By 2025 there is strong evidence that the “feature of the web” Chamath described—tools and business models that let creators own distribution and directly monetize their audience relationships—has in fact been built and adopted at scale.

• Direct‑to‑subscriber platforms. Substack provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design for subscription newsletters, podcasts, and video, letting creators send content directly via email rather than relying on social feeds. By November 2021 it already had over 500,000 paying subscribers, and by 2023–2025 it had grown to several million paid subscriptions and a $1.1B valuation, signaling a large, functioning ecosystem around direct audience monetization outside traditional platforms. (en.wikipedia.org) Notable independent media brands such as Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo were built around Substack-style direct subscriber relationships, then expanded into broader media companies—illustrating that creators can build durable businesses anchored in owned distribution. (en.wikipedia.org)

• Membership and fan‑funding at scale. Patreon enables creators to earn recurring revenue directly from fans via membership tiers. In 2024 alone, podcasters earned over $472M on Patreon across 6.7M+ paid memberships, with individual shows making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month from listener support. (businessinsider.com) This is precisely the kind of direct monetization of the creator–audience relationship the prediction envisioned, and it is large enough to support many full‑time careers.

• Decentralized social graphs and portable audiences. Web3 projects such as Lens Protocol explicitly aim to let creators own their social graph and carry their audience between apps. Lens, launched by the Aave team on Polygon, is described as a smart‑contract based social graph “designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community,” with user‑owned profiles/followers and modules that support direct monetization (e.g., paid “collects” of posts). (platoblockchain.net) This goes beyond just direct payments and directly tackles the dependency on centralized social platforms that Chamath was criticizing.

Collectively, these developments show that technology and business models now exist—and are in active, large‑scale use—that allow creators, influencers, and media personalities to (a) control their own distribution channels (email lists, membership platforms, decentralized social graphs) and (b) monetize those relationships directly via subscriptions, memberships, and on‑chain payments, rather than relying solely on centralized social media intermediaries. Since the prediction was that this would be figured out within the speakers’ lifetimes, and it has already been figured out and commercialized within just a few years, the prediction is best classified as right.