Woah! Who says we creatives aren’t important? We’ve got a whole economy named after us. And baig tech companies are fighting to shell out $$$ to us?
Oh, Lord, please let this article be real!
by Elizabeth Cullford & Sheila Dang
Katie Feeney, an 18-year-old from Olney, Maryland, was in her calculus class on Zoom in November when she learned that a week of posting skits and unboxing videos on Snapchat (SNAP.N) earned her $229,000. Her $1.4 million in total earnings over the past seven months will be enough to pay for her college tuition at Penn State to study business.
Portland-based personal trainer Julian Shaw dug himself out of $18,000 in credit card debt during the pandemic by selling fitness education videos “with a bit of sex appeal,” on OnlyFans, a content subscription site favored by sex workers paid directly by followers for posts.
In the last year, major social media companies have raced to announce dozens of features aimed at attracting creators, an estimated 50 million people like Feeney and Shaw who range from internet personalities posting beauty tutorials on YouTube and TikTok to independent journalists selling newsletter subscriptions on Substack to video gamers live-streaming on Twitch.
The popularity of upstarts like TikTok, whose tools have helped unknowns generate massive audiences and whose $2 billion creator fund helped drive attention to the rapidly expanding field, has set off an arms race among big incumbents like Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet-owned (GOOGL.O) YouTube to lure the most popular creators, sometimes called influencers. They have introduced new features, funds and subscription or tipping tools to earn money from fans.