How creators and Gen Zs will dynamite the media industry.
On July 2nd, controversial Youtuber, Jake Paul, got married to Tana Mongeau (also one of the most followed creators on the platform) in an unparalleled ceremony. Cameras were everywhere and almost every recognized youtube star was Vlogging the event. Surrounded by his crew in a room in front of the church, Paul, Jake’s older brother, was live-streaming a new episode of his podcast “impaulsive”. While this episode got 2 million views on YouTube and as many podcast downloads (Paul publishes all of his podcasts on Youtube) his brother, Jake, received 10 million views. But more impressively, Jake cashed out $3.7 Million live streaming the ceremony on a different platform, Halogen: 50,000 of his fans paid a steep $72 to watch the event live. Jake is just another example of how creators are starting to monetize their audience in large, unexpected ways. This ceremony displayed content similar to a reality show but brought in revenue at a much higher magnitude. That’s the power of creators.

At the same time, 300 miles from Jake and Tana’s wedding, Mike Tyson is lighting a joint with LL Cool J, ready to start recording a new episode of his podcast, Hotboxin. To host such a show on TV, Mike would have certainly been paid millions but he decided to monetize his audience directly, mostly through merch and ads. The audiences of Jake Paul and Mike Tyson are radically different but both are the sign of a titanic shift in the media industry. Creators and celebrities alike are now building empires independently, without the support of mainstream media or advertisers. They are connected directly with their audience through various formats (podcasts, videos, and short blogposts) and are capturing more of our attention every day. Contrary to traditional media, they don’t need to attract everybody, but just a small number of loyal fans…
From mainstream to niches
For the longest time, mainstream media platforms have focused on one single thing: getting as many eyeballs as possible. This made sense at the time since their revenue model was mainly built on advertising. TV networks and digital media alike would use audience or Comscore numbers to convince advertisers.This is the way media companies have made money for two centuries, as Andrew Chen underlines it in his Subsack investment memo “By the 1500s, however, technology had begun to democratize access to books (…) All this information — and the writers behind them — was still centrally distributed through the book publishers and media outlets that owned the relationship with the audience. Even though there was now a technology for creating and distributing information at scale, there was no business model for it. That is, until newspaper publisher Benjamin Day came along in the 1800s and invented a new, advertising-based model for the distribution of the written word. (…) Since then, the internet has opened up new opportunities for media producers. A writer, streamer, or podcaster can now reach an audience of millions. Powerful tools have been created to make it easier to self-publish any format of content. Social media has allowed people to amass large followings of dedicated fans, creating a new class of jobs never thought possible: professional gamer, professional travel influencer, professional fan-fiction author, and much more. But most of this is driven by advertising-based business models from the 1800s — the technology may have changed, yet the economic model is largely the same.” Today this model has started to reach its limits and could be interpreted as a source of Fake News and clickbait on most platforms. As demonstrated many times, fake news is often motivated by greed, it is an arbitrage between facebook ads spendings and google Adsense revenues.
But attention has shifted, while millennials and boomers alike tend to be more attracted by mainstream/corporate media, Gen Zs systematically prefer smaller creators. We need to take a break here and define what is a content creator. Most people over 30 tend to associate creators to fashion influencers because they are the ones you are most likely to encounter on Instagram. But content creators are different, they independently produce valuable content for a specific audience through a meaningful medium: video, audio, and text. Following this definition, most influencers aren’t creators because they only focus on pictures. They can be journalists, make-up professionals, gamers… They are all experts in their domain and delight their audience on a daily basis with their content. They make part of a new economy, defined by Li Jin as the “passion economy”.
Their impact on youth is so big that being a Youtuber is now the first job kids would like to do when they get older in America. Furthermore, 40% of the Gen Zs say that they feel closer to content creators than to their real friends. Their reach is now unprecedented due to the enormous audiences they have built during the last ten years utilizing platforms like Youtube or Snapchat. Moreover, they tend to reach a very specific audience; you can almost think about them as cable TV Channels, some specialize in cooking while others will only cover celebrities, gaming or music. However, the relationship they have with their audience is very different than one between viewers and a television show. In many ways, it is way more similar to the relationship one would have with a singer. These creators are in the same position that artists were in 2005: having a hard time distributing and monetizing their content.
This situation creates tremendous opportunities but few people can understand them. I firmly believe that you need to consume this content or be a creator yourself to fully understand the capabilities of it. Building a solution requires an equal understanding of technology and culture. Hopefully, our team at Snipfeed has both.
Creators are building a new market “the passion economy”
Innovation tends to come from unexpected places, and for consumer technologies, gaming, porn, and Chinese apps have always announced trends before they became mainstream -think about live streaming for example-.
Across the pacific, the passion economy is already huge. Creators have been able to monetize in multiple ways through direct to consumer relationships. Some of them, like Ruhnn, have even IPOed (she raised $125M through her US IPO). Live streaming and podcasting are two examples that highlight this phenomenon. In China, live streaming hosts can earn enormous sums, up to a reported $200,000 a month and more and average top streamers may earn $5,000-$10,000 a month (which is huge compared to the average salary in China). Most of this money comes from virtual gifts sent by their fans as well as premium streaming,

The gaming industry is pretty similar here too. While Twitch has a unique subscriber and ad-based revenue structure, most Western live streaming platforms are extremely similar to Chinese ones, insofar as streamers can earn cash rewards from virtual gifts given to them by audience members. If you hop on any of these platforms you will quickly discover that virtual gifting is most definitely not a phenomenon that only occurs in Asia.
But more surprisingly, podcasters also monetize in similar ways. Simply put, U.S. podcasting revenue is primarily ad-based. In China, they mostly use a subscription model. It turns out a national research institute in China determined that what they call the “pay-for-knowledge economy” is worth billions of dollars, especially with podcasting content that offers useful knowledge, skill-building, and tools that can help make consumers successful in an increasingly competitive job market — as well as their growing society. One of the Chinese podcasts mentioned in the Marketplace story is “How to Make Your Voice More Attractive.” It was created by a professor of broadcasting, Zheng Wei. He has more than 200,000 subscribers to a podcast aimed at white-collar workers trying to get a leg up. The cost? $3 per month, or $8M in ARR.
And this phenomenon is quickly emerging in the US too, starting with the porn industry. Actors and “influencers’ alike are cutting out the middlemen and monetizing through Onlyfans and Premium Snapchats. Many of those creators aren’t even pornstars, they are models, influencers or even fitness instructors. Onlyfans, created in 2016, is the biggest player in this market and has 70,000 creators with 7.5 million subscribers and growing (every day 30,000 new customers join the platform). For $4 to $25 a month, fans will get access to a premium feed with explicit pictures or videos. If they subscribe to a premium Snapchat -provided by an external tier- fans also expect to be able to chat with the influencer and get daily updates through stories. The trend is so big that even Grammy nominees are making fun of the sum these creators make.
And we have all the reasons to believe that this trend will go beyond gaming and porn. As Li Jin puts it down in her article describing the passion economy: “The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning.
These stories are indicative of a larger trend: call it the “creator stack” or the “enterprization of consumer.” Whereas previously, the biggest online labor marketplaces flattened the individuality of workers, new platforms allow anyone to monetize unique skills.”
The Missing Piece
As demonstrated before, the supply and the demand for this content already exist in the US but platforms connecting both are missing. Creators have to choose between distribution or monetization. Platforms that offer great distribution have poor monetization features. Think Youtube, for instance, ad revenues are getting so small for content creators that views just aren’t enough. After meeting with the Yes Theory team for instance I realized that even with 5 million views, ad revenues barely covered the production costs. Their exceptional team then decided to sell their next documentary direct to consumer and it was an amazing success.
On the other hand, platforms that allow monetization are not good at distributing and recommending content and even their monetization features are too limited, not allowing for creators to reach their full potential. It remains unnatural for a user to go to a platform specifically to pay for premium content, retention and engagement tends to be extremely low. At Snipfeed we believe that you need to nail distribution to solve monetization. It is hard but not impossible.
After talking to thousands of creators we realized that no platform was meeting their needs, mostly because they are not flexible enough. Take Patreon for example, the platform was a pioneer and understood the problem before anybody else and remains as one of the biggest channels for podcasters and YouTubers to monetize their content. But 85% of the creators we talked to were highly unsatisfied with the platform. Why? Because monetization only works through subscription which is not enough. Creators want to be able to sell bundles of content, get virtual gifts, etc. Also, discovery doesn’t exist on Patreon, meaning users just don’t hang out on the platform, which makes the conversion way more difficult. Most people want to enjoy the free and premium content in the same place. Some creators can make quite a lot on the platform but the level of friction will only allow them to capture the tip of the iceberg. Finally, Patreon is more emotional than transactional, since most of the fans don’t really pay for content, but rather want to show support. Having been raised in Paris, Patreon to me is very similar to giving a tip to someone performing in the metro.
How we try solving the problem at Snipfeed
Now imagine that in a platform where you listen to all your podcasts and have the ability to buy an extra-episode, or maybe a bundle including some videos or maybe offer a virtual Ferrari to your favorite host. Monetization would be frictionless, easy, and fun, which is what we are building at Snipfeed.

One of the biggest problems of platforms that focus solely on monetization is that you cannot discover content. We believe that discovery goes hand in hand with monetization. Most creators are still unknown from the mainstream public, and our mission is to help you find creators whose content you enjoy while helping them monetize in various ways. We strongly believe that users are more likely to spend money on content on a platform where they enjoy spending their time. Most creators are also frustrated that their fans cannot enjoy all their content in one place, no matter if it is free or behind a paywall.

Another problem creators encounter is that fact they can only distribute one “format” on each platform. As mentioned earlier in this article, new media mostly uses three mediums: Audio, video, and text. However, they often feel frustrated that individuals cannot get a holistic understanding of the content they produce, jumping from video to audio in one click or checking a short video clip of the podcast before listening to it isn’t possible today, you need to open multiple apps to do so. We make it all possible by integrating these formats on Snipfeed and using AI to connect them. Creators can then consider their pages as “mini-apps” where they can distribute and monetize all of their content in a singular place. Take Jackie for instance, one of our partners, she is mostly known for her podcasts and videos. Many of her videos are related to the content she mentions on her podcasts, but she has no place to distribute and monetize both at the same place. One piece of content she wants to monetize is her wedding video, but she currently can’t do so on Patreon. However, she will dedicate a podcast episode about it and will redirect fans to her Snipfeed profile to purchase it, listeners who were already on Snipfeed will be able to buy it directly below the podcast. But we still believe that creators need other streams of revenues, which is why they have the ability to sell merchandise directly from the platform, using referral links in their store section of their profile-, and even the playlists they curate through the “shop the playlist” features. Think about it as a friend’s recommendation on steroids.

The Alliance
Platforms wouldn’t be as big as they are today without content creators. We are in phase three of the content revolution, the first two phases gave birth to massive creators but they are now ready to leave old-school platforms for new places where they can truly thrive. But to do so we believe that they need to be heard by technical people who are building the next big consumer products. Culture and technology are now meeting and will give birth to platforms that will define the 2020s. It will only happen if we work hand in hand, which is why at Snipfeed we created the creator council, where creators with massive audiences are giving us their insight and feedback to build the best product. They also have ownership in the platform, making it a win-win situation. Imagine if YouTubers had google shares and if some of them were VPs, the platform would be much healthier. Finally, it seems unlikely for a new platform to reach a massive scale without the support and input of creators. Once again Andrew Chen is right.
If you’re a creator and want to join us early please email me at redouane@snipfeed.co
