Major Platform Creator Features

How companies like Facebook and Spotify have entered the creator game

For years it seemed like your favorite platform companies were trying to bury their head in the sand when it came to the creator economy. Instagram made “influencer networks” persona-non-grata in their API TOS, Evan Spiegel famously lumped creators into the companies (“media”) bucket not the friends (“social”) bucket in their last redesign, and YouTube turned off paid channels due to lack of interest from creators.

A lot has changed in the last 5 years.

TikTok announced a $2B creator fund, Twitter is standing up as many creator-friendly products as possible, and Clubhouse is becoming the first social platform built in a creator-first way. It seems that all the platforms are piling onto the creator game. 

We decided to take a look at what everyone was doing and very quickly hit a wall - there is no good central repository of what their offerings are. So we built it. Along the way we learned some things we did not expect. We’ve compiled those findings and all the data for you so you don’t have to do that yourself.

Check below for the full table of information and links to the products. Note that some products are in the announcement stage so we can only link to press articles about them. Some products simply don’t have a homepage yet. It’s a sad truth of the state of the creator economy when Facebook has the most concise and creator-friendly product directory. Our hope is within a year you can type “<any platform> creator monetization tools” into Google and get something useful.

Without further ado, here is what we found:

• There are now way more creator monetization products out there than we thought.

• Facebook has a product to help you charge for online events (whaaattt?).

• Pinterest was about to score a big old goose egg for creator tools when they announced a few days ago that they have their own Creator Fund. It’s not much but it’s a start.

• During editing of this, Spotify announced podcast subscriptions and this morning Apple did too. As this was news until this AM, we did not include Apple on the platform list but I suspect in a future version they will deserve to be there.

• LinkedIn has zero creator monetization tools. Zero.

• By far the most ubiquitous form of monetization was tipping and virtual gifts. Almost every platform has some form of this buried in their product.

• Facebook makes up to 50% take rate on virtual goods (they call them Stars). Wow.

• Facebook and Twitter are charging 0% on fan subscription products for the time being.

• Enabling creator eCommerce is definitely the next wave that’s coming across all platforms.

For the complete dataset please click HERE

Note that we used the same categories from the creator economy taxonomy of the CreatorScape for consistency. We also added a few like Grants, and Newsletters which are not on the 2020 CreatorScape but will be in the 2021 version.

and..

I am sure we missed something here. Maybe a whole product or just a link to a really useful description of one. Please help us build the most useful resource for this online and send us any comments you have.

- Niel and Ryan