How can we grow the Creator Economy from the 1% to the other 99%?

All monetisation is only for the 1% regular creators. What about the digital labour of the rest?

One of the questions we at Metamind are asking while designing our new content environments is how do we dissolve the artificial separation that exists between creators and other citizens on any given media platform today.

The value is in the network but it is the content::creator unit that is seen as the monetizable entity. I think it is just not a matter of economics and policy, something that can be repurposed with community-owned tokens to enable fractional ownership of a creator’s content project. It is also a problem of UX where today, so many users perform so many valuable social activities around a piece of content but go unacknowledged by the content::creator entity.

If we pull the 90:9:1 rule of the Internet in focus here, the way a content-structure is designed, all incentive designs and monetisation schemes cater to only 1% of regular creators, while the 9% of commenters and casual creators, and the other 90% of lurking consumers are ignored out of the economics.

The Creator Economy shall not be only for the 1% of creators. Every user active on a digital content platform influences not only distribution but actively supplies fodder for the content that emerges within these environments. At Metamind, I am exploring user experiences that where content explicitly absorbs this fodder into a growing piece of content, not unlike a software project on GitHub. But before we talk about that, let’s talk some personas.

Recognizing the Right Roles

What roles can the 99% embody? How do we define and incentivize a user to engage in all the valuable activities around a content?

One must ask questions like:

• Why should users mindfully compose their comments when they have improbable chance of being recognised by the creators or valued by the platform's economics?

• Why should users mindfully send your content to people in their contacts? What incentivizes them to comprehensively think up all the people to distribute the content to?

How do we design a platform where users "come for the tool, stay for the community, and work for the growth"? Or is economic growth, to be confined and defined by only the creators serving content everyday. I sense that the deepest fervours around the Creator Economy was ultimately not about creating a profitable and productive ecosystem for the typical creator but by way of doing that, achieve the grander goal of making "contributing information, ideas and content to the web" a pervasive activity to all of humanity.

The users are ready to grow the beyond the mere role of an audience. It is evident in how the Platforms are evolving to accommodate the emerging behaviour:

• "Sending in DMs" is increasingly the most popular strategy to drive more followers to an account. Algorithms boost content that gets sent around or merely have their link copied. The "Save button" is getting upgrades like creating custom guides, multiplayer collections, etc. The 90% consumers are acting more and more like curators.

• "Pinning Comments" became a table-stakes feature as creators would pin crucial emerging-thoughts in the comments, relying on the universal behaviour to check comments while or after watching a video. Comments single-handedly educate against a lot of fake and spammy Reels/TikTok videos, and correct the bias from misleading edits. See Snapchat that misses a comment section and you’ll observe a great disparity in the accuracy and quality of published content. The 9% of commenters are acting more and more like contributors.

And so here I submit :

The way to expand the creator economy from the 1% typical creators to the other 99% is an environment that embeds the 9% of commenters as contributors, and the 90% of consumers as curators.

Designing for it…

Metamind

For the content::creator pair to recognise users as curators and contributors, we need to re-design the lattice of a content. For example, I think about a lattice that doesn’t separate the Content from the Comments section, but rather has a mechanism to integrate “comments” within the content itself.

At Metamind, we are inspired by the Outliner structure for Content.

One can contribute "comments" anywhere over the content and they can be absorbed as contributions into the content, without disrupting the main content, and yet embedded meaningfully at the very position they were left.

Outliner structure is a form of displaying content that takes advantage of the infinitely “flexible” fabric of digital “surfaces” to allow content to be infinitely nested, allowing any amount of content to be embedded at any given point in a piece of content, even after the point of publishing. This can be a starting for a content-structure where content can grow by absorbing the activities around it.

This sense of content growing by absorbing activities around it is already being tested. An audio first platform, called Airchat, has done for this async-public conversations. Instead of live panel-like discussions on Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse, discussions on Airchat proceed like a Twitter Thread, where listeners are recording their responses in short audio clips called Chits. The main difference is the person who created the room for the discussion can then decide to stitch these chits into the discussion for everybody to check out, growing the piece of audio-content over days and weeks. If you’ve not talked checked it out, I have an invite to Airchat I can handout. Reply to this email and I will send it to you.

In our previous essay, I mused about the possibility of Twitter adapting to this dynamic with the help of an outliner representation. With version 1 of Metamind, we are starting to present content natively created in an outliner structure. And are going to be adapting the outliner strata for publish-ability, composability and other demands of the many social dynamics I have talked about here.

Participate in our discussions here. Sign up for our version 1 here :

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An outro with some money talks...

It is a great social media joke that none of the monetisation schemes devised by platforms for their creators has ever really worked. The latest hope is creator-level subscriptions. The flag-bearer here, Substack, evangelize that the future is where creators put all their content behind a paywall that users pay a monthly subscription for, but so far only about 10% of users on Substack are paying consumers. Many Creators don’t want to do this as they have all sorts of concerns regarding distribution when content is paywalled away from the rest of the Internet.

Many are citing community-owned tokens as the future for funding content projects which again pokes at redefining the roles of a consumer and their subsequent stake in the economy. But as I’ve stated before that instead of buying ownership like shares, we need mechanics for users to earn ownership into a growing content-project through contributions and distributions. Not just monetary but participatory ownership.

To redefine the roles of users on a platform, it will require us to reimagine not only the incentive design but the content's design and the social graph it is placed within.