Unbundling the Creator
How the separation of audiences, content and media skills are ushering in Creator 2.0
Every few months a new twitter thread pops up trying to define the word “creator”. The most common definition we come across is that a creator is someone who builds an audience and creates content for them. This could be a podcaster, a streamer, someone on Racket, an artist on Twitter who creates NFTs for a living, or one of a thousand other examples. This definition is useful as it highlights two of the most important skills and assets that creators have: audience building and content creation.
Over time, these assets have been sought out for their value. Even before the creator economy, back when bloggers were the OG creators, businesses wanted access to their audiences. It was easy back then because AdSense was the channel to get access. Some brands got wise and started working their products into the content as well. I co-founded a company called VigLink which focused on making it easy for bloggers to insert affiliate links. We achieved a ton of scale and pushed an incredible amount of product sales across our network of blogs (something like $1B GMV, yes that’s a “b”, per year).
In more modern times, the influencer economy rebooted this cycle with brands being willing to pay for access to influencers’ audiences on Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Companies like Lumanu took that to the extreme by helping creators manage Instagram whitelisting. Brands also paired an influencer’s audience with their content creation about their products for the one-two punch.
In the creator economy, content became the most sought after asset with the rise of course creators. Companies like Udemy and Teachable democratized access to knowledge. Interestingly, the most recent version of platforms like Maven have brought the audience back into the classroom finding that cohort based classes or course communities add a huge amount to the learning experience. The most successful creators are thinking about building audiences now even if they started by focusing on content. A recent conversation with an edu-tech VC called this the unbundling and rebundling of the learning Institution. Udemy took Harvard courses and removed the students, campus, alumni network and cost while Maven is attempting to reintroduce them all again (except the cost part).
We’re starting to see the actual content creation skill set of creators become more valuable too. Companies like SocialNative allow businesses to buy content from influencers without having to pay for their audience. Lots of stock photography sites like Scopio are trying to reinvent the type of stock photography images that are available by focusing on diverse content creators who naturally create more diverse images.
More recently, there has been an increasing call to arms from larger creators to find people who have content creation skill sets like video editing, podcast production and even just basic social-media smart image creations to join their teams. It’s no surprise the people with those skills are the content creators themselves. We see this from brands as well. Some businesses on influence.co (including ourselves) have hired full time employees out of the community.
As the creator economy becomes flooded with derivative content monetization products, the next era of the creator economy will see companies start to look for opportunities by unbundling these three assets: audiences, content, media skills.