It's quite a simple question but I think it's something that's not that easy for us here on Hive. 

In a way many could say that some of us here, often times also newcomers get "spoiled" so to speak. We're so used to inflation being one of the main monetization tools that we barely use the tipping function, I'd reckon tipping, apart from it being in the form of 0.001 Hive spams to your wallet with a memo assigned to it attempting to get something from you, is only a tiny fraction compared to votes that occur here. It's somewhat sad that the recurring payment feature which compared to other platforms and most of the blockchains is free to use, i.e. doesn't cost any fees and there's no middlemen between the sender and receiver, is so seldom used.

We're all so used to upvotes being the norm way of monetization that it often leads to a lot of disappointment and shock when downvotes some times occur, even if they're "meant well" and only take a little bit of the pending rewards. Many instantly go on the offensive to take it personal, feeling as if they were "robbed" of rewards and the classic "this is censorship" angle. Now I do agree that there are bad downvotes out there as well and unfortunately countering those is one of the things that remains unincentivized on Hive while most other things are, but then again so are downvotes and they're not often used unless the downvoter deems them necessary or actually uses them "the wrong way". Luckily there are many stakeholders who don't mind countering "bad downvotes" even if it costs them some returns doing so, but okay not going to get into the downvote part too much in this post as that's not what it was about to begin with - so please don't make it about that in the comment section, I know some of you are at the edge of your seat to do so.

On #web2 the main way to generate an income off of your content is through adrevenue, sponsorships or subscription models, the latter something they convince you to join in exchange of exclusive content they won't "give out for free". None of these things are really that common on Hive if they exist at all, I'd say out of the 3 sponsorship may be something that happens here from time to time. One could want a popular author to bring up or promote a project of theirs and ask them if they'd be willing to do so in exchange for rewards/upvotes/money, maybe this has happened but hasn't been mentioned by the author, but I haven't seen much use of it. It could be that it's also one of the dilemmas of our userbase being too small for any advertisers or promoters wanting to promote their projects here, on top of that there's also the promoted feature that some front-ends make use of where the hive/hbd you use to promote your content instead goes to @null effectively burning it from supply. At the same time posting content exclusively for only few people isn't really possible on Hive considering how open everything is, someone would have to go through quite some trouble to create a platform that were to decrypt all of the text and only give some accounts access if they filled the requirements, which could be a subscription model. 

I never really understood those models to begin with, though, because all it would take is one account to pay for it and publicize the content free of charge on their own account, so those who are fans of the author would just consume it for free there instead and no one would be any wiser. Some gamification could help make that part obsolete though where you'd be happy to support the content creator, but that again brings me to my question. Do we have such content creators on Hive or are those mainly the high-end ones who on other platforms would earn a nice living from adrevenue and sponsorships who would make a subscription model work for their content/personality?

Can you think of any authors on Hive that you follow that you'd miss if they stopped posting? Do you think there's any point to this method on Hive considering you can support them through upvotes/inflation?

I definitely have a few I could consider straight paying a fee to get to consume their content but I've also been here quite a while and gotten used to reading their posts/thoughts over the years. Aside from Hive there's only a few content creators I "subscribe" to and that's a couple streamers over on Twitch, unfortunately our streaming platform is a bit too small for me to make the comparison as I haven't had any luck finding such content creators here, yet. 

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