Welcome to Edition No. 1 of my weekly digital strategy newsletter, providing practical analysis of the latest in the world of content creation.
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Contents
I. Analysis: The Influencer Econo-Me
II. News: NFT-mania
III. Tips: Instagram Remixes
The Influencer Econo-Me
Earlier this month, Instagram became the latest super-platform to jump on the creator-monetization train, selecting 10 users for Subscriptions, aka “Helping Creators Earn Recurring Monthly Income on Instagram.”
(This is in addition to the “Reels Bonus Program” launched in November.)
As of Jan. 19, these creators can set a monthly price of their choice that will allow the influencers to create Lives and Stories exclusively for their subscribers. Badges will also show up next to the user names of subscribers’ comments and messages, which should make it easier for them to neglect the common folk who aren’t paying for their content.
The 10 creators are charging between $0.99-9.99 per month:
Some of the promo videos the users share for their subscriptions vaguely promise content you won’t see from them elsewhere, as well as a chance to develop closer relationships with their followers.
For example, you can pay $4.99 a month – the same price as Apple TV+ – for this guy to give you a food review of chicken tenders in a Portuguese McDonald’s.
Pete Wells, start packing!
I think my favorite part is: “This is so garlicky. You can see the pieces of garlic.” (I hate to break it to you, Elliott, but I doubt that’s real garlic.)
A similar feature has been available on sister/parent(?) company Facebook since 2020. Neither of them is taking a cut of user revenue until 2023, at which point they will give themselves “less than 30%,” according to the Information.
In September, Twitter launched $uper Follows: “a new way for people to earn monthly revenue by sharing subscriber-only content with their followers on Twitter.” During this test period, select users can provide subscriber-only content for their choice of $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 per month. (They only have those three options and don’t get to set whichever price they choose like on Instagram.)
You’ll be eligible to earn up to 97%* of revenue on your Super Follows subscription, after in-app purchase fees, until you reach $50,000 in lifetime earnings across all Twitter monetization products.
*Note: After $50,000 in lifetime earnings, you can earn up to 80% of revenue after in-app purchase fees.
Anyone who is 1) 18 or older 2) with 10,000 or more followers and 3) at least 25 tweets in the last 30 days is eligible. You must apply, at which point Twitter will either accept you or put you on a waitlist.
Twitter’s first point of advice on how $uper users should leverage the premium feature? “Share unscripted thoughts.” A word to the wise: Many a career has been sunk by that strategy.
Snapchat, meanwhile, in October launched Spotlight Challenges, available to U.S. users 16 and older with prizes ranging from $250-$25,000 for a typical contest.
This brings us to YouTube and TikTok. The former is a shining example in supporting the creator community, while the latter has been openly bashed recently by those same people.
YouTube does in fact have a subscription option, but the real money is made in the 55-percent cut of ad revenue that creators take from their videos.
Case in point: Gambling influencer Narek Gharibyan shared with the The Information that he makes nearly $1 million every year from YouTube ads, but a comparatively scarce $700 per month from his 150 subscribers.
TikTok, projected to become the third-most-used influencer platform in 2022, behind only Instagram and Facebook, has eligibility requirements for its Creators Fund that are similar to Twitter’s $uper user feature.
And while the overall Creator Fund pool of $200 million may seem like a lot of money, some of its most prominent beneficiaries have shed light on the cracks in the system, especially when compared to YouTube.
Hank Green makes $0.025 per 1,000 views ($0.000025 per view) via TikTok’s Creator Fund.
In nine months as part of the program, another user who’s garnered more than 25 million views has earned a mere £112.04, or about $151. That’s $0.00000604 per view, and $16.78 per month. (The European fund, which only includes the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain, is separate from the U.S. fund and contains 254€ million, the equivalent of about $283 million.)
The problem, as Green points out in his video titled “So…TikTok Sucks”, is that TikTok’s Creator Fund pool is limited. A growing number of users are competing for a fixed amount of money. And while the U.S. fund is expected to grow to $1 billion in three years, it still has a ceiling.
That explains why Green’s 2.5 cents of revenue per thousand views on TikTok is down from 5.1 during a previous period. (He doesn’t provide dates.) There are more and more fish every day swimming in the same-sized pond.
While TikTok limits its payouts, but not its participants, YouTube limits neither. That’s why it was able to dole out more than $10 billion to creators in shared ad revenue last year, according to Green. Suddenly that $200 million TikTok pool – 2% of $10 billion – doesn’t seem so generous.
Another YouTube advantage? Ads are attached to particular videos instead of appearing “between” content in a feed, like on Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. In other words, you can attribute ad revenue to a particular video, and therefore, a particular user.
TikTok (and other platforms) can’t do that. So they do the “next-best” thing: Attribute revenue based on views. But there is a potentially happy median: subscriptions1.
Imagine SuperSaf, the TikTok user making less than $17 per month from the Creator Fund, was part of the Instagram program. Even by charging a low rate of $1 per month, he would only need 17 subscribers to surpass his TikTok revenue. Or with a price of $9.99 per month, like Aliza Kelly, he would need a paltry two subscribers to generate more income than he has on TikTok with millions and millions of views.
MrBeast was the top YouTube earner of 2021 at $54 MILLION, and even he has generated less than $15,000 from TikTok’s Creator Fund despite “prob over a billion views.”
(In Sept. 2020 YouTube did begin a shared fund for creators of Shorts, their play at TikTok-style videos, worth $100 million. The highest performers earn up to $10,000 a month, far below what users could make via shared ad revenue on regular videos.)
Someone making more than $50 million a year from YouTube obviously doesn’t need a big payout from TikTok to survive. But MrBeast is the exception. For every millionaire original-content creator, there are thousands of people who are aspiring to reach that level and never will. Not even via YouTube ads. And that makes subscriptions a viable alternative.
It’s not inconceivable that a chef or a personal trainer with truly quality content in well-produced videos could eventually amass 1,000 subscribers at $10 a month. That would be $120,000 in a year before the platform takes its cut.
If you have a loyal following, the subscription is clearly a better option than a common fund, which is divided into more and more pieces every day. It also alleviates the stress of having to constantly create new content just to rack up views for fractions of a penny each. You can focus on creating something useful and interesting instead of reviewing McDonald’s garlic sauce in a foreign country.
Even if a creator does find some level of success, don’t overlook the many layers of competition. Not only within your given niche on the respective platforms themselves (skaters on Instagram, for example, or chefs on TikTok), there’s competition across all niches within the entire platform. Then there’s competition between platforms – including with your own accounts.
And beyond that, there’s inter-industry competition. The Utah teenage gamer in his mom’s basement vs. your favorite Netflix show. Your digital news subscription vs. your Hello Fresh subscription. Your favorite podcast vs. your Weekly Discovery playlist on Spotify.
But wait – aren’t most podcasts free?
Exactly. Because it’s not just a competition for your money, but also for your time. So while it may seem feasible to rack up a steady monthly revenue for creating original content – that is, after all, a long-term goal of this newsletter – your competitors aren’t limited to your peers, and neither are they limited to a single platform.
If you’re like me, your monthly subscription budget has a financial limit, and I’m not sure I consume enough content to justify what I already pay for on a monthly basis. I can’t say I’m eager to watch more content, either.
Ultimately, people give creators money for two reasons: to be educated and/or to be entertained. In the endless sea of content available to anyone with a credit card and decent WiFi, it takes much more than a blue checkmark or a single viral video to be worth the price of climbing aboard.
When the fog clears, some people are content to drift on the surface in the wake of the passing ships. After all, it’s free to swim.
News
NFTs
Twitter will allow you to use your NFT as a hexagonal profile photo.
Reddit appears to be working on something similar.
Facebook and Instagram are potentially taking it a step further: “Two of the people said that [parent company] Meta has also discussed launching a marketplace for users to buy and sell NFTs.” -Financial Times ($)
Google-owned YouTube “may embrace web3 technologies, including NFTs — or non-fungible tokens, a way to certify digital assets stored on the blockchain — as a means of helping YouTube creators make money.” -TechCrunch
I’m still trying to save up for a house in the real world before I buy things in the metaverse.
EXPERIMENTS
“Flocks,” which looks a lot like “Close Friends” on Instagram.
Poll-response options in Stories are increasing from 2 to 4.
TikTok
Allowing you to see who viewed your profile
Avatars not too different from the ones Apple users have on their devices
Group messaging
Audio-only live streams -Social Media Today
UPDATES
Zoom
Add video to your meeting’s waiting room (paid accounts)
Reset virtual backgrounds to default after each meeting
If there are multiple people in the same room using the same camera, Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery can divide them into multiple camera feeds (click through for a visual example, plus more updates from Zoom)
You can now remix any video – not just Reels (more below in Tips)
When you schedule a live, a banner will be added to your profile so users can sign up for notifications
TikTok
“TikTok Instant Page is a lightweight native landing page within the app that loads up to 11 times faster than standard mobile pages.” -TikTok
“The new ‘TikTok Tactics’ course is an ‘easy to follow, best-practice guide to advertising on TikTok’, which provides a range of lessons on attribution, targeting, creative best practices and more.” -Social Media Today
YouTube
Monetization features for its Shorts, which have topped 5 trillion views. -Variety
All the Rest
New emojis are in iOS “as part of the first iOS 15.4 beta,” and they include…a pregnant man. But my personal favorite is the melty face. -emojipedia
Don’t expect YouTube’s dislike (👎) count to come back to videos.
“Every way we looked at it, we did not see a meaningful difference in viewership, regardless of whether or not there was a public dislike count. And importantly, it reduced dislike attacks.” -CEO Susan Wojcicki
-Variety
Tips
101
Are you managing multiple Instagram accounts? There’s an easy way to switch between profiles on the app.
Tap and hold the profile icon in the bottom right portion of the screen and choose the profile to which you want to switch.
On desktop this can be done by clicking the profile icon in the top-right portion of the screen, clicking “Switch Accounts” then selecting the account you want.
Advanced
As mentioned above, Instagram now allows you to remix any video, not just Reels.
Check out this short clip I created to walk you through the basics so you can create your own video remixes.
Please consider following my new social media accounts, where I’ll be sharing other updates and tips throughout the week:
Have a great weekend!
-Brad
(Although TikTok may soon launch a subscription feature.)