The Next 20 Years: What Role Will Large Social Platforms like YouTube Play in the Future of the Creator Economy?
This year, YouTube celebrated its 20th anniversary. For the past two decades, YouTube, and large social media platforms like it have been at the center of the creator economy. What started as a place that allowed amateur videographers to upload homemade videos and clips from popular TV shows quickly evolved into a platform that supported a more professional class of content creators. By the time Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.6 billion, just one year after launching the platform, communities had already started to form around popular creators like Smosh and PewDiePie. Now dubbed YouTubers, this new class of entrepreneurial, full-time creators realized that they could build their own businesses by leveraging social media platforms that allowed them to reach thousands of new eyeballs daily.
This new social media-centered, creator economy began to form around advertising. Brands quickly learned that getting their products in front of these niche, yet passionate audiences was an effective marketing tool, and creators learned they could generate income by sprinkling this messaging into their videos. Additionally, YouTube launched its Partner Program in 2007, allowing creators to further monetize their audiences by allowing YouTube to run ads before their videos and share the revenue. Over the years, other social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok would also begin experimenting with revenue share programs that incentivized creators to post content and build audiences on those platforms. And for the last twenty years, by allowing creators to directly monetize the audiences they were building, these large social media platforms became the center of the creator economy.
Reach, Relationships, and Longevity
But many creators have learned that building a business on top of a platform you don’t own or control comes with downsides.
First, a creator’s reach is at the mercy of social media algorithms. While these algorithms play an important role in channel growth, it’s difficult for creators to constantly have to change their creative to feed the algorithm and ensure that their content reaches their audience. If reach is unpredictable, so is the income tied to that reach, since platform rev share programs are most often tied to content performance.
Second, creators don’t own the relationship between themselves and their devoted audiences. Social media platforms are notorious for being walled gardens, unwilling to share fan data with the creators generating content for their platforms. As a result, content creators are increasingly finding it difficult to reach their fan bases when they have things to promote or news to share.
Finally, the longevity of social media platforms is out of creators’ hands. The shuttering of Vine in 2017 left short-form video creators scrambling to move their audiences to other platforms. More recently, the long-term viability of TikTok in the United States is continually being questioned, forcing large creators on the platform to invest more time and energy in alternatives.
Transitioning to a D2C Strategy
As a result, after two decades of platform dependency, several large creators have started experimenting with more direct-to-consumer (D2C/DTC) outlets for their content.
Launching in 2018, the large YouTube comedy account, CollegeHumor launched a fully branded streaming platform called Dropout as a direct result of the challenges outlined above. While initially maintaining both the CollegeHumor and Dropout brands, due to the overwhelming success of Dropout, they decided to drop CollegeHumor altogether in 2023, completely rebranding the existing YouTube channel. Now featuring mostly clips from their Dropout shows, their YouTube channel now serves as a marketing tool to generate new subscription customers for their streaming service.
Other creators have adopted a more hybrid approach to their D2C strategy, using it as a way to drive incremental revenue, while still maintaining their existing social media channels. Starting in 2021, Rhett & Link’s annual Good Mythical Evening livestream event is a date all Mythical fans circle on their calendar. A more risque outlet show than their more PG YouTube channel, Good Mythical Morning, Good Mythical Evening allows Rhett & Link a repeatable way to connect more directly with tens of thousands of their most loyal fans while also providing a creative outlet that lives outside the rigid content guidelines of social media.
Owning the Audience
While different in execution and scope, the goals of these D2C models are the same:
Creator-owned D2C projects allow creators to take control of their fate, reducing their reliance on third-party platforms.
Owning the distribution also means owning the audience. Direct-to-consumer platforms and livestream events help creators learn more about their fans while also collecting first party data to allow them to directly contact them in the future when they have something important to say.
The social media barrier between audience and creators is removed, leading to deeper and more direct relationships with fan communities.
Finally, ownership means creative freedom, both in terms of content and business model.
While YouTube and large social media platforms like it have shaped the creator economy over the last twenty years, the existing model is starting to change. The next decade will not be built by walled gardens owned by a small handful of tech companies, but instead by ambitious creators who will find new ways to form direct connections with their fan communities through creator-owned distribution channels.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Kiswe. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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