📺 the creator economy in 2030 and the growth of viewer-funded businesses

One last thought here: having said earlier that money comes into the ecosystem either from advertisers or from viewers, I’m excited to see how the two can work together to have a compounding effect. For instance, Maybelline could sponsor a beauty creator’s memberships business, sending members regular make-up samples or discount codes.

Finally, paying for creator-associated goods is nothing new: creators have been flogging merch, doing brand deals and adding affiliate links in their descriptions and bios for years.

Who will we even consider to be creators? I see two trends having an impact here. First, the line between mainstream and digital talent will fade away: not so much through creators ‘breaking through’ into the mainstream (a narrative that already feels out-of-date), as through the opposite - talent that has (or would have) found an audience through ... See more

There are fundamentals that I don’t see changing: money comes into the ecosystem either from advertisers looking to reach an audience, or from the audience itself. For the former, the creator economy will continue to capture a greater and greater share of ad spend, mostly because it will capture a greater and greater share of viewer attention. But ... See more

How to do this in a way that wouldn’t upset the creator community or disrupt the egalitarianism of the ecosystem or - after all, every channel starts with zero subscribers, and every video with zero views - is another question: I’m excited to see if anyone’s figured it out by 2030.

The first is around collaboration. I’m fascinated by the delta between the number of people it can take to produce a TV show or a movie, and the fact that many creators work on their own. And yet, to take a very reductive view, both achieve the same goal of entertaining a viewer for a period of time. One conclusion to draw from this could be that m... See more

The internet has created huge consumer surplus - people value what they’re consuming far more highly than what they are currently paying for it: that’s an incredible opportunity.

‘Experiences’ include interacting directly with the creator, the content and the community, and standing out from the crowd.

We can break viewer payments down into three categories: paying for content, paying for experiences, and paying for goods.