Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators
The exodus from Twitter since the election is a sign of things to come
There are now 27 million people in the US working as creators on web platforms. That’s a stunning number—it represents 14% of the working age population.
Some 44% of them do this as a full-time job.
These numbers come from the Keller Advisory Group, but other sources tell the same story. Citi believes that 120 millon people worldwide are working in the creator economy—a career path that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
What are these creators actually creating?
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The word 'influencer’ is often used to describe these individuals. But that’s a misleading term.
Most of these creators work in very familiar media—video, writing, photography, audio journalism, music, and artisan crafts of various sorts. A few are stereotypical influencers, posting photos on Instagram for endorsement money. But that is a tiny part of this indie uprising.
For the most part, these individuals are genuine creators, not just influencers. And they are starting to flex their muscles.
The numbers below from Citi are already out-of-date, but the larger picture hasn’t changed. They tell us that YouTube is the largest outlet in aggregate for creative talent, but smaller platforms—especially Substack—offer more potential rewards on an average basis.
In other words, the creator economy is mostly old skills getting repackaged in new ways. Here’s a visual representation of this from Citi.
But there’s still another way of looking at this.
Web platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc., are really in the business of managing and motivating creative talent. They are not much different from record labels, or ad agencies, or movie studios from an earlier day.
These platforms will collapse without those creators—so the corporate bosses need to treat them well.
Very few CEOs in Silicon Valley have figured this out yet. They are tech people, and tend to focus on apps and clicks and software upgrades. But they are really in the business of managing human talent.
Sure, they would like to replace all these human creators with AI. But that’s not happening anytime soon—or maybe not anytime at all. The consumers of creative works are skeptical of bot-generated work.
This represents a huge shift in power. Just a few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos could rule their platforms like dictators, and there were no negative consequences.
That’s changing.
Consider the uprising on Twitter during the last three weeks—and uprising is not too strong of a word. Everybody I know on the platform has seen a significant erosion in followers since the election. Users are walking away.
Nobody can give me precise numbers. But based on my own account metrics, close to 5% of the user base seems to have disappeared since the start of the month.
That adds up to tens of millions of people.
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And my numbers probably underestimate the actual departures, because (1) I don’t post on politics, so my audience should be less sensitive to the election cycle, and (2) Many who leave the platform aren’t actually shutting down their accounts (because this would allow others to take over their social media identities).
This new fluidity is happening everywhere, and not just social media.
Unexpected turbulence has also impacted MSNBC, the Washington Post, and various other participants in the attention economy. But social media is especially vulnerable—because it relies on users as unpaid content providers (ugh!).
Too much discontent = less content. And this creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
Users are still isolated and fragmented, but they are starting to push back. Platforms can’t survive without them, and this will increasingly limit corporate owners’ ability to manipulate, demonetize, and cancel—or impose other algorithmic forms of domination.
These corporations have lost power—and primarily due to their own decisions.
They have endlessly abused and manipulated the creative talent they need to prosper. Adding to the crisis, they have all shifted to endlessly scrolling interfaces that require a steady stream of new videos and jokes and cutesy images.
With each passing month, social media is less social and more about media. Like the audience at Roman gladiator games, the digital crowd demands intense and constant entertainment—or at least distraction.
If you run one of these swipe-and-scroll behemoths, you need creative talent and that talent now has demands. In particular, it wants to be paid—and will leave if it isn’t.
There are plenty of options for them. If they don’t like Zuckerberg and Musk, they can move to TikTok or YouTube or Substack or some other friendlier terrain.
We can already see that the platforms paying out the most and offering the greatest transparency are growing the fastest. But we are still in the early stages.
Make no mistake, the owners of the dominant platforms will do everything possible to maintain control. But they are already living in an indie world—so much so, that even the most centralized and domineering web companies will soon be forced to court and spark this indie talent.
Pundits who offer opinions on everything will figure this out very soon. That’s because many of them will go indie in the near future.
This will (mostly) be a positive shift for the larger culture.
We need the vitality that only independent voices can offer. We need more power at the grass roots than in the executive suites.
This power shift has been gaining momentum for the last year—accelerating before the election, and probably even more afterwards. But this is only a taste of what’s coming next year.
And that is the real story of the Influencer Economy.
In 2025, it will start to influence in ways we haven’t seen before. And I’m not talking about fashion brands or cosmetics or running shoes.
A lot of this influencing will take place right here on Substack. So we will have front row seats as the drama unfolds.
Please keep coming back to this subject, Ted. I've been feeling the same momentum from the creative community for about a year now. It's great to see a scoreboard of the changes as they unfold in real time. I think AI has really given the indie movement (if we can call it that) a kick in the butt. It seems as if a showdown is shaping up between the artists and the roboticists, and between the environmentalists and resource exploiters. Are you seeing the same thing? Is it the same battle?
Perhaps groups of individuals on a particular platform will start to organize, joining their voices together so that the C-Suite of a social media platform will have to listen. Call it a union? Perhaps a guild? There is more power in numbers.