Starting out with a small audience

An illustrative scenario, not a real creator’s results. Tejaki
is in closed testing.

The situation

You stream regularly. A few hundred people show up, most of them the same people, and they
care about the subject. It is a good audience by every measure except the one platforms use.

Every monetisation programme you can find requires a threshold you have not reached.

Why the threshold model exists

Not out of malice — it is an administrative convenience. Assessing and paying a large number of
small creators costs more per creator than paying a few large ones, so a threshold keeps the
programme’s cost down. The cost of that convenience lands entirely on the people at the
bottom.

What the audience is actually worth

To a general advertiser, very little. To an advertiser whose product is specifically for the
thing your audience cares about, considerably more per viewer than a diffuse audience twenty
times the size — because they are reaching people who are already interested.

Follower count cannot express that. A stated rate, priced on what the audience is worth to a
particular brand, can.

How we would approach it

1. Price the audience, not the size. Specificity is worth paying for.
2. Remove the administrative cost that makes small creators uneconomic to work
   with. That is an engineering problem, and it is our problem rather than yours.
3. Pay per delivery, so a small amount arrives when it is earned rather than
   accumulating toward a threshold.
4. Keep it inside your existing workflow, so a modest fee is not consumed by
   production effort.

The honest limit

This does not make a small audience lucrative. It makes it earn something proportionate,
starting now rather than after a threshold. For someone building, the difference between a little
and nothing is the whole thing.