“People need to understand… the scale of what’s going on with talent and with the business that they’re building in the creator economy,” Sean Atkins, president of Jellysmack, told Cynthia Littleton on Variety’s Strictly Business podcast.
Or, as Atkins put it in a tweet, conversations like these are relevant because the “Creator Economy is becoming the economy.”
Littleton describes Jellysmack as a “prime example of a company that is active in an emerging business sector” and says “Atkins brings good perspective on how the creator economy is maturing, thanks to his long resume as a digital leader in traditional media.”
One way in which the Creator Economy is still distinct from traditional M&E? Atkins says the Creator Economy is far ahead in reflecting the true composition of the world. “I think the thing that was a little bit differentiated is the absolute diversity of that talent base, right?”
He added, “the traditional side of business” still has a “desire for diversity” but “struggles” to make it a reality, whereas “you look at the streaming [platforms], they don’t have that problem at all.”
One reason may be that new talent who come up as creators “completely control the entire means of production and the means of distribution, which really doesn’t happen in the traditional media space.” This translates, Atkins observes, to “immense amount of, kind of, success and capital for creators.”
However, Atkins acknowledges that this DIY-it-all attitude can also be fraught as creators find more success. “Creators who grew up in that ecosystem have a tendency to confuse the means of production as the creative itself, right? So if you think you have to edit and write and do everything, to scale to multiple platforms, it’s very complicated.”
Jellysmack clients “really figured out how to build content by identifying the type of talent most likely to resonate across these platforms,” Atkins says. Where his company comes in is to add their “content on multiple platforms, and ultimately expand your business so that you can be not dependent on just one source of income.”
Also complicated is the reach of the Creator Economy, which goes far beyond M&E, Atkins says. “The Creator Economy is actually transversely impacting a lot of different communities. And so when you talk about a creator, they might be on YouTube, and they get ad revenue from YouTube, or they might get brand revenues.”
Creators often “have a direct relationship with brands,” which are often outside the entertainment vertical. In fact, Atkins says, “It’s really hard to find an actual vertical that doesn’t have creators pretty dominant.”
Success as a creator is also not just profitable, it can be fairly stable. “You can build a middle class lifestyle,” Atkins says. In terms of dollars, “about 80% of our clients have made over $250,000. And … we’re not their core business.”
Atkins says, “It’s hard to argue that that’s not going to have pretty tremendous mid-market impact over time.”
Think about it this way: Atkins says, “There was a day where 90% of ad revenue went to newspapers. Because that’s where attention was, right?”
In 2023, he says, “It is inarguable that attention is moving to social and to the creators.”
“We have a generational shift in consumption. And that’s one thing but …we’re now two generations into the shift.”
Of course, he says, “The advertiser dollars always lag, but they always end up where attention is.”
