Influencers were increasingly frustrated that their high-traffic content gave big media platforms lots of eyeballs, but relatively scant content creator rewards.

Along the way big tech hopes to capture a bigger slice of a market estimated at $104B and growing, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.

“The power has shifted away from the platforms to the creators,” SignalFire principal Josh Constine told Reuters. “The platforms all stepped up and realised that they were in grave danger of losing their labor force, if they didn’t add these features.”

the number of content creators on Facebook earning $10,000 a month from ads and fan support grew by 88% from 2019 to 2020, and the number of creators earning $1,000 per month nearly doubled over the same timeframe.

In terms of monetization, users will be able to tip creators through Stars, Facebook’s native tipping system. Eventually, Facebook plans to allow creators to charge for one-time or recurring access to Live Audio Rooms and said it would roll out an Audio Creator Fund to support emerging creators.

Substack and Revue currently take 10% and 5%, respectively

Even if the material profit is negligible compared to its advertising revenue, newsletters are another flourishing part of the creator economy ecosystem — something Facebook is looking to integrate itself further in.

Influencer marketing began taking off in the 2010s, and influencers themselves were some of the earliest drivers of the birth of influencer marketplaces — or platforms where influencers could connect with brands directly to ink sponsorship deals.

its Amazon Live Creator app allows influencers to livestream and earn commissions through livestream sales.

it may find the most traction is through Twitch, its game streaming service. Amazon previously hosted a Prime Day livestream on Twitch to sell its products

In Q3’20, creators streamed 206M hours — nearly double year-over-year — and users viewed 4.7B hours of video on Twitch.

Twitch currently derives the majority of its revenue from its 50% cut from subscriptions, but it’s reportedly hoping to up its ad revenue, which has higher profit margins. 

To fuel subscription growth, the company recently launched tiered subscriptions that differ by country to account for local pricing.

Livestream shopping is a critical next step for companies looking to succeed in social commerce, and Amazon is clearly looking to expand in this realm.

Taobao Live, Taobao’s livestreaming platform, reaped $7.5B in the first half hour of presales for Singles’ Day, China’s annual shopping festival.

The trend is expected to generate up to 20% of its total e-commerce sales by next year, up from 10% in 2020, according to estimates by HSBC and Qianhai Securities.

“We are the company that stands for the builders, the creators,” Nadella said back in 2016. “Every choice we make is about finding that balance between consumption and creative expression. I am inspired by what I see in the Minecraft generation. They see themselves as not players of a game, but creators of a world they dream up.”

“Creation, creation, creation — the next 10 years is going to be as much about creation as it is about consumption and about the community around it, so it’s not creating alone,” Nadella told Bloomberg in March 2021. “If the last 10 years has been about consumption — we’re shopping more, we’re browsing more, we’re binge watching more — there is creation behind every one of those. But I see that phenomenon being much more democratized.”

“It’s a competitive landscape, and creators certainly can go other places,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in an interview with Fortune. “But at the end of the day, if we offer the most amount of reach and the most amount of dollars or financial success, creators will come to us.”

More than 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than a billion hours of video are watched every day on YouTube, and it is expected to reap $30B in ad revenue in 2021.

Google Play similarly takes a 30% cut, but it reduced that to 15% for the first $1M developers make each year. By comparison, other infrastructure platforms take a smaller percentage — Stripe, for example, takes 3% from retailers using its payments processing platform.

“The creator economy would be 10x larger today if Apple’s fee was 3% instead of 30%,” Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia said in an interview with The Information. “I would say it’s the number one bottleneck to the creator economy today.”

big tech’s shift into the creator economy boils down to one goal: to retain users. The products and services that evolve out of big tech’s efforts will thus necessarily focus on their own platforms

Creators, however, are likely going to favor becoming platform-agnostic and becoming independent brands to ensure less dependence on any one platform.