The creator economy is booming. Amid the boom in new social apps, “creator-first” companies have emerged to offer services. These include influencer marketplaces, merchandise stores, and tipping platforms. This helps content creators make money across multiple platforms.
About 50 million people describe themselves as creators. These could be independent content creators, bloggers, influencers, streamers, and videographers. Today the total size of the creator economy is estimated to be a little over $100 billion.
The rapid growth of the digital and creative economy wouldn’t be possible without the evolution of the internet. Over 30 years, the web has gone from static pages to blockchain and decentralized platforms for creators.
Static pages and read-only internet defined Web 1.0. Web 2.0 was a dramatic leap – it changed the way users created and consumed content. Between 2000 and 2010 creators got access to content machines, such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
As the adoption of smartphones increased, wireless speeds improved (3G/4G/5G). The services and experience provided by these apps also improved. The creator economy boomed in 2021 with renewed interest in blockchain, cryptocurrency. And, it introduced the masses to the concept of NFTs.
Creator economy: The gamer changer
The decentralized, blockchain-powered platforms are changing the game for creators. They can now own the relationship with their audience like never before. Fans get rewarded for their engagement too.
The Covid-19 pandemic has propelled the creator economy into a new era. It is fuelled by the upward trend of people monetizing their passions to make a living. Creators experienced double-digit growth in traffic to their social channels and website blogs. This is an average increase in likes of 67.7%, and an increase in comments of 50%.
This is why Collective Intelligence Labs decided to dig deeper and compare the state of the creator economy before and after Covid-19.
The increase in internet time has meant an explosion in the number of new influencers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Increased interest and guidance on health, nutrition, beauty, fashion and gaming led to a sudden leap in influencer profiles.
Creator Economy Explosion
According to some estimates, there was a rise in influencer market by four to five times. There was particularly impressive action during the holidays. According to another study, 78% of marketing leaders employed influencer marketing in 2020. Around 13% of them took to influencer activity for the first time last year.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub data, the sphere has grown by US$800 million with the addition of just 31 influencer-startups since October 2020.
What’s next for the creator economy?
There have been several trends that are set to continue. Here are just three:
NFTs
Since the beginning of 2021, there has been a boom in the world of non-fungible tokens (NFT). The amount of transactions has propelled the NFT market into the billions of dollars, and the most expensive work pulled in US$69 million.
In the roughly 18 months since the emergence of DeFi at scale, approximately US$80 billion of capital has been contributed to DeFi protocols. At the beginning of 2020, the total capitalization of decentralized finance projects stood at $1.5 billion. And, in October 2021 it reached US$148 billion. DeFi is in principle a fairer way for creators to get paid and for value to be transferred around the creator economy.
Creator protocols
The emergence of specialized creator protocols allows creators to tokenize and monetize their content and digital assets. Global cataclysms and pandemics such as Covid-19 will continue to affect the creator economy. There will be more refusals of classic systems, economic crises and the lack of people being offline. People will go online more and more deeply with many opportunities to express themselves as creators.
Read the full report to learn more about what the future holds for the creator economy
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