What is the creator economy? It’s defined as the class of businesses built by over 50 million independent content creators, curators, and community builders

Creators moving their top fans off of social networks

Creators becoming founders

Creators gaining power in the media ecosystem

More than 50 million people around the world consider themselves creators, despite the creator economy only being born a decade ago.

There’s been a societal shift in consciousness towards caring more about feeling fulfilled in our jobs, having control over how we spend our time, and being our own boss. Fans see creators doing what they love for a living and aspire to follow that path that never leads to a cubicle.

To succeed, creators have to be incredible storytellers, relentless hustlers, and leaders of their fan communities.

a ton of companies have been built to support creators, especially the 2 million people able to make a full-time career out of it

Professional Individual Creators (~2M+) – Making content full-time

YouTube: Of the 31M channels on YouTube, ~1M creators have over 10K subscribers

Instagram: Of the 1bn accounts on Instagram, ~500K  have over 100k followers

Amateur Individual Creators (~46.7M) – Monetizing content creation part-time

YouTube: Of the 31M channels on YouTube, ~12M have between 100-10K subscribers

Instagram: Of the 1bn accounts on Instagram, ~30M have between 50-100K followers

Layer 1: Foundational Media Platforms. Since the late 2000s, we witnessed the birth of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, iTunes, Spotify, and more recently Snapchat, Twitter, Medium, Twitch, TikTok, etc.

platforms don’t always have content contributors’ best interests in mind so the smart creators learn to cross-promote and diversify their presence on different apps to minimize “platform risk”.

Layer 2: Monetizing Influencer Reach. Once top creators had built an established audience who trusted what they had to say, brands started to recognize the return on investment of paying creators to harness their on-platform reach to advertise products and services.

According to Mediakix, the current influencer marketing TAM is ~$8bn and it’s expected to grow to $15bn by 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing business sectors.

with each paid post, they’d lose some of the trust that they established with their audience, hurting their engagement and growth. Which brings us to the latest wave of creators’ evolution

Layer 3: Creators as businesses. This is where we are today! Having developed fandoms that follow them off-platform, creators can become full-fledged businesses with multiple revenue streams beyond ads.

The big trend we see here is that over time, creators are becoming more diversified in their revenue streams and are being funded directly by their fans.

Historically, content creation tools with social networks attached have been the most financially successful.

Unlike traditional brand campaigns, the influencer’s pay, in this case, is directly proportional to the ROI they generate for the brand.

This “economy of recognition” can let creators focus on making niche content designed to get their biggest fans to pay, and is advantageous for platforms as they can earn a cut while attracting creators without much work.

Cameo’s success can also be attributed to how easy it was for creators to get paid $50-100 for making a short 30-second video, which rapidly helped them grow their supply side.