🔴 What is the creator economy?

It’s a new dawn for Creator Spotlight. This week, we switched to publishing our podcast on Tuesdays, delivering it to you in a newsletter penned by our new Assistant Editor, Natalia Pérez-González. That Tuesday edition is a lean, concentrated version of the format we’ve been sending out on Fridays since the start of 2024. We’re privileged to have Natalia on the team; she joins us most recently from Weber Shandwick and has spent the last 6 years as a freelance reporter, publishing in outlets including The Nation, Bustle, and Refinery29. She spent 2022 as a Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow.

Today, and every Friday from now on, we break new ground. Around once every quarter since I took the reigns at Creator Spotlight, I’ve written an original essay, not attached to any podcast episode, but drawing on what I’ve learned from those conversations, what I’ve learned from other sharp thinkers covering internet culture and the creator economy, and what I’ve observed navigating the feeds.

Past essays like "How liquid is your content capital?” have consistently drawn more web comments and email replies than any profile piece we’ve published, and I hope for our Friday editions to continue starting conversations; I ask you to share your thoughts in the comments.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

A unified definition of “creator”

There’s one question I ask almost every single guest on The Creator Spotlight Podcast: What is a creator? It’s a term with many different meanings.

I’ve landed at a definition that I’m happy with: a creator is somebody who produces digital media for distribution on one or more online publishing platforms for an audience beyond their immediate friends and family and somehow monetizes that media.

(If you’re curious how I got to this definition, I’ve written about it twice.)

This definition includes all three of a creator’s jobs: producing media, growing an audience or community for that media, and building a business around it. It’s inclusive of part-time and full-time creators.

There’s a more generalized definition I like, too: a creator is somebody who contributes to the corpus of the internet. We experience the internet as a series of content — videos, tweets, direct messages — and anybody creating them is, in a real sense, a creator. However, this definition is too broad to be useful when discussing the creator economy, as we are here.

What we talk about when we talk about the “creator economy”

Based on our definition of creator, I’ve taken a swing at defining the creator economy. I find this much simpler to define, having already defined “creator.“

The creator economy is a broad industry comprising digital media creators and service providers that connect these creators with consumers. These service providers include individuals (such as agents, strategists, and salespeople) and companies (such as Meta, beehiiv, and Elgato).

Most creators are not directly managing all three creator task groups (creating, growing, monetizing). Complete vertical integration is exceedingly rare in the creator economy. Most of this work is outsourced to a mix of service providers, both human and software.

These three task groups define the creator economy.

• Create

  • People like writers, photographers, producers, podcast hosts, videographers, graphic designers, etc.; anybody producing media

  •  Any tool used to record and edit media. (Meta (Instagram, Facebook), the camera app on your phone, Riverside, Figma, Google Docs)

• Grow

  • People like strategists, marketers of all kinds; anybody working on audience acquisition

  • Any software used to reach and engage consumers. Meta (Business Suite), beehiiv Boosts, recommendation tools on any social platform, algorithms on any platform, etc.)

• Sell

  • Salespeople, middlemen 

  • Any software used to convert attention to revenue. (Meta (revenue share), beehiiv’s ad network or subscription feature, YouTube revenue share, Shopify, Stan, etc.)

When we talk about the creator economy, we’re talking about people and software operating in one or more of these categories. Hardware is included, too — the iPhone is an absolutely essential creator economy product, as are microphones, cameras, ring lights, and so on — but the creator economy is digital-first. Most physical creator economy products have other primary purposes.

Most creators do not have a vertically integrated create-grow-sell system; MrBeast’s business generates hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but he does not own YouTube; he and his team are strategists skilled at using the platform to reach users, but it’s space they rent through ad revenue sharing.

The creator economy relies on foundational platforms — like the iPhone, Meta, and internet service providers — but they generally contain the creator economy as one component rather than relying entirely on it to survive. It relies on them to survive.

What is the creator economy to traditional media?

The best description of the creator economy versus traditional media I’ve seen recently comes from Ryan Broderick, creator of the Garbage Day newsletter (and former Spotlight guest). Specifically, it comes from a conversation he recently had with Felix Biederman, one of the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast.

What Ryan terms “Post World” here is the creator economy. This framing makes me wonder if the creator economy is less of a long-term industry than a moment in the long history of the media industry. In 50 years, will it still be a term we use? Or will it be considered an era of disruption preceding an era of reconsolidation?

All we know is that the attention-hour pool will only continue to increase, barring some planetary disaster or a Luddite turn. But will it fragment — will the creator economy eat traditional media or reconsolidate — will a new institutional media form?

New institutions

In the forest of media, attention is life-giving light.

Attention is a zero-sum game, the resource for which anybody producing media competes. There are an estimated 402.74 million terabytes of data created every day.

In a forest, a tree falls, and new light is shed on the forest floor; new shoots sprout, even from the rotting body of the fallen tree.

Americans are consistently spending more time with media than they used to. A study published by Statista late last year found that “In 2023, the average daily time spent with major media formats, including television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital platforms, reached 12 hours and 31 minutes.” Still, the supply of information competing for our attention increases at a pace far greater than the available supply of attention.

In the forest of media, trees and plants are information. As opposed to traditional media, the creator economy can be characterized by a greater volume of plant life and a faster growth-to-death cycle due to increased competition.

Across the three categories of creator work (producing media, growing audiences, and monetizing) are opportunities for competition, collaboration, and exploitation. There’s a war on! For attention, for money, for power.

Participants in the creator economy have at least two paths: form new institutions and work together to make them less reliant on mass-market social media platforms that own your growth and (a variable portion of) your sales functions or lean into mass-market social media platforms.

Last week, we published an interview with Amanda McLoughlin, CEO of the podcast collective Multitude. The shows in her network are all in the top 5% of podcasts globally, according to Listen Notes. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. She’s a rare person who is adept in all three of the creator task groups, but she doesn’t go alone; the podcasts in the Multitude network have larger audiences both because they are networked and because the network’s membership is limited.

A solo creator faces more barriers to success than a small group of creators who can fill each other’s skill gaps; a small group of creators faces fewer barriers to success than a massive network that ultimately ends up in inter-competition for the same attention. Sustainability is a middle ground.

Mass-market platforms aren't going anywhere because almost nobody is top-tier at creating, growing, and selling. And there will be no shortage of platforms productizing some version of growth and sales. Neither will there be a shortage of service providers.

There’s an over-saturation of people operating only in the production column of the creator economy, but we’re far from saturation in terms of high-quality production distributed across niches. Just the same, we’re far from saturation in serving those same purposes in the growth and sales categories.

There is all manner of plant life in the forest; much of it doesn’t even need much light to survive.

This is what the creator economy is: a complex ecosystem of creators and service providers competing for attention in an increasingly crowded landscape. The supply of information will continue to balloon and the supply of attention will continue to grow at a much slower pace; combined quality of information, precision of growth motion, and sophistication of sales will never lose.

Have something to say about this essay? Disagree with a point? Let’s discuss in the comments.