Within the creator economy, innovative partnerships can enhance viewer engagement and brand value, advertising is a critical revenue stream for creators, according to Marc Hustvedt, president of MrBeast, and YouTube creator Samir Chaudry of Colin and Samir.
The duo discussed these issues and more at VidCon 2024 in a featured session entitled “State of the Creator Economy.”
Hustvedt recounted his early days at MrBeast, where he started out by examining revenue models and developing strategies for cracking the ad business.
“Because we are still making ad-supported free content for a global audience,” he said. That means creators must find a way to help change the way the advertising business currently functions, he added, “because it’s very US-centric or territory-specific.”
“The reality is, if you’re a creator, you’re in the ads business, period,” Chaudry agreed, urging creators to make the leap from on-camera talent to producer. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot — like, where does dealmaking go in the future of the creator space?” he poses, outlining the trajectory of the industry from Canadian YouTuber Lilly Singh’s 2019 NBC show, A Little Late with Lilly Singh, to Beast Games, the forthcoming MrBeast series for Amazon Prime.
“I think Lilly was seen as talent, ‘Hey, let’s get this this person, as a comedian, and put them on stage and put them in a show.’ You think about the Amazon Prime show that you guys are producing — you guys are producing it.
“That’s a very different world, right? You’re a production company, you can go make the show, and deliver it to Amazon,” said Chaudry.
“Now, when I think about the future of how deals are made, largely creators are represented by agents or managers, but we’re starting to see this this slow movement of building in-house and dealing directly with brands.”
The Evolution of the Creator Economy
The big trend, Hustvedt maintains, is the creator economy’s shift from wholesale to direct. “The entire entertainment industry has moved from where you pitch a show to a platform that then is responsible for distributing it, versus actually going direct,” he says.
“When you think about it, [brands] were in the wholesale business themselves. They were renting somebody else’s audience, they outsource the creative, the production, the measurement, and pretty much everything that would be telling their brand story,” Hustvedt continues.
“I think brands are like finally realizing that we need to own our storytelling in-house more. And the smart CMOs are like, ‘Yay, get all of these transactional people out of the way, I want to talk to the creator and I want to understand, like, how [they] think.’”
What Hustvedt calls the “acquisition of attention” is a core part of any business, and it’s up to brands to determine innovative ways to achieve that, he says. “If you’re selling something, whether it’s in retail or not, you’re responsible for going and finding this audience and hooking them and finding clever ways to do it.”
Partnering with creators is a savvy way of co-opting audience attention, but what used to be more of a “hands-off” transactional relationship where creators were left alone and encouraged to “do their own thing” is increasingly morphing into long-term collaboration.
“We’re seeing great brands who build social teams in-house, or build storytellers in-house, and literally hire creators in-house,” he says.
Creators who know how to do viral marketing and harness breakthrough attention on algorithmic platforms are bound to succeed, Hustvedt says.
“It’s a teach them how to fish situation as opposed to just pure media, and I think that’s part of the value we deliver,” he explains. “Whether rates will go up or down, I think you’re going to see more in-house creators at brands,” he predicts, pointing out that, for most creators, brand partnerships can be a rung up the ladder.
“You’re already kind of seeing it’s sort of something that might be the next career step, you demonstrate an ability to scale like a 2 million sub channel and get views. You’re like, ‘Well, do I want to be a media company? Or do I take this skill [I have] and toss it there? Or do I start my own business?’”
Globalization and Localization
Localizing content for specific regions is an expensive game, Chaudry notes, but it’s one that can add value for creators and brands.
“Dubbing blows my mind by the way that, like, when you dig into it, how much we’re building brand in countries,” Hustvedt says. Some of it, he admits, is anecdotal. “But we did dig into the data a little bit. We do about 15 languages and growing,” especially in India, where MrBeast content is dubbed in the subcontinent’s two biggest languages, Hindi and Mangala.
“Six hundred million people speak those two languages as their primary language,” Hustvedt points out, describing how he and his team identified the most populated parts of the world and mapped that data against YouTube users.
“There’s obviously other languages that are interesting, but not as big,” he says. “And the economics of that gets a little interesting. I think it’s where AI can probably pick up some of the slack, but we use all-human dubbing. It’s an incredibly precise process that we do — we built the entire system in-house because normal dubbing takes a long time and we’ve shrunk time.”
Another look at the data showed that nearly 10% of users in the US are watching MrBeast content in Spanish, which turned out to be a huge surprise.
“You have to be very careful about thinking about the countries you’re at,” Hustvedt says. “I mean, you’re brand-building in those countries, even if you don’t have a commercial incentive today. The CPM might not be there… [but] to me it’s a long game. You’re playing a long game of building a fan.”
Learn more: The Creator Economy Amplified
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