There is a peculiar assumption that runs through online conversations about creative work, one that suggests entertainment and commerce exist in separate universes, never to touch. If you write to entertain, the thinking goes, you must survive on ad revenue or Patreon donations while “serious” writers—the ones who produce white papers and case studies—get to charge real money. This binary has warped how we value creative labor, and it deserves to be dismantled.
Consider your own behavior as a consumer. When did you last make a purchase while bored? Compare that to how often you’ve bought something while laughing at a podcast, engrossed in a newsletter, or following a story on social media. Entertainment lowers our defenses. It builds trust. It creates the psychological conditions where spending money feels less like a transaction and more like a natural extension of the experience. The writer who makes you feel something has already done the hardest part of marketing—they have your attention.
This is not manipulation. It is simply recognition that humans are emotional creatures who make decisions based on how we feel, then justify those decisions with logic afterward. The entertaining writer who recommends a product, teaches a skill through narrative, or builds a world that readers want to inhabit is providing genuine value. That value deserves compensation beyond whatever fractions of a penny ad networks deign to distribute.
The confusion stems from a misreading of history. We look back at the magazine era, when fiction writers were paid handsomely by publications supported by advertising, and assume that model was the only way entertainment writing could be profitable. We forget that those same writers often sold books, gave lectures, and cultivated direct relationships with audiences who would follow them anywhere. The advertising was a delivery mechanism, not the business model. When that mechanism collapsed for digital media, we mistakenly concluded that the writing itself had lost value rather than recognizing that we had lost the intermediary.Today the intermediary is gone, and writers must build their own bridges to readers. This is more work but also more opportunity. A technical writer might charge five thousand dollars for a white paper that three people read. An entertaining writer might charge five dollars for access to a story that five thousand people read. The math works out the same, but the entertaining writer has five thousand people who know their name, who trust their voice, who will buy the next thing and the thing after that. Entertainment scales in ways that pure utility rarely does.
The resistance to this idea often comes from writers themselves, who have internalized the notion that asking to be paid for pleasure is somehow dirty. We have created a culture where suffering is the only legitimate credential for artistic work, where financial success is treated as evidence of selling out rather than evidence of value created. This is a convenient mythology for those who would prefer not to pay creative workers, and a destructive one for the workers who believe it.
There is no shame in wanting your work to find an audience and wanting that audience to sustain you. The newsletter writer who makes you laugh on Sunday morning is doing something harder than the one who summarizes industry news. The novelist who keeps you up past midnight has earned more of your attention than the content farm that optimized for search engines. We know this intuitively when we experience it. We need to know it intellectually when we price it.
The path forward requires abandoning the false choice between entertainment and commerce. The most successful creative businesses of the coming decades will be built by people who understand that entertainment is the engine and commerce is the fuel, that you cannot separate what you make from how you survive, and that readers are not foolish for paying to be delighted. They are simply recognizing value where they find it, as humans have always done.
