
Welcome to Issue #16 of the Means of Creation weekly news roundup where we break down the latest news on the passion economy, including the happenings related to platforms, creators, startups, and trends.
This Week’s Interview: How Creators Became Digital Celebrities, with Evan Britton
This week we interviewed Evan Britton, founder of Famous Birthdays, the de facto celebrity wikipedia offering 200,000 biographies with a focus on Gen Z social media stars and creators.
Currently, the site registers 30 million unique monthly visitors, with versions in Spanish as well as Portuguese. The site’s content on all four of its social channels (YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram) has been receiving more than a 100 million views every month.
Find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Breaker or wherever you listen to podcasts, or as a video on YouTube here. Or subscribe to the Means of Creation YouTube Channel. And now, onto the news.
NYT Profiles Snapchat’s Newly Minted Millionaire Creators
(Image Source: Alex Welsh / NY Times)
What Happened?
- This week Taylor Lorenz at the NY Times profiled several Snapchat creators that have become millionaires overnight.
- Since November, Snapchat has been distributing $1 million every day to creators to incentivize viral content creation using its Spotlight feature.
- The Spotlight feature lets users share short-form video content. The million dollars is split proportionally based on consumption/virality, similar to TikTok’s Creator Fund.
👧 Li:
- Snapchat is following the strategy used by Alex Zhu at Musical.ly. First you want to create the idea that anyone can be wildly successful, and then build out a strong creator middle class.
- Getting rich overnight is not really happening on TikTok anymore — CPMs are in the pennies for TikTok’s Creator Fund.
👦 Nathan:
- Snapchat seems to be incorporating lottery elements to incentivize posting. It’s more exciting to have a small chance of winning $1m rather than a strong chance of winning $10.
👧 Li:
- Yeah exactly. TikTok does have lottery elements to it in terms of viewership and potential virality. But that doesn’t translate into dollars currently.
- I wonder how much creators are motivated by building an audience and status versus purely getting money. Are creators cross-posting the same video to try and get both — the potential audience growth on TikTok as well as the financial benefits on Snapchat?
- As a creator, we’ve been posting the same video on TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter Fleets, and Instagram Reels. Each one is good for different things: Fleets helps me reach older demographics like millennials, TikTok is best for going viral among the next generation. We know the Creator Fund isn’t going to pay us very much, but it creates great exposure.
👦 Nathan:
- I don’t think people care about money as much as the thrill and status of going viral. But for a company like Snapchat, money is easy to dole out and could be a way to get a positive feedback loop turning. You need a lot of content on a platform for some of it to be good, and for people to go there to view it and potentially create more.
- It’s the kind of thing you do to become more like TikTok rather than an alternative model to TikTok.
👧 Li:
- Snapchat needs to demonstrate that they are a platform that will generate new stars, rather than just having most of them cross-posting from TikTok. Only then will they be able to attract new creators.
👦 Nathan:
- Yeah, generating a star is very different from generating a millionaire.
👧 Li:
- Exactly. Facebook tried to do something similar with Facebook Watch a year ago. Facebook was artificially inflating payouts to encourage creators who were getting paid a slice of their ad revenue, but it didn’t stick.
- It didn’t work because of two things. First, the payouts weren’t steady. Creators saw their payouts fall. And second, the folks who Gen Z really look up to weren’t there. There was no native Facebook Watch star.
👦 Nathan:
- I think The Beatles said it best:
Andrew Yang Wants to Bring Hype Houses to NYC
(Image Source: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
What Happened?
- Andrew Yang recently announced his push to bring Hype Houses to NYC as a part of his mayoral bid.
- He wrote: “Our administration would also work to attract content creator collectives, such as TikTok Hype Houses, where young artists collaborate. We need to help create similar artist collectives that utilize new technologies.”
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