The Future of the Creator Economy

Wednesday morning. 10am, 4th February.

As I look out the window from my home office, I can see yellow crocuses starting to push through the mossy lawn. New beginnings.

I've spent the last decade building content engines to aggregate attention at scale. For six years I helped build, and eventually sell, Jungle Creations, which at its height reached 5 billion people a month through social video. At BBC Studios, I worked to apply that same blueprint inside a legacy organisation, combining top-tier IP with institutional weight to reach new audiences.

The world is shifting again.

It’s never been easier to create. AI workflows and GenAI production have collapsed the barriers to content creation. Content is always on, algorithmic and endless. Awareness has never been cheaper, but consumer trust has never been harder to earn.

Where does that leave the CMO?

Recently, I've had the luxury of time. Time to listen. Time to think. Rather than bank a batch of content I wanted the first newsletter to be a selfish endeavour. A cathartic act of quieting the noise by committing a few thoughts to paper.

To understand where we’re going, it helps to understand where media has been.

In the past, success in media and entertainment was largely a function of capital. With enough money, you could build the infrastructure. A printing press. A broadcast TV network. You could develop strong brands and IP, attract top talent, and distribute content through a narrower set of owned channels to reach a global audience.

Institutions brought the funding and the credibility. Talent performed within institutional frameworks. Everyone knew their place.

Then it came crumbling down.

In 2017, I sat in a weekly commercial meeting with the Editor in Chief of one of the world’s largest publishing houses. Traffic was down year on year. Revenue in the red. Expletives flying. Full grown adults avoiding eye contact for fear of invoking the wrath.

Consumer habits had shifted in less than twelve months. News moved to the newsfeed. Video became the dominant medium. Websites stopped being the destination and started fighting for referral traffic from social platforms.

Audiences were more fickle than anyone once thought. The on-site publishing model was fighting for its life.

This moment feels eerily similar. In the last 12 months the rise of AI summaries has seen clickthrough to sites drop >50% and more than half of all new online articles are now written by AI.  

The lines between AI-generated and human-made content are getting real blurry and that has big implications for marketing. 

Three strong signals for the future:

YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, said last week  “Creators are the new studios”. Dude Perfect, Beast Industries & Sidemen Productions have shown that once demand is proven, it is possible to scale and rival the best in Hollywood. 

In the past, talent was dependent on the funding, production creds and distribution that the media owners could guarantee. A parent child relationship. Distribution has been democratised by the behemoth that is YouTube and talent are growing up and finding their independence.

The flavour of the moment is video podcasts. At roughly £5k per episode, two episodes a week across 40 weeks. You’re looking at ~£200k to test and prove a format in public. Layer in ads and sponsorships and the right talent-led shows can break even in series one. If it’s interesting, let me know and I’ll share the economics behind this in a later newsletter.

This low risk, audience-first model is working. Goalhanger, The Overlap, Fellas, History Hit are all talent led, digital-first businesses growing across ads, sponsorship and consumer revenue. Seeing the likes of TCN Group, Global and Little Dot come in and take stakes suggest something bigger is underway.

Last week, the BBC announced it will make original programmes specifically for YouTube. Not clips. Not trailers. Full, format-native shows designed for digital-first audiences, with advertising outside the UK. And not a moment too soon, given YouTube overtook the BBC's combined services in the UK on certain viewing metrics.

Just yesterday, Amazon's the Grand Tour announced their new line up; a presenting duo from Throttle Houses’ YouTube Channel and our fav train spotter Francis Bourgeois.

This is the future: Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, the BBC all stop competing for audiences and start competing to serve creators who already have them. 

For CMOs building brands or studios building IP this means one thing, whatever the ambition be it strategy, creative, development, paid media - it has to begin with creators.

“Creators” is a great catch all term but it’s too expansive. We often think about them in terms of size (Celeb, macro, micro, nano) but this is reductive. We need to start looking at these tastemakers through a different lens. One that goes beyond reach and looks at hard technical skills and capabilities, depth of relationship, audience affinity. The list can (and should) go on.

Here’s a starting point. What role are creators playing for your business now?If we know that they are only getting more powerful, how are you going to leverage that for your benefit?

That’s it for this week.

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