Hi it’s Ange!
Welcome to the 5th issue of Passion & Creator, the newsletter about emerging trends on the exciting vertical of the Creator/Passion Economy.
Every week, receive the news, resources, deep dives and the tips to better understand the ever-growing of the Creator Economy!
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to share comments, or questions. Don’t forget to like this post above and share it with your friends and colleagues. 😉
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The breaking news with Twitch new tactical move and others news
The fundings and exits to watch with 2 new rounds, $50M raised and an exit
The top content to read, see and listen with the GTM strategies of creator platforms
Let’s talk about Creator Economy with the creator monetization ways
The creator of the week with Adrien Garcia
Have a good reading 💁🏿♂️!
💰 Livestreamers endorsed by Twitch can now work with the competition
It is a big signal in the livestream world, especially the gaming livestream!
Twitch, the livestream powerhouse, announced this week that the creators involved in its creator Partner program, can now allow to do simulcasting. What’s simulcasting? It is making a livestream on different plaftorms at once.
It could seems trivial, but before the announcement, when you are a Twitch-endorsed creator, you cannot stream your content on other platforms. For exemple, a gamer could not being a Twitch-endorsed gamer and make livestreams on TikTok or Instagram.
This statu quo is explained by the battle for attention: Twitch doesn’t want that viewers could see what the creators are paid for on other platforms. It seems like the sports TV rights for example: you want to see football champion leagues, you need to pay cable networks to see it because the networks pays TV rights to have the exclusivity to polarize this attention and make it profitable with ads.
But now, it’s different.
Twitch Partner Creators could now make livestreams. The Twitch partner creators can know make live on TikTok Live or Instagram Live. However, it’s not the complete “deregulation”: they could not make livestreams on main competitors platforms such as YouTube or Facebook.
Why this matters?
This move will help the streamers to use the strength of multi-channel and Twitch possibly avoid a “creator drain”.
Simulcasting is the best opportunity for streamers to scale their business. For example, TikTok is now the platform with the best content reach.
As a livestreamer, my audience (and money) will coming from my engaged audience pool, my community. The more I could develop the size of my engaged pool, the more I could earn money from the B2B collaborations and from the community itself.
So, my goal is to have the best audience coverage per second streamed. And the simulcasting is the best way to scale it. It is not 1-hour livestream to 1 audience, but 1-hour livestream to X audiences.
So when rival platforms as YouTube offer opportunities to make simulcasting, it’s too much tempting.
If Twitch wanted to counterattack this offer, the solution could be to offer kind of “exclusivity bonus”, but it was the complete opposite. The company have even offered new contracts with less potential creator revenue. According The Washington Post investigation (very insightful investigation by the way, even if the newspaper and Twitch are part of the same house) Twitch used to decrease the revenue potential of livestream for new contracts of famous livestreamers, while maintaining the exclusivity clause.
It was just the trigger to launch the move.
As TechCrunch underlines, notables creators left the Creator Program due to the restrictive conditions. For example, LilyPichu the gamer of 2.5M followers on Twitch, and almost 3M followers on YouTube, choose the latter platform in last July.
In last September, DrLupo left the Twitch Partner Program to YouTube, followed by TimTheTarman to the same platform. It’s a pool of millions of views coming of a cumulated 11.5M Twitch followers that flocked to the competition.
Losing attention is losing money for Twitch: the company makes money with ads. So it’s their best interest to act and review their position before knowing its “Great Creator Resignation”.
Twitch represents the platform n°1 with +60% of gaming livestream market with around 140M monthly unique viewers , and wants to stay at the top. The contenders YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming collectively hold the rest of the market.
What the takeaways of that?
1️⃣ Create a perfect alignement of interest between creator & platform is not easy, even for big platform.
Twitch wanted to keep every % of the attention pool it gathered by working with famous creators, as it don’t want to share it with anyone. Livestreamers wanted to develop the biggest and most engaged community possible, so expand their scope of their streams is key for them. We have an issue there, that could be solved by compromises made by both parties.
Partners Creators have “sacrified” their absolute reach for more support in the Twitch kingdom, but Twitch had to offer earlier opportunities of community growth.
It’s very difficult to find a satisfying consensus. When it’s found, like Twitch has done for many years with livestreamers, it’s gold! But like in a love relationship: once acquired, you have to nurture it, and maybe it’s where Twitch meet difficulties…
2️⃣ Understand the personal evolution of your creator is key
I didn’t tell you that before, but according to the Washington post investigation, some creators wanted to reduce their volume of livestreaming to focus on their personal life, and Twitch did not accept it (it enforce creators to make at least 200 monthly hours, while YouTube asks the half).
Some creators began older, and have to handle a busy personal life, so that scaling their activity is key (do you remember the upside of simulcasting…? 😉). If Twitch anticipates this issue, they could adjust the contract for creators according to their life path, so that they could keep their creators (and their respective communities) longer in their pool.
Creators needs to be cared as long-time partners, not treated like expendable assets.
🖋 Twitch now lets partners stream on rival platforms like YouTube and Facebook
And some other interesting news…
Amazon launches Amp, its Clubhouse-like solution: Amp.
YouTube breaks sinto the podcast game.
Instacart opens shoppable carts, allowing creators to make live shopping money.
We had a small week, when the Creator Economy startups collectively raised $50M on 2 rounds and an exit!
🟪 Tessera (ex-Fractional) (2021 / USA 🇺🇸)
#Web3 : enables creators to buy, sell and mint fractions of NFT.
Raised a Series A of $20M
🟪 Modulate (2017 / USA 🇺🇸)
#Gaming / #Moderation: fights toxic behavior in chats of online games
Raised a Series A of $30M
🟪 Current Technologies (2019 /USA 🇺🇸)
#InfluenceMarketing: enables creators to be brand ambassadors & booked on influence campaigns.
Acquired by Pattern®, an e-commerce and marketplace acceleration provider, at a undisclosed amount
If you want to see the previous rounds of 2022, their investors, and discover other companies of the Creator Ecosystem, do not hesitate to check my +600 organisations Creator Economy Database (still in progress), by clicking on the link below 👇
Today, let’s see how the greatest social media platforms develops their business to become part of the powerhouses of the Creator Economy. All these platforms answer to a cornerstone of this ecosystem: Gather a community!
With these insightful content, you could go with some takeaways if you’re developing a creator platform 🤓
All these articles are written by Ali Abouelatta, a amazing writer who explains in simple words how the best tech products you could know started from the bottom, on his newsletter First1000! Enjoy 😉
🖋 Instagram in 1 minute: how Instagram got its first 25k customers in one day?
🖋 Discord: Everything you *didnt* know about building Discord.
🖋 Snapchat: How Snapchat got their first 30 000 customers?
🖋 Twitter: How Twitter got its first 1000 users?
🖋 TikTok
👨🏿💻 Tell me what do you think about this content in comments and what kind of subjects would you like to be treated in this section!
💶 How creators make money?
Some #creators make $100 per month, others +$1 000 000 per year.
How they do this? 🤔
These are 16 ways used by creators to make $$$: let’s check them 👇
The first type of monetization type is content-based monetization. The more the creator could create traffic on his content, the more the creator will be able to generate revenue.
🟪 Paid subscriptions → Produce consistently premium content & get it access through a paid subscription system.
🟪 Sponsored content → Create a content only dedicated to promote a good or service.
🟪 Affiliate marketing → Keep a part in your original content for a shout-out to a brand with a specific link.
🟪 Brand collaboration → Create a original content specifically focused on the brand.
🟪 Ad revenue → Publish a content on YouTube and generate a specific per thousand of views generated.
The second type of monetization is community-based monetization. The revenue will coming from the engagement and the loyalty of the community that the creator’ll be able to gather all along his journey.
🟪 Fan Tipping → Receive $$$ from fans via a donation platform.
🟪 Fan clubs → Create a digital space where people could have direct & privileged access to the creator, and a access to premium content.
🟪 Paid communities → Create a digital space where people have access to people in the same vibe, access to private events & content and put a monthly payment on it.
🟪 VIP meetups & events → Create a temporary & restrictive “by design” moment where people could have access to the creator, accessible through specific conditions and/or a paywall.
🟪 Live & virtual events → Create a temporary moment where people could have access to an activity the creator will share.
🟪 Shout-outs → Make customized shout-outs to your fans through a fan interaction platform.
The third one is the service: a creator could execute regular business services, based mainly on the expertise, reputation or track record the creator develop on a certain niche.
🟪 Speaking → Make an intervention on a specialized conference a key opinion leader where you give an access to your personal monopoly and negotiate a rate.
🟪 Coaching → Help a fan to achieve something you know very well on a live direct interaction.
The last one is the product: a creator can create and sell his own digital or physical products.
🟪 Course creation → Build a sequenced content package which will teach people a specific skill, add some live moments if you want, & put a paywall on it.
🟪 Digital product → Build a Notion template, a ebook, an NFT collection and put it on sale through a paywall or on a specialized marketplace.
🟪 Merchandise → Create a physical product line with your brand through creator-focused merch design & selling platforms or by yourself and sell it.
🛍 How to build a sustainable fashion business through a creator journey with Adrien Garcia
I used to listen a podcast about entrepreneurship called “Generation Do It Yourself” hosted by the digital marketing agency Casa Vostra co-founder Matthieu Stefani, where he interviewed company founders, athletes or public personnalities.
This week I wanted to share you the story of one of his guests I think incredible: the story of Adrien Garcia!
Adrien Garcia is the co-founder of Réuni. Réuni is a fashion brand focused on high-end, eco-friendly women clothes and fashion products, who sells in France and in Europe.
Nothing special, you could say, but he developed his company not from scratch, but from content creation. Let me explain.
Adrien worked in several sectors (food, hospitality …) before pivoting and attempting to break into the world he was passionate: the fashion world.
So, he went back to school to learn fashion design. The fashion world is hard, and after an internship at Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga and an entry-level position at the latter, he felt stuck at his place, where he could not develop his skills and deploy his creativity, and with no network to leverage to advance in his new career.
So, Adrien decided to explore more in-depth his new world by interviewing seasoned fashion professionals on a podcast (entrepreneurs, C-levels, artistic directors …).
Interviewing lot of fashion professionals enabled him to develop his expertise about the sector, learn its best practices, develop his network, and develop an audience passionate about fashion.
2 years and +90 episodes later, Adrien decided to launch his own brand Réuni. And the brand is a success!
3 years later Réuni’s launching, the podcast counts now 400 episodes and Adrien expands his scope by interviewing now people working not only in fashion, but in the others industries; and Réuni is now a fashion house of +10 employees, which are developed +20 original pieces, generated 1M€ this first year, and at the moment of the podcast episode in mid-2021, targeted 2M€ for 2021, and the 5M bar for 2022!
Why I choose to speak about Adrien?
Because he inspired me to believe that you could create a sustainable business directly from a podcast, thanks to the strength of the community.
The upsides of making a podcast before launching a business are multiple:
acquiring best practices from seasoned professionals
building a powerful network by meeting people and creating a personal connection with each of them
gathering an audience of people fan of you and your subject, people which could become one day your future clients.
He uses the leverage of the media and content creation to develop his audience, his expertise and create his own “track record” of successful fashion people interviewed, which help him create his future client base when his own project will be ready.
If you want to break into an industry from scratch: begin by creating content, then building a product.
Of course, it’s a long and hard journey : Adrien produced almost 100 episodes at Réuni’s public launching, but the consistency is the first skill of a successful creator.
Finally, this journey and these lessons could be used on others industries.
For example, Harry Stebbings and the venture capital industry is a great example. The VC industry is well-known to be very small and hard to break into.
Harry Stebbings decided in 2014 to begin to interview the best VC investors of Europe and US on his podcast, 20VC. The podcast finds its own audience and is still a success, 8 years later.
Thanks to his success, Harry could develop an expertise about tech investing and nan powerful network, so that he could launch his first £40M VC fund in 2017: Stride.vc.
Now, Harry is well-respected figure of the venture capital and tech industry, but at first he was a nobody.
So if you want to break into an industry, how hard it is, you have now a clear path about how to become someone in this ecosystem.
If you want to discover the journey of Adrien, go listen on Generation Do It Yourself by clicking here. (It’s a 🇫🇷 French-speaking podcast: I’m so sorry for my English-speaking subscribers 🙏, I don’t know if Adrien Garcia has given a interview in english about his journey).
🎙 The podcast “Entreprendre dans la mode”
That’s it for this week!
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See you next time 🙋🏿♂️ !
Ange Michael AHYI