The “Creator Economy” is here…Are you ready?

The creator economy, currently valued at over $250 billion annually, will spike over $450 billion in less than 5 years. Job and wage growth has stalled or declined across nearly every sector in the last five years, and inflation is sky high, but somehow the creator economy is booming.

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life, economically speaking.

We’re living through the biggest transformation in modern economic history and it’s anyone’s guess what our financial future actually looks like.

The reasons for this are many: technology, AI, the economy, and so on, but we can actually trace the beginning of this shift to a very specific moment in time.

A few years ago a pandemic spread across the world that trapped millions of us in our homes for weeks or months (depending on your situation).

The disease itself caused a tragic loss of human life and the measures used to slow its spread damaged the global economy so profoundly that we’re still feeling the effects years later.

Millions of businesses shuttered, and many more barely scraped by on loans from the government but were forced to cut expenses; primarily labor. This flooded the market with unemployed professionals; and while some of us were reabsorbed later, but many just never went back to corporate life.

Companies were forced to adapt to remote working conditions and then, when they attempted to recall their labor force back into their offices after the pandemic, there was no stuffing the genie back in the bottle. In the end, hundreds of thousands of workers simply refused to come back.

“The Great Resignation”, as it came to be called, signaled our increasingly unsustainable level of dissatisfaction with corporate life. And at the same time, companies, still licking their wounds from losses of the pandemic, started investing into ways to reduce costs, expanding the gap between what their we, their workforce, needed and what our jobs could be expected to provide.

The robots took our jobs?

AI evangelists have long touted AI as the solution to the disaffected workforce of the corporate world. They say we’re unhappy because we have to work and should be replaced with robots who can’t complain. And yet, most of us are actually quite happy to work, so long as the work is fulfilling and profitable for us as well.

This is where we are today. Corporations are demanding more labor under increasingly unrealistic conditions while the traditional value proposition for laborers in the workforce is quickly evaporating.

It seems like a race for the bottom and every ambitious, aspiring worker is looking for an alternative to the bleak options the world has provided them.

This is true across every industry but these shifting priorities in the marketplace are most obvious in sectors that are highly integrated with technology: big tech, obviously, but also marketing, sales, and other sectors.

The marketing industry, in particular, got creamed during the pandemic. Brands and agencies dumped their most experienced talent in fear of their shrinking bottom line and they’ve tried to make up the difference by dumping the work on the remaining (junior) staff and subscribing to a few more AI tools.

After witnessing this culling, and absorbing the load, younger marketers are gradually waking up to the reality that they don’t have any more security in an agency job than they would out on their own -and maybe even less.

And the even younger generation of workers behind them is looking at this insanity with disbelief and dreams of making it big on TikTok, never wanting to enter the workforce in the first place.

And why not? Think about it for a minute…if agencies are replacing staff with AI tools, what’s to stop anyone else from doing the same? What’s to stop you from using the same tools to replace the agency?

If you’re a digital creator then you’re already, unofficially, a one-person marketing agency, so what’s to stop you from making it official? You’ve got marketable skills and proof of concept. You have literally dozens of AI-powered tools at your disposal. And everyone with a business is trying to be seen and that requires your very special skill set…

Having a freelance hustle is now the norm

Let’s look at some numbers to put this opportunity into perspective:

The rate of growth in the marketing industry, in terms of salaried job positions, has remained relatively flat over the last 6–10 years, and is expected to increase by about 7% in coming years -which is about the average across all industries.

And that’s just the number of jobs. Wages have stagnated or declined slightly in the last 5 years, if you account for inflation.

Now let’s compare that to the numbers we have on the growth in self-employment / freelance workers in the same period.

Upwork reported in their study “Freelance Forward: 2023” that 64 million Americans performed freelance work that year, which was the all-time high, and represents 38% of the workforce -up from 35% in previous years.

This represented an additional 4 million freelancers in 2023.

There are literally millions of skilled Americans jumping ship and going independent. And this is just the tip of a very large iceberg that threatens to sink the lumbering titans of all industries -but most especially those currently under assault by AI, like marketing and tech.

Marketing is where the money’s at in freelancing

It’s clear that more and more of us are shifting away from full-time employment, or are at least supplementing our incomes with part-time work. Not so much because of the opportunity that freelancing represents, unfortunately, but because of an increasingly challenging economy.

Job security is on the decline, employer expectations on the rise, and people are struggling to make ends meet. This is an unsustainable state of affairs and it’s driving workers to take matters into our own hands.

For many of us this means moving into the freelancer / creator economy where we’re more in control of our ability to earn. But what skills are in demand?

If you find yourself in a position to make such a career move, away from the deteriorating stability of a traditional 9-to-5 job and into a solopreneur or entrepreneur type situation, you’ll find it easiest to succeed if you focus on a certain niche of skills.

Upwork’s 2023 Freelance Forward report states that 47% of freelancers (over 30 million workers) provide “knowledge services”, such as marketing, programming, IT, and so on.

Because of the pandemic, a lot of the senior skilled labor in the marketplace was forced, in large part, to move into independent (freelance) roles. And the future generation, with all its up-and-coming talent, aspires to become independent creators and avoid the workforce entirely.

Either way, the skills we’re using are the same: programming, marketing, creative (design / video), communications, and so forth.

And though AI may force us to adapt these skills in the coming years, the underlying talents we’re developing alongside them will still be incredibly valuable.

Regardless of the tools or the mediums we use, the way that humans relate to each other has always been through telling stories and creating experiences. Our myths and legends prove this. But what’s important to consider in the context of changes to the economy and labor is: which of our skills transcend the work being performed and are essential to the experience itself.

For example: high-end video editing is an in-demand skill today but AI is already making it easier produce such effects without skill. Your skill with editing tools won’t be relevant in five years but the ability to captivate audiences will. Being able to write complicated code all on your own isn’t going to be very impressive either but architecting a truly frictionless user experience is.

At a point in the timeline where even CMOs are being outsourced (google “fractional CMOs”), you can be sure that even complex tasks like these examples are already being performed by freelancers.

Transitioning to the “Creator Economy”

We’re in a state of limbo where the old world is encountering the new one but the struggle for dominance is clearly still in play. It’s still relatively difficult to walk the path of a solopreneur. This is, of course, what keeps everyone from doing it and creates an opportunity for those of us bold enough to press our advantage now.

As the creator economy roughly doubles over the next half decade, a few things will happen that are reliably predictable:

• Demand for content will increase unimaginably
• There will be more big creators and many, many more mid-tier creators and smaller creators
• New creators have an even harder time breaking through than they do now
• Networks of established creators will influence which newer creators get attention

We’re still in the wild west period of the creator economy but it will not last forever. Once these factors are in place, the path to independence will be gate-kept by those who establish themselves in the space now.

The trick is figuring out how to dedicate time to establishing yourself as a creator when most of us are still trying to figure out how to survive the economic hardships we’re already enduring.

Almost 50% of creators recently surveyed by ConvertKit say that creating content is their full-time occupation but Goldman Sachs reported in April of last year that only about 4% of global creators make in excess of $100,000 USD a year. And this figure is not predicted to rise even though creator revenues will double by 2027.

Suffice it to say, becoming a fully-independent creator is not easy. Not now and not in the future, despite the astronomical revenue projections.

Given this fact, you might assume that buying expensive equipment, learning a ton of new skills, and having the time to be consistent with a mountain of content creation on top of working for survival just isn’t accessible to the average person.

And while it may not be accessible to the average person, it’s not inaccessible because of cost or complexity. It is challenging because it requires sacrifices that most aren’t willing to make but could, in theory. And this is what will set apart the creators of tomorrow from the consumers.

To become part of the 4% of creators earning a meaningful living requires continuing to create long enough, without relying on your content for income, for this dream to come true.

To make this work you have to be able to pay for your life while you learn the skills necessary to create amazing content and develop an audience around it.

This is what all the big players have done. They’ve worked, coached, run businesses, created products, and so on, while building up their personal brand and list so that attention from their audience can sustain them. But what they were not doing was counting on brand sponsorships, or TikTok’s creator program to pay them for views.

The views come long after the content, long, long after learning the skills, and a very long way from where you are now. And that’s not meant to be discouraging but, in fact, the opposite. If you start this journey out by looking for these impossible outcomes you’ll never last long enough to find out how to actually get them. If you’re consistent and have realistic expectations though, you’ll outlast the vast majority of your competition.

There’s a certain order to how building an audience and monetizing it actually works:

• First you give away everything you know for free to establish your clout
• Then you convince people to join your list / community / etc
• Then you spend time cultivating that community
• Eventually, after a long time, you can safely monetize it once you’ve established trust

But you have to be able to live while this is taking place and being a creator is almost a full-time job in itself. So how do you earn while devoting so much time to learning how to create?

You get paid to learn how to be a creator.

Work for yourself while you build an audience

The good news is that you don’t need to be trailblazer to figure this out. People have done this before. Arguably, long before there was a demand for “creators” making content, they were just creatives working in creative industries like marketing, media, and entertainment. They had the same choices: work in a corporate environment or go into business for themselves.

The difference is that there were no creator programs paying for views, so the idea of making money by “just creating content” is a new and novel invention.

The far more traveled (and reliable) path is the one where you harness your creativity for the benefit of others, they pay you for this service, and you get paid to learn (via experimentation), plus making a tidy profit on your time.

Alternatively, you can create products (digital or otherwise) which you sell to your still developing audience but this is a much more difficult path than simply trading expertise and time for money.

It’s also worth noting that choosing this strategy doesn’t rule out switching, or hybridizing, your approach later on. In fact, it only makes sense that to gain some experience working directly with the future potential customers of your product before attempting to create a product to sell them.

Creators have a broader appeal than typical freelancers because they already know how to manage a significant content creation (and promotion) process. This makes the average creator almost like a one person marketing agency. Perhaps this is why so many of the bigger creators end up offering marketing and coaching services along with everything else they do.

So if you’re an up-and-coming creator, of any size, and you’re even halfway good at what you do, you’ve had to learn how to tell compelling stories, developed some design and video editing skills, learned how to write copy, and to promote yourself through all kinds of digital marketing tactics.

If you can do all of that for your content, you can do it for someone else for money. And that specific set of skills is already in high demand and demand is only going up. So instead of working so hard to make your dream start paying for your life today, you can invert the approach and have a much easier time of it.

If you’re a creator, you’re a one-person marketing agency. The problem is that you only have one client -you. And you don’t pay very well.

Buy the time that you need to make your dreams come true by turning that creator skillset into a very profitable solo agency. Then work just enough hours to make your life as comfortable as you want and spend the rest of your time on becoming the creator that you dream of being.

If the idea of running a solo marketing agency to fund your aspirations of becoming a full-time creator resonates with you, follow my blog at NathanBinford.com.