The potential of the creator economy undoubtedly offers many opportunities. However, more and more valuable content is required. Keep in mind that audiences and brands should not be underestimated and, above all, success lies in creating a community that is interested in this content, which makes it possible to understand their preferences and that a product of quality is always delivered.
Every day more and more people see the Internet as an option to expand their business model. Social networks have opened up a range of possibilities for content creators, becoming the best space to develop their digital products. However, although it is a growing industry, it takes knowledge, planning, perseverance, goals and a strategy to go far and achieve monetization.
According to SignalFire’s report, more than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves content creators, a figure that was reached despite the creator economy being born only a decade ago. The creator economy, or also called creative economy, is a new economy related to digital products, such as online courses, e-books or podcasts.
What exactly is the creator economy?
With the evolution of the internet, we have started to see various forms of democratization in industries such as traditional finance (crowdfunding), accommodation (home sharing/Airbnb), transportation (Uber) and many others. industries.
Essentially, the Internet has allowed people to have greater access to resources to invest, run their small businesses, and manage just about every aspect of their lives. This access opens up the closed community we talked about above, where media companies no longer have absolute control over the production, distribution and marketing of content.
Similar to the sharing economy, the creator economy relies on technological innovations, often startups. It’s a do-it-yourself (do-it-yourself) type situation, where a startup tech comes out with some sort of app so ordinary people can bypass the traditional gatekeeper elements of an industry to participate in something that was once inaccessible.
To the extent that the Internet has given the public access to instant, low-cost stock trading (which was expensive and reserved for professional traders in the past), it has also broken down the barriers built by these media companies.
Not only that, but the Creator Economy offers comprehensive business management tools for creators to connect with fans, market their products, and monetize their creations.
Here are some examples of the creator economy in action:
- An unknown writer can skip traditional publishing and become a blogger, publish a newsletter, accept subscriptions through Patreon, and publish their own eBook on Amazon, all without the high costs, gatekeepers, and distribution limitations of before.
- A stay-at-home mom without a telecommunications degree can launch a global news-focused media empire with her own monetized YouTube channel.
- A fashion enthusiast can become a social media influencer on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, host their own fashion shows, give style advice and earn money from promotional posts, sponsorships and income advertisers.
- A graphic design student can sell prints, t-shirts, and mugs from their bedroom on an affordable e-commerce platform like Shopify.
- A single dad with no radio experience can start a podcast on the Anchor app to record content, distribute episodes, monetize with ads, and manage an entire community of listeners.
- A gaming enthusiast can tap into the world of development by creating video games on Hiberworld and then monetizing a community on Epic Games.
- Anyone can live stream their favorite pastime using affordable tools like a laptop, webcam, and social media platforms like Twitch.
- Musicians can create and sell music files on a platform like StageIt, eliminating the need for a record label.
- Any average person can check out their favorite hobbies and create courses to teach others, monetizing the whole process with Teachable or Thinkific.
- Creators can put paywalls on their exclusive content with Patreon, while keeping most of the profits for themselves instead of giving it to an intermediary.
Why is the creator economy important?
The creator economy is important for a variety of reasons, but when presented in an overarching statement, here’s why people care:
The creator economy allows people to create, distribute their creations, and earn money from those creations without limits.
As mentioned earlier, this new style of content creation takes the power away from a small group of people and puts it in the hands of the actual creators. It is democratization.
Instead of a record company owning the rights to thousands of albums and taking a stake in the process, the artists themselves retain ownership of their work, while bringing in more money for their efforts.
The world is moving in this direction, and while not everything is perfect (it’s much harder for creators to manage everything themselves, and some platforms try to take advantage of creators by offering low royalty deals or high), we can see that this is at least a step in the right direction for e-commerce, content creation, art and business in general.
What should we expect from the future of the creator economy?
Here are some thoughts on the overall creator economy, as well as ideas for what to expect in dual creators in the future:
- Content will become more accessible than ever. Consider research papers. They are traditionally blocked in one way or another from the public, requiring you to have some sort of library or industry access account. Not only that, but industry studies and medical journals are convolutedly formatted and often cost an insane amount of money for the average person. The same could be said of courses taught by renowned professionals. Masterclass is the first we’ve seen anything like this where you don’t have to go to college and come to that campus and pay high tuition just to learn from the best people in an industry.
- We will start to see media companies paying big bucks to gain access to creator ownership. Media lose control over content as creators don’t need certain platforms or companies to distribute their work. Just look at how Spotify paid Joe Rogan an incredible amount of money to make his podcast exclusive on their platform.
- Creators will begin to associate in more formal groups for the purposes of networking, cross-selling, and content creation. It will have some of the downsides of the media-controlled economy of before, but at least content creators still have a full domain on their work.
- Although new, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) should evolve into a more targeted way for creators to make money. Being able to create a completely unique and verifiable work of art, music, or writing and then sell it has so much potential.
- Influencers will promote brands without being solicited or paid. We’ve seen it before with Elon Musk and crypto and Hiteh Shah and Lazy Lions where they already own some of that asset so using their likeness is a sure way to increase its value and make money without interacting actually with a company.
- Creators will look to equity deals rather than full endorsement payouts. Great wealth has been found by claiming ownership of a business that is bound to grow. Ryan Reynolds is famous for this with Aviation Gin. Why get paid once when you can hold equity that grows over time?
- We will constantly see new monetization options. Cryptocurrency has already brought us NFTs.
