At Creator Economy Tips I like to cover new media trends in business and social as the Creator Economy continues to mature each day and each week heading into the middle of 2022.
Hey Guys,
I have become more interested in the Creator Economy, since I took the plunge to write full-time on Substack. So let’s get into it:
Pinterest’s new inclusion bonus to its Creator Fund offers chosen participants $25,000, that’s $10,000 more than LinkedIn’s program. LinkedIn’s accelerator program is currently active only in India. (Where I guess they pay them less).
As competition heats up for creator talent, Pinterest this week announced it was more than doubling its initial investment in its Creator Fund with an additional $1.2 million in a combination of cash grants, ad credits and other creator resources for underrepresented groups.
The company last year announced the debut of its $500,000 Creator Fund alongside new content policies and other creator tools. However, even with the fund’s increase and Pinterest’s other creator commitments, Pinterest’s investment remains smaller than the massive efforts from other social giants, including Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.
or you can read:
After announcing its Creator Fund in April 2021, Pinterest last fall said it would invest another $20 million toward Creator Rewards in the U.S., which would pay creators directly for participating in “challenges.” That effort is not considered a part of the Pinterest Creator Fund, however.
THE CRYPTO MEDIA ECOSYSTEM IS HEATING UP AS BITCOIN’S PRICE RISES AND WEB 3.0 HYPE INCREASES WITH NFTs
The Block has employed longtime Bloomberg News editor Sarah Kopit as editor-in-chief.
The crypto information website desires to develop its newsroom from about 20 journalists to as many as 100 in the subsequent two years.
The Block says it makes tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in annual income, equally from adverts and subscription merchandise.
Crypto information and analysis firm The Block has appointed a Bloomberg News veteran as its new editor-in-chief because it plans to quadruple the measurement of its newsroom over the subsequent two years.
AVALANCHE LAUNCHES $100 MILLION CREATOR FUND WITH GRIMES
Avalanche launches $100 million creator fund with Grimes and web3 platform Op3n.
Ethereum-challenger Avalanche makes cultural play with a $100 million creator fund to launch projects on the network exclusively accessible on social media platform Op3n.
Grimes’ plans for an “intergalactic childrens’ metaverse book” will kick off the fund, with a collaboration on Ava Max’s new music video to follow suit.
The Web 3.0 upstarts might just hit the Creator Economy harder than platforms like LinkedIn or Pinterest are willing to do.
The Avalanche Foundation and web3 social media platform Op3n announced a $100 million initiative for creatives to build projects on Avalanche as the blockchain network grows its profile with non-crypto natives.
Named the Culture Catalyst initiative, the first of these funded projects — paid out in the network's native token AVAX — will go towards musician Grimes. The singer, who previously sold $6 million worth of NFTs, plans to create an "intergalactic childrens' metaverse book" which she hopes can follow in the footsteps of the acclaimed Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro.
WHO SAYS NEWSLETTERS ARE DEAD
Morning Brew generated $50 million in 2021. Not bad for a company that was bootstrapped by two college kids in their dorms. Morning Brew’s primary newsletter has surpassed 4 million subscribers after hitting 3 million just eight months ago.
Morning Brew generated about $50 million in revenue in 2021, during what’s been a boom time for newsletters.
The company is actively exploring M&A to extend its coverage into new verticals.
This shows that Newsletter initiatives can scale into media companies.
What started as a light-hearted business newsletter for college kids by two students in their University of Michigan dorm room has become a multidimensional media operation.
Riding its popularity, Morning Brew now has more than 230 employees creating newsletters for retail, marketing, HR and emerging tech.
I guess we really just like to read with our morning cup of coffee eh? Morning Brew generated about $50 million in sales in 2021, Rief said, more than doubling 2020′s $20 million annual revenue.
PATREON AND SUBSTACK LOOK NECK AND NECK IN SUBS
"Patreon has amassed 8 million patrons (i.e., subscribers to creators) and has paid out $3.5 billion to more than 250,000 creators."
As the creator economy continues to grow, Jack Conte is figuring out how to keep Patreon relevant on its own terms.
“Finally, everybody seems to be excited about compensating creative people what they’re worth instead of the minimum amount that tech companies can get away with,” Conte says
and:
“So I’m thrilled that big companies, small companies, startups, venture capital—everybody’s trying to solve this problem of how do we make creativity not just accessible and available for people and ubiquitous and cheap to enter into, but how do we make it a lucrative profession.”
Since launching in 2013, Patreon has become the platform of record for creators to charge monthly or annual subscription fees for access to their content. Patreon has amassed 8 million patrons (i.e., subscribers to creators) and has paid out $3.5 billion to more than 250,000 creators. (It originally crossed the $1 billion threshold in 2019.) The company itself was valued by investors last year at $4 billion.
Substack and Patreon are both ready to experiment with native video. Last year, Conte announced that Patreon was developing the capability to host native video on the platform, videos that would be uploaded directly to Patreon rather than being embedded from YouTube or Vimeo.
“Patreon does not serve advertisers. We don’t work with brands. We never have. And that creates a very different set of incentives, a very different set of governance metrics for the business,” he says.
That sounds a bit like Substack’s ethics as well.
HOW YOUTUBE OWNERSHIP OF CONTENT IS SCALING WITH THE CREATOR ECONOMY
"Catalog investing [is] the next frontier in YouTube content monetization."
How do YouTubers make a living? Usually, through a mixture of merch sales, membership programs or maybe even a custom product. But YouTube ad revenue makes up a sizable chunk of the pie chart.
A YouTuber’s back catalog becomes a financial asset — every month, they know they’ll get a payout from ever-increasing engagement on their past content. Now, the Los Angeles-based startup Spotter wants to help creators scale their channels faster by offering them large sums of upfront cash in exchange for the future ad revenue from their existing uploads.
Spotter has licensed content that generates over 40 billion monthly watch-time minutes.
In Mid February, 2022, the company announced that it raised another $200 million in Series D funding from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, valuing the startup at $1.7 billion. Before that, Spotter raised $555 million across three undisclosed funding rounds.
Softbank typically invests in disruptive startups many with implications in A.I. but here is a definitive Creator Economy bet.
WILL KIDS VIDEO BOOST THE CREATOR ECONOMY?
Kids' entertainment is the new gold rush in streaming video. The toddler’s face is glowing green from the tablet in her hands, which shows a cartoon boy singing a nursery rhyme and dancing with dinosaurs. Ah it’s the jelly face of YouTube indoctrination.
The toddler doesn’t know what dinosaurs are or what the lyrics mean, but she’s so entranced that she doesn’t blink when her mother calls her name. The kiddie-video segment in media though is big business, as you can imagine well.
It’s not entirely clear how much of CoComelon’s runaway popularity stems from this formula and how much it owes to the pandemic, which put more kids in front of screens. As parents juggled childcare and remote work, demand for kiddie content spiked 52% between January 2020 and February 2022, according to data from Parrot Analytics.
Read more about this Children’s entertainment juggernaut.
THE NEW YORK TIMES LIKELY TO CANNABALIZE UK MEDIA IN THE NEAR FUTURE
The New York Times is the fastest-growing news brand in the UK.
The New York Times more than tripled its audience month-on-month in February, making it the UK’s fastest-growing news brand.
The websites and apps of the US publisher reached 11.7m people (23% of internet users aged over 15) in February – more than three times the 3.5m people it reached the previous month, according to data from Ipsos.
If you like data on media and journalism in the UK you will like this read and analysis:
NEW PODCASTING EMPIRES ARE FORMING IN THE NASCENT PERIOD OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY
Crooked Media now has 21 million monthly downloads of its 25 podcasts.
Crooked Media, the progressive media company that produces the top-ranked “Pod Save America” and other podcasts, signed a multiyear, multiplatform agreement with SiriusXM.
New media also means new ways audio, video and video-game media intersects with the attention economy.
The agreement gives SXM Media, the advertising-sales arm of Sirius XM Holdings, exclusive global ad sales rights to Crooked Media’s lineup of podcasts starting in May. This will also result in M&A in the podcasting, video catalogue and niche sectors of the Creator Economy.
As part of the agreement, Crooked Media’s podcasts, including “Pod Save America,” “Lovett or Leave It” and “Pod Save the World.”
WHY MEDIA ACQUISITIONS DON’T ALWAYS WORK OUT
Companies that don’t understand the verticals they acquire can do some pretty awful things with those acquisitions. SiriusXM leapt into podcasts with a $325 million deal — insiders say it’s off to a messy start.
Hearing people describe the heyday of Earwolf, the comedy podcast network, you can understand how it so quickly developed a roster of talented comics, from the Sklar Brothers and Harris Wittels to Brett Gelman and Jimmy Pardo.
Conclusion
There’s a lot behind the scenes taking place in verticals related to the Creator Economy. New media, Media consolidating into digital formats, subscription services scaling, podcasting empires being born and being bought. Podcasting moving into video. Newsletters pivoting into podcasting.
Web 3.0 companies creating Creator Funds that are bigger than established social media companies. It’s a pretty crazy and eventful time for the future of media, the attention economy and the Creator Economy.
I’m trying to cover it, at least sometimes. I’m also upgrading a lot of my tips and tricks of how writers can scale on Substack better which is perma premium content here.
If you liked this content give me a like and I’ll try to curate more in this format on this Newsletter.