The creator middle class will rule the world

By Katie Burke and Iñaki Escudero

Creators and the creator economy are another topic we are watching on our innovation radar here in Accenture Interactive. It’s calling us to question traditional employment models in offices, it’s generating new investment and focus areas on the big tech platforms, and is being associated with crypto-revolution.

We wanted to explore this in a bit more detail and see what people in Accenture Interactive are doing with this space. We’ve learned a lot. The creator economy today is at a scale that we can’t ignore.

Stripe, which offers services to companies to quickly onboard and payout creators shared that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregated earnings and the number of creators is up a whopping 48 percent year-over-year. In total, platforms like Stripe have on-boarded 668,000 creators.

Essentially, creators are now a thriving profession and has moved beyond what used to be a reserved for influencers.

The number of creators earning a living wage (>$69K) has increased 41% YoY. The big platforms are also taking the trend to the next level. Meta has tools that help creators express their ideas, connect to fans, and be rewarded through monetization. TikTok has a creator fund, as does Pinterest.

Today, social media allows you to build large audiences. Although there are funds to pay creators for their content, the monetization systems are not necessarily beneficial for them. Platforms would generate engagement-driven entirely by creators but would share very little of the ad revenue back with them. Making money on the platforms is hard with some even claiming that the algorithm killed creativity.

A powershift

What we do know for sure is that people use creativity to solve their problems and that’s exactly what’s happening now as creators are finding new ways to monetize their content — their creativity — and signals are getting stronger in areas such as:

1) Start-ups with direct payment monetisation models are enabling ways for creators to gain more money for the content they create and connect them directly with their fan base. Look at Twitch and Substack as examples here.

2) NFTs and royalties for creators. Web2 is characterized by people creating the content and companies earning money while Web3 promises that the people who create the content are also the ones who earn the money.

3) Decentralised SMBs “Gen Z creators will redefine what we think of as SMBs. The way Gen Z creators today are building these businesses is fundamentally different. They rely on decentralized teams of contributors versus full-time employees (FTEs); team composition is fluid, even temporal, and distributed from the start; and revenue models are community-driven and often based on tokens versus dollars.” Jennifer Neundorfer, Cofounder and General Partner at January Ventures (Forbes)

The rise of the creator middle class

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of several social dynamics like online learning, remote work and last-mile delivery, but it has also empowered the emergence of a new creator middle class. A growing class of people who have increasing access to the wealth created by the attention economy (those who can get the most attention win).

The most fascinating part of this upward mobility is that it breaks away from traditional media concepts and creates new jobs and business opportunities.

Eric Freytag of Streamlabs summed up how media consumption has changed in an article he wrote for VentureBeat: “Rather than ten TV shows consumed by billions of people, we now have hundreds of millions of shows that cater to billions of people. You could be only one of ten people in the world interested in a niche topic, but chances are you’ll find content for it. Additionally, the people who are creating content for that topic are truly and authentically passionate about it.”

Gone are the days when the creative class had exclusive access to the means of production and distribution of content. Today creators own and curate not only the product but every aspect of the customer purchase experience.

Let’s put together some of the exciting shifts and changes happening today in the communications world: the decentralization of media and creativity, earned attention, access to new and dynamic marketplaces, the monetization of passions, the great resignation, remote work, or the value of experiences over ownership. Is your business embracing any of these behaviors yet?

Jack Welch said: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

Perhaps we are already beyond the end. Perhaps this is a whole new reality. Perhaps it’s time to accept the middle-class rules.

On December 17, 2020, Li Jin argued in her article published by the Harvard Business Review that: “The sustainability of nations and the defensibility of platforms is better when wealth isn’t concentrated in the top 1%. A healthy middle class is critical for promoting societal trust, providing a stable source of demand for products and services, and driving innovation.”

Societies and platforms flourish when there is a path for everyone to have upward mobility, achieve financial security, and learn and grow. And this is the real reason for the excitement around a bigger and more dynamic creator middle class.

Individuality is a feature of the creator middle class, and it’s available to everyone!