What I like about this is that it quietly exposes how broken the "creator economy" narrative has been for text on the web. For 20 years the model was: have a normal job, let the internet subsidize the rest with cheap distribution and a bit of ad/support money. That worked as long as (1) part-time/contract engineering was plentiful, (2) search sent humans to long-form, and (3) nobody was flooding the commons with infinite free derivative text.

All three legs are wobbling now. Hiring shifted to "full time or nothing", SEO is a mostly hostile environment, and AI has turned "writing" into something that looks abundant from 10,000 feet. The result is that the remaining high-effort indie sites end up in this weird funding gap: too small and stubborn to become a VC-scale "media brand", too big and polished to be a casual side blog.

So you get this old-school, almost embarrassingly direct solution: just ask readers to buy back the author's time. No growth story, no "community platform", just "I can make more of the thing you like if you cover what the labor market no longer will." In a way that's the most honest possible response to the AI slop wave: not "we'll use AI better", but "we'll opt out of that game entirely and see if real people care enough to pay for it."