🔴 What it means to be a creator

No guest today — instead, an essay wherein we attempt to answer three questions:

• 🤳 What do we talk about when we talk about “creators?”

• 📌 What does it mean to be a creator?

• 🤔 Do creators have particular responsibilities to their audience? Themselves?

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! No new episode this week; it’s a great time to browse the backlog. Listen on your preferred platform or watch on YouTube.

What is a creator?

I’ve asked this question of almost every person I’ve interviewed for Creator Spotlight this year. No answer has proven fully satisfying; the most all-encompassing answers are necessarily broad; they lack a useful point. Today’s newsletter means to find a point.

The “creator” definition I’ve been using since this spring, influenced by all the definitions shared in these interviews, is: somebody creating content for distribution online to an audience beyond immediate friends and family. This feels true as a surface-level description but lacks edge and fails to reveal a core truth. It describes what a creator is, but not what it means to be a creator.

Rachel Karten, who we featured in September, made sure to clarify a distinction between creators and influencers:

In this definition, an influencer is someone telling and selling their own story. A creator might do the same, but they’re more focused on craft — writing, producing, filming, etc. — creative hard skills. They’re telling stories about subjects other than themselves.

The influencer-creator distinction, though, matters less and less. Ten years ago, legions of influencers might’ve been able to command hefty fees to post Instagram photos featuring some product, and plenty still do so today, but the market is more competitive; influencers have been forced to improve their craft and, in doing so, have become creators or been left behind. Creators, meanwhile, execute influencer-style promotions because it’s part of a healthy revenue mix.

Ryan Broderick, who we featured in May, had a similar answer to Rachel’s, but instead of the influencer angle brought up creators’ relationship to tech platforms.

I asked Ryan to clarify what he meant by “Uber driver for posts.”

The definition he’s getting at here is something like: a creator is someone who works for the tech platforms they distribute content on and the audience consuming that content as much as they work for themselves. Like an Uber driver, a creator picks their hours and has some degree of agency, but they rely on the tech company to connect them with consumers, sharing part of their earnings in exchange. YouTubers, for example, get 55% of the ad revenue generated by their videos, while YouTube keeps 45%.

Let’s say you’re a full-time social media manager for The Acme Corporation, whose entire job is to manage the company's TikTok account end-to-end. You’re strategizing, writing TikToks, producing them, starring in them, posting them, and tracking the channel's performance.

The actions you’re executing day-to-day might be exactly the same as an independent TikTok creator who generates their living entirely through the platform, but you’re not a creator because you work for Acme; you are accountable to your employer, not to TikTik or your audience. To be a creator is to operate independently in the precarity of the attention company, your sail exposed in the storm to any upside or risk, absent employer-funded health insurance or long-held employer-employee relationship FTC protections.

The working conditions of the internet define what it means to be a creator

Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz wrote as good an article as I’ve read on what it means to be a creator for the Washington Post one year ago. (Taylor, as it happens, announced this week that she’d left the Post to focus on her own creator-journalist publication.)

It’s a thoroughly reported, well-researched piece I recommend reading in full. This passage serviceably sums up their points:

Yes, to be a creator is essentially to post online, as noted the people we’ve interviewed for Creator Spotlight — but the weight is that this is an intensely competitive, incomprehensibly massive, and largely unregulated arena. This is what it means to be a creator: to fight for limited attention with little to no labor protections.

Attention is the gold-standard currency

The nature of the creator economy — inasmuch as it is an unforgiving, endless competition for attention — is that the first “responsibility” a participant has is survival, a responsibility to hold attention, which is the gold-standard currency.

This is their responsibility to themselves if they wish to make a buck. It is their responsibility to their audience, who search for content worth their attention. It is also their responsibility to their advertisers and the platform they use, which may be functionally one and the same; a YouTuber monetizes through ad revenue provided turnkey by the platform, revenue unlocked through sustained and scaled attention.

This is the lone, impossible-to-fulfill goal of the mercenary creator: scaled attention. It is, by nature, unsustainable, a shallow well you must dig deeper every time you take of it.

Purpose beyond immediate attention is the foundation of a sustainable creator business

I often ask the creators I interview for this series if they think much about their responsibility to their audience and if that’s something they’ve defined. Some have clearly given the matter much thought. Others haven’t given it much conscious thought but will have an instinctive answer, usually concerning transparency and honesty, especially in how they communicate advertiser relationships.

I first asked this question — “What do you think about your responsibility to your audience?” — in my first interview for Creator Spotlight. The context is important; I was interviewing Henry Winslow, whose newsletter, Tricycle Day, is about psychedelics news, policy, and research.

John Doerr, a veteran venture capitalist, once said, “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Henry’s answer shows him to be a missionary — essentially someone whose work is driven by a deep sense of purpose rather than a desire for short-term capital gain.

A mercenary approach to the creator economy — producing clickbait, sensationalist lies, rage bait, AI slop — prioritizes attention above all else and provides no foundation to build upon.

A missionary approach understands that to be a creator is to be a type of modern media entrepreneur. It is defined by respect and duty to the creator’s specific audience and to the internet more broadly. This is how Henry sees it and how other creators I’ve interviewed see it:

All three of these people run newsletters serving very specific niches. All three are generating multiple thousands of dollars in revenue per month. The responsibility to their audience is how and why.

• Listen to this week’s episode of Tasteland, the podcast hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

  • This week: “magazines” are the inevitable endpoint of every form of media business, a magazine is just a container for taste, is neutrality in journalism over, AI agents consuming AI content, and the death of advertising,