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Do you know what’s BIG, bold, and here to stay?
Yes, it’s the creator economy!
Whatever business you’re running or working for, odds are you’ve already bought something from a creator or will soon. At the very least, their content will influence your purchase decisions.
The creator economy is here to stay. To do that, it will go through a consolidation phase in 2024.
Creator economy stats and current state of affairs
There are over 200 million creators but only 4 million have over 100K followers. The creator economy is growing FAST but the average income isn’t growing that fast.
Only 10% of creators make more than $100K a year, with 26% of them making less than $1,000. On average, it takes six months to make your first dollar and 17 months to earn enough to support yourself.
Inequality is alive and well in the creator economy, with male creators making nearly twice as much as their female counterparts.
The biggest challenge for creators is getting their content discovered.
What do all these data tell us?
- People are drawn to the creator economy, so they join it in droves, but rarely with a clear plan. Speaking of clear plans, I built this to bring clarity to yours.
- 2020-2023 were “discovery” years. 2024 will be the year to separate the wheat from the chaff. The cash cushions accumulated during Covid are running low, so a lot of creators will go back to the safety of regular jobs — at least part-time. Worry not, though, there will be plenty of others who join.
- In 2024, most “veteran” creators (with more than a year under their belt and a validated monetization strategy) will start consolidating their channels and their revenue streams. It will be a year of fewer risky bets and more tried-and-tested approaches.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been taking notes about every budding trend in the creator economy. Some proved to be fads, while others managed to convince me they would stick.
Today, we analyze the latter.
Psst, my subscribers read this before you did. Want to be the first to see analyses and roadmaps like this one? Subscribe to Ideas to Power Your Future and get them in your inbox every Thursday.
1. B2B creators are on the rise (and they get inspiration from B2C influencers)
The role of B2B creators and influencers is no longer reserved for mega-stars like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Elon Musk. There’s a need for smaller-scale creators that people listen to — because they are more relatable.
I don’t care what note-taking app Elon’s using because I know he can afford five assistants. But someone close to my league? Yes, please, share your tech stack, I’ll click on your affiliate link.
In this respect, B2B creators are somewhat akin to B2C influencers: Kim Kardashian started by recommending beauty products, clothing, and accessories from other brands. She built her own brand(s) but still has partnerships with other brands.
B2B creators will get brand deals (more on that below) but also build their own digital products. Some of them will build adjacent brands as well, as Kim K did. Or like my friend John Harrison, who used his copywriting skills and his partners’ business and SEO skills to launch an AI-powered writing solution, Penfriend (this is not an ad, just an example of how B2B creators use their skills to build additional revenue streams).
TL;DR: personality-led brands follow similar trends, whether they are in B2C or B2B, creators or influencers*.
*I wrote about the distinction between influencers and creators here.
2. Hybrid mode activated
Unlike influencers*, B2B creators don’t just sell sponsorships, merch, or their own products. They sell their time, too, because they have valuable skills to offer.
More and more creators have offers that allow you to work with them directly: 1:1 sessions like mine, but also live workshops, communities with office hours, fractional roles, and more.
This isn’t just a way to pad bottom lines. It allows creators to interact with their community directly, to learn about their wants and needs, so that they can build better products.
In fact, a big adjacent trend I see taking shape is self-paced, zero-interaction courses dwindling. Buyers want a bit of your time, so you need to open up your calendar.
3. Owning multiple channels will lead to better brand deals
Newsletter sponsorships were big until recently. CPM rates (Cost Per Mille, what you pay for every one thousand newsletter subscribers on the books, irrespective of how many open the email) are lower and lower.
Don’t get me wrong, email is still the best platform for B2B creators and the only one I can recommend to everyone.
But for decent brand deals, you need a cross-channel approach.
Creators who have a decently-sized audience on email, social media, and/or a podcast will fare much better than single-channel creators.
What to do next: start building a second or third channel. And work on your sponsorship deck — yes, you can still get sponsors without a media kit/sponsorship deck but not for long and not for everyone.
If brand deals are on your agenda for 2024, check out Who Sponsors Stuff — each issue includes sponsors buying right now.
4. Audience growth is the creators’ main concern
Size matters, even for micro-creators (with audiences below 20K people across platforms). Remember the report above that said creators’ main challenge is getting their content discovered?
That’s just scratching the surface — discoverability is directly correlated with audience size.
It’s basic maths: the more people see your content, the better your chances of getting clicks, shares, referrals, and so on.
The same goes for monetization: if you can make $10K on a relevant audience of 2K, you can make $100K with an audience of 20K (provided you can maintain relevance).
My advice: if your combined audience is below 10K, spend at least 50% of your time growing it before you go all-in on monetization. When you have a bigger audience, it’s easier to get relevant survey answers, build relevant products, and monetize.
By the way, I’m working on a live audience building workshop — date TBD, in January-February next year. If audience growth is your concern as well, join the waitlist here and you’ll be the first to know when it goes live.
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5. More B2B creator partnerships in 2024
Whether it’s about building new products or simply tapping into one another’s audiences, partnerships are on the rise. You’ll see more webinars, co-created programs and courses, co-created content, and so on.
It’s the fastest, most affordable way to grow and smart creators are already tapping into that.
Case in point: every month, I join my uber-smart friends Hannah and Michael on an audio event on LinkedIn. We call our series Critical Thinkers Anonymous and we have a blast together, we explore ideas (critically!), and we engage with our audience(s) directly. This month’s event (Dec 13) is about paid growth in the era of comatose organic reach.
​Join us here to see how we leverage this trend before it becomes mainstream.
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6. Creators become full-fledged media companies
If you recently bought a mic, professional lights, or decided your phone/laptop camera doesn’t cut it anymore, congrats! You’re morphing into a media company and that’s the BEST thing you could do.
​Like it or not, you’re running a media company — I wrote this issue as a pre-warning that you need to start treating your business like a media business. The data support this take:
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All of these verticals point to creators being media companies. More interestingly, affiliate marketing has grown significantly and paid content subscriptions are a new-entry that already accounts for a sizeable chunk of creators’ income.
The New York Times makes money through paid subscriptions, ads, and affiliate deals. Netflix and Disney too. See where I’m going with this?
The most successful creators will be those who can get both right, just like a media company:
- Get people to pay for their content directly
- Get brands to pay to be featured in their content
An arms race has started
Creators are going toe to toe with established businesses. Some creator businesses make more revenue/employee than Fortune 500 companies. These are exceptions, of course, but they point to a trend.
But unlike mammoth-sized companies, creators have agility on their side. There’s virtually no chain of command, so they make decisions and iterate faster, thus shortening their go-to-market time.
Don’t take “arms race” literally — there’s no war here and no one’s rooting for the other to fail. We need big companies just like we need creators, so neither of them is going to disappear.
Instead, they will find ways to work with each other. Sponsorships and VC-funded startups that build products that support creators are just the beginning. In the future, I see more blurred lines, like creators joining big companies, either as consultants or as fractional CXOs.
Exciting times, don’t you think?
In the meantime, remember that 2024 will be the year of consolidation, diversification, and cross-channel expansion. Which of these will you be focusing on next year? Reply to this email and let me know — I’ve already started collecting data for my next trend report.
Since I have you here, quick question: did you fill in my 2-minute survey about topics you’d like me to tackle on Ideas to Power Your Future? Do it now, and get me to write about what matters to YOU.
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Adriana’s Picks
- Thinking about launching a course or a digital product in 2024? Join me and 5 amazing creators at the Solo Creator Summit on December 12. We’ll be talking about the best platforms to launch digital products on, how to build them, and how to promote them. Get your free ticket here!​
- I was a guest on The B2B Marketing and Copywriting podcast with Linda Melone. We talked about clickbait, bro marketing, and non-sleazy ways to sell. Listen to it here.
- Google announced that its Bard chatbot is now officially connected to its state-of-the-art Gemini AI system, which the tech giant alleges is more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4.
That’s it from me today.
See you next week in your inbox!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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