. It's like every venture capitalist and investor suddenly forgot every economic lesson of the last thousand years when they tacked "on the internet" onto the end of a business plan. So now we have to have youtube guys trying to sell plushies of their dog or coffee mugs, or taking sponsorships from the Sonoran Deceit Institute, because heaven forbid the internet just settle on one standardized tip jar. There's a big difference between the terms "influencer" and "content creator". Influencers are the dudes who are obsessed with having "influence" over "followers", so they can sell that influence to anyone and everyone. They love monetization. Content creator is a generalized term for every type of artist and writer of opinions and maker of things you want to see on the internet. They choose to describe themselves that way because they're focused on what they want to make for you, not what they want to do with your attention once they have it. Frankly, monetization is my least favorite part of the process, and I wish I could leave it to someone else. But I can't, because this gig actually is a full time job and I have a mortgage and bills and stuff, and being an extremely minor niche internet celebrity does not directly and automatically translate into anything the power company cares about. It's not a terrible burden, of course, because every job, even a really cool job like "write stories and be interesting on the internet" is always gonna have less-fun parts of that job. But it just seems like a massive duplication of effort, because there are thousands of us, and we're all solving the same problem from scratch.