The Creator Economy – Who are they, what do they do and How do they make money?

50 million people consider themselves pro or semi pro creators. In this post, I cover who are they, what do they do and how do they make money as well as the best tools for creators.

byEze Vidra

February 8, 2021

13.0K views

2 minute read

Don’t let ‘perfection’ get in the way of ‘creation’ – just start. pic.twitter.com/GgD2iWml0b
— Eze Vidra (@ediggs) February 4, 2021

50 million people already consider themselves pro or semi-pro “creators”, according to Sigalfire’s in-depth “creator economy” report. Although there’s some overlap with freelance platforms, where creators look for paid ‘gigs’, I’d argue that while creators are looking to monetize their craft, they care about “artistic freedom”. To do that, they need to build and engage an audience, create unique, quality content and monetize it in different ways.

First, we need to understand who’s a creator, what do they produce and how do they monetise. While this is a partial list, you get a sense of just how broad the spectrum is in the Creator Economy:

The creator economy – who they are, what do they do and how do they make money? (Credit: Eze Vidra, VC Cafe)

Taking a look at the list above you can get a sense for what tools are needed for creators to create, distribute and monetize their content. It’s also a reminder that these creators are making themselves into a business, and so a lot of the tools they require are also SMB/Freelancer tools. This is a big area of opportunity for startups.

The landscape for creator economy tools is evolving rapidly. Here are a few of the directories aggregating the emerging tools for creators:

On the platform side, in the past, a few large platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok were the core distribution mechanism for creators. Now they are diversifying to more vertical, specialised platforms tailored to their needs.

Li Jin curates the Side Hustle Stash as a free resource to find platform-based work.

SMBs and freelancers, whether they are creators or not, need a range of tools to get their work done. From setting up a website to creating contracts or sending invoices. FYI curated a list of 171 free resources for freelancers:

Heywith created a list of 100+ tools to monetize your social media following. Ranges from memberships to donations.

100 website and tools to monetize your social media audience by HeyWith

Nuton created a creator stack, with collections of tools grouped by the type of output a creator makes (newsletters, podcast, gaming stream, etc)

Finally, Hugo Amsallem created a landscape of the tools for the creator economy in his newsletter, Arm the Creators

Creator Economy tool landscape by Hugo Amsallem

For more in detailed thoughts on this topic, see my previous VC Cafe post on the creator economy and check out my interview with Techcrunch (published yesterday, Feb 7 2021), where I shared my opinion on the challenges and opportunities in the creator economy, alongside other prominent VCs investing in this space.

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Eze Vidra

Co Founder and Managing Partner at Remagine Ventures

Eze is managing partner of Remagine Ventures, a seed fund investing in ambitious founders at the intersection of tech, entertainment, gaming and commerce with a spotlight on Israel.

I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.

I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.

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