Ten or twenty years ago if you were trying to create an online business the things were quite different than today.
You had to build your own servers, buy a special fast and super expensive internet connection, maintain and scale the infrastructure and data centres yourself. And all of that, before even thinking about creating a product or even attracting customers in some way.
But during those years all of these hugely expensive and time consuming tasks have been transformed into services that can just be turned on and off and plugged into your own world.
Services like AWS, Salesforce and Hubspot have made the building of a company so much easier that it used to be. And that’s awesome.
Today, if you truly know what you are doing you can assemble a stack of services to support your vision and then concentrate on what matters. Your product, your customers and your strategy.
As I follow the start-up world and the creative world very closely I see some similarities arising.
Creators a few years ago, needed to invest in websites and marketing in order to host their creations and attract eyeballs. Today platforms like Youtube, Instagram and Facebook have made that so much easier for them.
But again, creators did not have the tools to monetise their work. Then Gumroad, Patreon and Fullscreen popped out and tried to solve this problem. And they did, in a big way. Creators can now support their craft by creating and charging for it.
Today there are Youtubers making hundreds of thousands of $ per month and influencers and podcasters making millions per year. A few years ago, this was just fiction.
As a result the number of creators that have become full-time has exploded in the last 2-3 years. It’s a revolution in progress. And the pandemic only accelerated that process.
And that’s something the big distribution companies have now come to realise. They want to get in the game by providing paying solutions and better content hosting services for the creators.
Youtube launched Channel memberships, Twitter Super follows and Facebook Fan subscriptions. TikTok, Snap, Twitch, Substack, Onlyfans and Clubhouse are doing the same as we speak.
They want to make it easy and more accessible for creators to share content and get paid. And of course they want a piece of that pie.
But we are only scratching the surface here.
There are thousands and thousands of new companies that are created for the creators. Services that can accommodate every creator need and help them become full-time on their craft. This could be the “job” of the future.
NFTs are changing the game once again bringing the value of the “authentic”, “original” and “one of a kind” creation to the online world. A single image was sold for 69M and Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for 2.9M just some weeks ago.
Some info on NFTs: NFTs’ actual ownership is blockchain-managed. They are unique, rare and indivisible digital assets. Non-fungible tokens contain permanent metadata – like a certificate of authenticity for a rare painting. Also, developers have the power to limit the number of rare NFTs, making them scarce and desirable. Finally, NFTs cannot be split into smaller denominations – you can only trade them as a whole.
This is crazy (but is it?) and it’s only going to get more and more interesting.
The new Creator Economy is booming. Only in the USA creators earned a baseline of $6.8 billion just on the nine top platforms in 2017.
We could be living Renaissance 2.0. This is really big and it’s only going to get bigger as time goes by.
The internet was created by people for the people and now the same people can live out of the internet not by building a business online, but by tunnelling their creativity into it. Like fuel.
The possibilities are endless here. NFTs, VR, AR, Blockchain and many more technologies embrace the dreams of creators and are used to implement service for the creators era.
The era where people’s job will be just to express themselves and share those expressions with the rest of us.
A beautiful era.
