The creator economy, which has spent the better part of a decade insisting it represents something entirely new under the sun, is beginning to look remarkably like the media business it was supposed to disrupt.
According to Zach Blume, co-founder and president of Portal A, a content production company, the landscape is splitting along lines that would be instantly recognizable to anyone who has attended an upfront presentation or placed a programmatic buy. At one end sit creators like Alix Earle, Druski and the apparently inescapable Mr. Beast, who are being courted for the kind of extended brand partnerships that used to be reserved for television networks with Super Bowl inventory. At the other end are the nano and micro creators — millions of them, really — who have become the digital equivalent of recipe bloggers with ad space to sell.
"Brands are increasingly approaching the space just like they would traditional channels with a media mix that reflects what they've done historically," Mr. Blume said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast.
The comparison to legacy media is not incidental. The major creators are now engaged in what Mr. Blume called "a brand marketing exercise," involving prolonged negotiations, creative input and the sort of integration deals that media companies have offered advertisers for decades. The smaller creators, meanwhile, have become a scale play — bought programmatically, in bulk, across platforms, by agencies like Influential, Whalar, Viral Nation and Billion Dollar Boy, which Mr. Blume described as "effectively media agencies for the creator economy."
(One might note that the advertising industry has a certain talent for reinventing the wheel and then buying it at both ends of the market.)
Mr. Blume was careful to note that this bifurcation is "not an either-or proposition," and that investment is increasing across the spectrum. Which is to say: there is enough money flowing into the space that everyone is still growing, even if they are growing into shapes the old media business would find oddly familiar.
Original story published in Digiday: "Media buys and mega partnerships: How the creator economy is splitting in two"