This week really puts into perspective how 🔥 the Creator Economy has been these past few months. What feels like a relatively quiet week is still packed with high quality content and an 8-figure fundraising announcement.
That Demand Curve, Tho
Peter Yang came out swinging again this week with a great thread / article on the Creator Demand Curve.
BTW, Peter has come out with a course called Build for Creators. No afflinks here, but know that I’ll be signing up.
FYI: NFTs in NYT. NBD.
Li Jin’s $25k NFT sale made it to the New York Times this week.
Whatever you think of blockchain/NFTs, it’s really cool seeing the level of discourse being raised here. Seeing professional journalists grapple with — and now be able to succinctly explain — how this stuff all works, is a sign that maybe there’s only a couple bubble/burst cycles left before it’s all here to stay for good.
Get. That. Money.
Linktree? More like Kingtree.
Linktree announced $45M in funding this week, and I think it’s worthwhile to think about why for a minute. Yes, Linktree has a great product and an amazing brand. I don’t know if they do NPS, but I’m sure it would be through the roof. However if we force ourselves to be cynical — just for a minute! — it’s a landing page. In addition to a dozen high quality, differentiated products we covered in our Link in Bio Deep Dive a few weeks back, there are scores — if not hundreds — of competitors in this space. A talented designer and developer could build a competitor in a weekend.
Despite all that, very smart people are putting money into Linktree. Why?
According to Georgia Stevenson @ Index, who co-led the round, it’s because while things like discovery and leveraging followers is huge, driving heavily into enabling direct sales is going to be a big part of Linktree’s future.
From our perspective, there’s also a higher level narrative at play: 2021 and 2022 are going to be the Kingmaker years in the Creator Economy, and those very smart investors not only know that, but they think Linktree has a chance of being that King in the Link in Bio space.
Who can afford Discord?
Microsoft obviously. Details are still sketchy, but numbers like $10B are being thrown around. With 300M registered users and 140M MAU, that number feels a little low. If their acquisition of LinkedIn is any indication, things probably won’t change that much for Discord’s users going forward, but we’ll have to wait to find out.
Our Next Deep Dive
We’re working on our next Deep Dive piece. Our first Deep Dive was centered around Link in Bio tools. We coupled that with a Clubhouse which included the CEOs of Koji and Linktree (and which made us instantly regret not recording the whole thing because it was solid gold).
Our next Deep Dive is going to be looking at the various ways that huge companies — some of whom are not the typical creator-focused companies that come to mind at first — are helping creators monetize. This is a massive space, so if you have any leads, please reach out directly to @nielr1 and @angilly on Twitter!
Until next week!
As always, if you have any hot tips or hot takes on anything that happened recently in the CreatorScape, please drop as a note at creatorscape@influence.co.
If you’d like to learn more about the creator economy, please check out our market landscape which is the inspiration for this newsletter. We call it the CreatorScape and you can find it here and can read an overview of how we put it together here.
What are your thoughts on beacon vs. linktree?