Measuring the Sustained Creator–Audience Relationship on Direct-Support Platforms: A Mixed-Methods Study of Independent Cultural Production

Abstract

Independent creators increasingly reach supporters through direct-support platforms that remove the traditional gatekeeper; the publisher, gallery, or label that once decided who could reach an audience. A practitioner intuition holds that lasting independence depends less on raw talent than on cultivating the audience as ongoing work. Testing that intuition has been limited by the absence of a measure that separates a lasting relationship from a one-time burst of support. This study introduces a sustained audience relationship score, which summarizes how well a creator, keeps its recurring supporters over time on a scale from 0 to 1. The score is computed for 381 independent creator and community projects using public Open Collective data and is then related to the behaviors a creator can be observed performing, holding the quality of the work constant. A mixed-methods layer codes the text of 101 communicating projects against an eight-category practice framework. The score tracks ongoing retention closely (rho = 0.75) yet is only weakly related to the size of one-time funding (rho = 0.13), separating relationship from transaction. Observable cultivation behaviors did not explain sustained retention beyond work quality, in either the full sample or the coded projects. This pattern is read as absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence: the practices the intuition names are relational and largely unreadable from public artefacts. The contribution is a transferable measure of the sustained creator–audience relationship and a transparent, reproducible protocol for studying cultivation on open platform data.